Symphony highlights playful selections
Conductor Eckart Preu opened a sonic playground Friday at the Opera House with the Spokane Symphony cavorting through the musical equivalent of swings, slides and climbing bars provided by composers from Bach to Saint-Saens.
Preu opened Friday’s concert with Leopold Stokowski’s arrangement of Bach’s most famous organ work. (If indeed it is by Bach. Musicologists argue Bach’s authorship.) Stokowski wrote it for his own Philadelphia Orchestra finished in 1927. It reflects the “symphonic idealization” of the pipe organ sound and style of organ playing Stokowski’s generation. Friday’s performance was openly romantic; Preu encouraged a juicy string sound and plenty of vibrato and used Stokowskian pushing and pulling of the tempo for grand, even grandiose, effect. Both Stowkoski and Preu had a great time playing with Bach’s colorful play of textures. It was, to my ears, quite irresistible.
Johann Sebastian Bach does not come across in those austere formal portraits we see as a playful fellow. But his Concerto in A minor for Four Harpsichords and Strings is, if anything, even more frisky than the Stokowskized Toccata and Fugue. Bach took Vivaldi’s Concerto for Four Violins and transformed it into a romp for four harpsichord. Why? Who knows? But the interplay of the incisive plinks of harpsichords produce a startlingly different effect from that of four bowed violins. Friday’s performance with harpsichordists Keith Thomas, Linda Siverts, Bonnie Robinson and Greg Presley seemed a bit more careful than I suspect Bach and his sons or students might have made it. But it was still had sparkle enough to raise a smile.
Most audiences in George Frideric Handel’s time knew him as a composer of operas and as a brilliant organist. But his “Music for the Royal Fireworks” became hugely popular, and Friday’s full orchestra treatment showed why. Preu brought power and majesty to the Overture, though there were some uncertain moments in the echoes between the trumpets and French horns. And the set of dances that followed alternated a delicate sprightliness and a graceful pastoral quality that suited Handel’s music beautifully.
Friday big work was Charles Camille Saint-Saens’ Symphony No. 2, sometimes called “The Organ” Symphony simply because the composer included a part for the organ, not unheard of but unusual enough to attract attention. Like the symphony of his rival Cesar Franck, Saint-Saens built his Third Symphony exactly as an improvising organist might, taking a couple of small ideas and spinning them out by creating layers of color ranging from the pastel woodwind solos beautifully performed by oboist Keith Thomas (yes, the same fellow who played harpsichord earlier), flutist Bruce Bodden and bassoonist Lynne Feller-Marshall, to the bright bursts of brass, and dark agitated rhythms of the strings. Organist Bonnie Robinson (who also had earlier played harpsichord) furnished the soft cushions or colorful curtains of sound Saint-Saens called for.
I was struck by the fact that all the composers and arrangers on Friday’s program – Stokowski, Bach, Handel and Saint-Saens – were brilliant organists. Each one of them seemed to take a playful delight in what could be done with groups of instruments behaving like stops of a pipe organ creating layers of sound that blend or contrast. Preu made a wonderful evening of these works.
As an encore, the orchestra played the March from Tchaikovsky’s “Nutcracker” ballet. “This is a preview of our performances of the complete ballet with Alberta Ballet, which will begin next week,” Preu said.