Orchestra, guest pianist shine like gold

The Spokane Symphony Orchestra celebrated Vienna’s golden age on Sunday afternoon at The Met with fine performances of a dramatic overture by Beethoven, one of Mozart’s masterful piano concertos and a symphony that can be described only as perky.

Morikiho Nakahara, the orchestra’s associate conductor, led the performance.

Beethoven’s popular overture to his otherwise little-known ballet “The Creatures of Prometheus” opened the program. From the startling sequence of abrupt chords that begin the work, Nakahara and the orchestra showed the large Met audience a work that sometimes looks backward to the balanced elegance of the classical age, then suddenly turns toward the grip of emotionality in the romantic.

Pianist Hsia-Jung Chang was soloist in Mozart’s Concerto in C Major (K. 467), an astonishing masterpiece that happens to be a favorite of mine. Chang grew up in Spokane, and though she lives in New York, she frequently has performed solo recitals here. This was her first concert with the Spokane Symphony since 1984 when she was a Young Artist winner of the Spokane Festival, and a welcome return it proved to be.

Mozart fills the first movement and finale of this concerto with sparkling figuration designed specifically for his own fleet fingers. Chang’s playing combined a fluent ease in Mozart’s most difficult passages with an intense concentration that gave the concerto real vitality. Mozart left no written cadenzas for this work, so Chang improvised her own, which were explorations of the full range of the piano keyboard and witty comments on Mozart’s themes.

One great Mozart scholar described the concerto’s slow movement as “a dream andante” – a movement that seems to exist in a world of throbbing accompaniment, muted colors and melodies with wide intervals filled with longing. There is a kind of beautiful ache in the music that both Chang and Nakahara captured in Sunday’s performance.

The finale featured quick exchanges between soloist and orchestra that resembled a series of volleys in a hard-fought game of tennis. Only funnier.

The 250th anniversary of Mozart’s birth is just weeks away, and Sunday’s performance was a splendid beginning to a year of celebration.

In his spoken program notes, Nakahara pointed out that on Sunday evening, Austrian television was to announce the result of DNA studies to determine whether the skull purported to be Mozart’s really is his. Sad to report, the results were inconclusive. But the results of Mozart’s genius definitely are authentic.

Schubert’s Symphony No. 5 is something of a miracle for a lad of 19. It manages to evoke infectious energy even without the trumpets and drums that had long become standard symphonic instruments. Sunday’s performance captured the youthful spirit of the work’s fast movements and the lyricism of its andante.

If some in the audience thought it amiss that the orchestra failed to acknowledge Haydn as a star in Vienna’s golden age, it was clear that Haydn, the musical jokester, was winking away at us from the pages of Schubert’s finale.

The concert will be repeated at 7:30 p.m. Tuesday at The Met.