Symphony celebrates friendships

The Spokane Symphony began its new year with what the program termed “an ode to musical friendships in the 19th century.”

The friendships embraced not only the composers on Friday’s program but the performers on stage, as well, in a concert that furnished both brilliance and warmth.

Conductor Eckart Preu opened the concert with Felix Mendelssohn’s “Overture: Ruy Blas,” a work written in three days’ time for a benefit performance of a play the composer hated. Preu and the orchestra did not allow Mendelssohn’s antipathy to Victor Hugo’s blood-and-thunder melodrama show through.

What Friday’s audience heard, instead, was the composer’s consummate craftsmanship and melodic inventiveness. It was a pleasurable beginning for a concert that had even greater things in store.

Preu pointed out in his pre-concert talk that in the 19th century the concerto had become a showpiece for star soloists. Johannes Brahms dared to write a concerto for two stars, and he made the challenge work.

Friday night, violinist Mira Wang and cellist Jan Vogler reveled in this Brahms musical and met the technical demands with a deeply committed performance the likes of which one rarely hears. And they were joined by Preu in a three-way partnership that made Brahms’ great epic speak with drama and poetry in a performance that was nothing short of stunning.

Brahms wrote the concerto for two performers who, as members of a string quartet, worked closely together and could each anticipate the other’s way of turning a phrase or placing an accent.

Wang and Vogler, as husband and wife, have developed the same knack. Both are outstanding soloists, but that is no guarantee of the kind of unanimity of feeling this pair projected Friday night.

Brahms gives opportunities for explosive outbursts and ardent lyricism, and the emotional gamut in between. Vogler and Wang were responsive to all those moods with effortlessly balanced playing without any loss of their distinctive personalities.

Wang, left on her own, plays with an elegant sweetness while Vogler seems to favor a bolder way of digging into the strings. But each matched the other in a beautifully effective way whether in the sweetness of their combined return to the main theme of the slow movement or in the gypsy outbursts of the finale. The playing of passages in octaves, which vex even the finest players, showed the difference between playing on pitch and playing in tune.

Following intermission, Preu selected the “Rhenish Symphony” by Brahms’ friend and mentor Robert Schumann.

Schumann’s four symphonies are filled with superb ideas and massive challenges for a conductor. Schumann could not resist doubling melodic lines – if a melody sounded well played by the oboe, wouldn’t it sound even better if the violins played it, too. And maybe the violas as well. The result, in any but expert hands, can sound thick and gluey.

Preu was able to give this symphony a kind of out-of-doors freshness and transparency that surely Schumann had in mind. And he did it without tampering with Schumann’s orchestration in the way that has tempted many conductors, even great ones such as Mahler and Toscanini.

Part of Preu’s success lay in the lightness of playing he achieved with the orchestra. Part, too, was the rhythmic accuracy he tried for and (mostly) achieved. Schumann denied that he had specific scenes in mind when he wrote this symphony. Maybe. But Preu “painted” the five movements of this work – from the folk dances of the second and final movements to the religious ceremony of the fourth – with the clarity of a fine photograph.