Preu, pals perform friendly program
Musicians are a close-knit group, and musical friendships produce some exciting musical results.
Two trios of musician friends – composers and performers – make up the ingredients for Friday’s Spokane Symphony concert at the Opera House.
Conductor Eckart Preu has persuaded two of his friends, violinist Mira Wang and cellist Jan Vogler, to join him for a program of music by three 19th-century composer friends: Felix Mendelssohn, Robert Schumann and Johannes Brahms.
Preu and the orchestra will open the concert with Mendelssohn’s Overture to “Ruy Blas” and close with Schumann’s Symphony No. 3 (“The Rhenish”).
Wang and Vogler, who are husband and wife, will perform the solo parts of Brahms’ Concerto in A minor for Violin and Cello, Op. 102.
“I first met these two a few years ago when they played this concerto in Carnegie Hall with the American Symphony Orchestra,” Preu says. “They were a very nice couple and very, very good musicians. Since I love this concerto, it’s been in my mind I would like to do it with them here.
“The concerto requires two players who make a real team,” he adds. “You can’t just throw any two good players together and expect them to find what is in this music. But Mira and Jan are such a good team.”
Wang, who is Chinese, was sponsored for her studies in the U.S. by the Polish violinist Roman Totenberg, with whom she studied in Boston. Vogler grew up in a musical family in Berlin and was principal cellist in the Saxon State Orchestra before leaving to pursue a solo career.
The couple met at the Marlboro Music Festival in Vermont and later married. Since each has an active worldwide concert and recording career, they divide their time between homes in New York and Berlin. In summer they work together at the Moritzburg Festival near Dresden, Germany, where Vogler is artistic director.
Brahms wrote his Double Concerto for two of his own friends, Joseph Joachim and Robert Haussman, who were members of the Joachim Quartet. By coincidence, Wang plays a Stradivarius violin which once belonged to Joachim.
“I love all Brahms, that’s the simple truth,” Preu says. “But what I like about this concerto is the odd combination of the two soloists on instruments of such different registers.
“Brahms sometimes contrasts these sounds, but sometimes makes them seem like one giant instrument covering the range from very low to very high. And other times he makes the cello play very high into the violin register, and the opposite with the violin playing very low. It’s a fascinating and beautiful piece.”
Preu says that he selected the three composers on Friday’s program because he wanted to make a connection about the music of friends. Just as the young Brahms had benefited from the support of the advocacy of Schumann, Mendelssohn had been an advocate and support of Schumann’s early orchestral music.
“Schumann, as a German romantic, sometimes suffers from comparison with Brahms on the one side, whose music is more sophisticated, and on the other Mendelssohn, whose music is more accessible,” Preu says.
“There is a real validity of Schumann’s heavier orchestration for what he is trying to do. But you do have to work very hard to achieve real transparency.”
Many conductors have tinkered with Schumann’s orchestration to achieve that transparency.
“I don’t want to open that can of worms,” Preu says. “I like Schumann’s symphonies they way they are – faults and all. If you try to take the weaknesses away from a person, he is not that person any more. The weaknesses and the strengths together make the personality.”
He adds that the “Rhenish” symphony “is beautifully constructed, five movements each like a little picture.”
Mendelssohn’s Overture to “Ruy Blas” was written to precede a benefit performance of Victor Hugo’s blood-and-thunder tragedy in Leipzig.
“I was looking for another quintessential romantic piece to open the concert,” Preu says. “It struck me that ‘Ruy Blas’ is romantic but very different from the romanticism of Brahms and Schumann.
“It’s so theatrical. All of its themes reflect the standard characters of the drama and it shows off the orchestra so well. It’s amazing to me that he wrote it in three days, even though he claimed that he did not even like the play!”
Wang and Vogler will join host Verne Windham for a discussion of Friday’s concert at Classical Chats, the symphony’s pre-performance conversation, today at 12:15 p.m. in the council chambers at City Hall. The 30-minute program will be televised on City Channel 5.
Preu also will talk about the program as a part of the Gladys Brooks Pre-Concert Talks series in the Opera House auditorium on Friday at 7 p.m.