Nice interplay meets Haydn’s demands

The Spokane Symphony’s second classics program featured four of the orchestra’s principal players in an unusual work by Joseph Haydn, one of the wittiest of the classical masters.

Carl Nielsen Suite from his incidental music to the play “Aladdin” is all that remains of a splashy production of the play in 1919.

The composer was deep in the fashionable orientalism that started in the 19th century and persisted until deep in the 20th.

Conductor Eckart Preu extracted the maximum range of exotic color from Nielsen’s score from the evocative swirl of “The Dance of the Morning Mists” to the blaring grimness of the “Prisoner’s Dance.”

The most experimental and the most vivid splash of contrasting orchestral colors came in the interplay of four independent orchestral sections imitating a trip through the “Marketplace of Ispahlen.” The contrast of four bands each playing their own tune was a bold compositional maneuver that Preu and his players brought off beautifully.

Joseph Haydn’s Sinfonia Concertante uses an unusual combination of soloist – violin, cello, oboe and bassoon – playing in conversation and argument with and against each other and the orchestra.

Violinist Kelly Farris, cellist John Marshall, oboist Keith Thomas and bassoonist Lynne Feller-Marshall were obviously having great fun fulfilling Haydn’s grueling demands wherein he demands just as much fleet fingerwork from the bassoon and cello as from the violin and oboe.

The work is full of Hadyn’s peculiar harmonic twists, his skidding stops in moments, and delightfully quirky pairings of instrumental sonorities.

In Sibelius’ Symphony No. 3 the composer turned away from the grandiose romanticism of Strauss or Mahler for a leaner style hinting that the neoclassicism that was to come.

Unfortunately, Friday’s performance got off to a shaky start with the ragged opening statement of the cellos and basses. The uncertainty took time to be righted and was never completely dispelled. Still Preu and the orchestra achieved the chilling loneliness Sibelius sought for the haunting folksong that permeates the second movement and the raw churning energy of the finale.

Friday’s concert included two additions to the printed program: a performance of Sibelius’ melancholy “Valse Triste” as a memorial to the symphony’s longtime patron Helen South Alexander and a brightly energetic performance of Glance’s Overture to “Ruslan and Ludmila” as an encore.