Despite Rustiness, Symphony Delights
Spokane Symphony Orchestra Friday at the Opera House
Locked out of the Opera House for six weeks during the hugely successful run of “Phantom of the Opera,” the Spokane Symphony returned Friday to resume its season with impressive performances of three Romantic masterpieces. Romantic music, like its poetry, is filled with delectable anguish. Conductor Fabio Mechetti began with Richard Wagner’s Overture to “Tannhaueser” - a work torn between religious and erotic passion, between noble self-sacrifice and sexual surrender.
Mechetti and the orchestra made a nearly seamless flow of those striking Wagnerian mood changes. Some occasional patches of vague intonation and moments of disorderly ensemble in the violins betrayed the orchestra’s six-week vacation. The noble brass sonority in the “Pilgrim’s Chorus” section was grand, as was Wagner’s innovative combination of horns and woodwinds that opens the overture.
The young American soprano Bridgett Hooks was the impressive soloist in Richard Strauss’ poignant “Vier lezte Lieder.”
Hooks replaced the originally announced soloist, Julie Newell, who is recuperating from surgery on her jaw.
I confess that these “Four Last Songs” are my favorites among orchestrally accompanied songs. And Hooks obviously loves them, too. Her concentration on their beauties not only was heard in beautifully produced vocalism but in the absolute stillness with which she listened to her instrumental partners in the work’s lengthy orchestral interludes and epilogues.
No one denies that Strauss’ swan song presents monumental challenges to its interpreters. The orchestra he calls for is huge. The vocal range is enormous. And the emotive depth of the poetry by Eichendorff and Hesse is great.
Hooks is not the kind of powerful dramatic soprano who can (or wants to) push her voice through the complex tapestry of Strauss’ orchestration. Instead, she produces lovely tone from top to bottom of her range, and she counts on purity of tone and intensity of expression to carry her sound over the orchestra to the audience. Most of the time it worked, as Mechetti restrained the orchestra’s sound as much as he dared.
Hooks’ tonal beauty was matched by the orchestral soloists. I was especially impressed by horn principal Margaret Wilds in “September” and by concertmaster Kelly Farris in “Beim Schlafengehen.” Particularly impressive was the purity of intonation at the ends of each song - sustaining the mood as the sound vanished.
Tchaikovsky’s justly popular “Pathetique” Symphony closed the program. As Spokane audiences have come to expect, Mechetti refreshed this much abused warhorse by paying close attention to Tchaikovsky’s detailed instructions. And he avoided the distortions of tempo to which even so scrupulous a conductor as Toscanini was susceptible. There was especially laudable playing from Eugene Mondie in the “Pathetique’s” numerous clarinet solos.
One of Mechetti’s most outstanding achievements Friday was the balletic lightness he brought to the work’s second and third movements. This made an especially dramatic contrast with the sustained bleakness of the finale - a finale that did not seem to end, but simply dissolved in a sorrowful gasp.