Symphony Crowd Enjoys Introductions
Spokane Symphony Orchestra with pianist Markus Groh Friday, Oct. 6, Opera House
Friday’s concert of the Spokane Symphony provided an evening of introductions. Fabio Costa, the symphony’s new associate conductor, was leading his first Classics Series concert with the orchestra. Piano soloist Markus Groh, despite his fine European reputation, is barely known in the United States. And Friday’s performance was Groh’s U.S. orchestral debut. Both young artists demonstrated that happy combination of intelligence and imagination that marks real artistry.
Costa opened the concert with a lively, entertaining performance of William Bolcom’s “Commedia for an (Almost) 18th-Century Orchestra.” Bolcom is a Seattle-born, Pulitzer Prize-winning composer of everything from ragtime to opera. His 1971 “Commedia” was rife with upstart humor - with quirky quotations (and near-quotations) from Mozart, Mendelssohn and Mahler, and with the orchestra interrupting itself with rude noises. It concluded with an ending that just won’t quite quit. Bolcom provided fun that seemed funny to far too few Friday. What seemed needed was a laugh track.
Groh joined Costa and the orchestra capturing the wonder and tragic intensity of Mozart’s Piano Concerto in C minor. Groh’s playing made Mozart’s “simple” scales and repeated figurations not merely ripple, but sing. And the soloist and conductor made this concerto into chamber music in which the piano conversed with soloists in the orchestra - the woodwinds especially.
Groh is one of a rising crop of young pianists, including Robert Levin and Keith Jarrett (yes, that Keith Jarrett), who are not afraid to add subtle elaborations to the printed notes of the solo parts of Mozart’s concertos just as Mozart himself did. And Groh played his own stylishly convincing cadenzas for the first and third movements. The result was beautiful and moving.
Costa was not only a fine collaborator in Mozart, he proved an excellent guide to the revolutionary qualities in Beethoven’s Symphony No. 2 - perhaps the most unjustly neglected of all Beethoven’s nine. In this symphony, Beethoven has moments of stern seriousness living dangerously close to passages of childish prankishness. Costa made perfect sense of these juxtapositions without robbing them of the element of surprised delight.
As music director Fabio Mechetti’s duties in Jacksonville, Fla., consume more of his time, the symphony’s associate conductor will become increasingly important. Thus, for me and for many in the audience, Friday’s big question was: Will Fabio Costa be a conductor the Spokane Symphony can work with and grow with? By the end of the evening the answer seemed clearly, “Yes.”
Costa conducts with large, vigorous and sometimes stabbing gestures that the orchestra is still growing accustomed to. More economy might mean greater precision. But that aside, Friday’s performance showed Costa to be a thoughtful, versatile musician and an excellent addition to the orchestra and to Spokane’s musical life.