Soloists add verve, passion to evening
The Spokane Symphony and conductor Eckart Preu made a powerful connection with the “Slavic Soul” theme of Friday night’s concert at the INB Performing Arts Center. And with violin soloist Tai Murray they showed just as fine a grasp of the classical romanticism of Felix Mendelssohn.
Preu began the evening with the big orchestral sneeze that opens the suite from Zoltan Kodaly’s opera “Hary Janos.” Among old-time Hungarians, a sneeze before a story is an indicator that the storyteller is about to commit a real whopper. And the orchestra related the fantastic episodes in Hary’s story with real verve.
Friday’s performance featured some excellent orchestral solos. Particularly beautiful were the solos in the third movement love song between Hary and his Hungarian sweetheart. Violist Nicholas Carper led off with the swirling accompaniment of the cimbalom (a table-size hammered dulcimer) expertly played by Seattle-based Alexander Eppler. All of the principal woodwind players took their impressive solo turns in this love song.
Saxophonist Paul Plowman played to the hilt the comically tragic solo announcing Hary’s single-handed defeat of Napoleon in the fourth movement.
When the originally scheduled soloist, Jennifer Koh, was forced to cancel her appearance owning to a burned hand, Tai Murray agreed to substitute performing Mendelssohn’s popular Violin Concerto instead of the originally scheduled Slavic concerto by Karol Szymanowski. Murray showed why Mendelssohn’s Concerto is one of the most famous of all violin concertos.
Every violinist plays it, but I have never heard it performed with such loving care as Murray did Friday night. The opening movement is marked Allegro molto appassionato, and many violinists confuse passion with speed. Murray was ardent, but never hasty. And she lavished a sweet lyrical tone on the concerto that gave the work a songful clarity.
The opening musical motto of the finale was delivered with such coy wit I had a hard time to keep from laughing out loud. Both Murray and Preu coaxed the orchestral players into “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” of fantastic magic.
A vital and intense performance of Bela Bartok’s brilliant Concerto for Orchestra followed intermission. To hear the vitality of this piece in a fine performance makes it difficult to imagine that it was composed by a composer virtually on his deathbed, with a body reduced by leukemia to less than 90 pounds. The range of Bartok’s imagination was unimpaired, and to my mind unexcelled in any other orchestral work of the 20th century.
Preu gave full rein to Bartok’s range of dynamics from the soft gauziness of the atmospheric opening to the proclamatory brass ensembles that figure so importantly in the first and second movements and toward the end of the finale.
The centerpiece of the work is its third movement, which Bartok titled “Elegia.” Commentators note that it is an example of the composer’s “night music” with its twitterings, murmurs and insect sounds. But it is an un-silent night that also has fierce winds, ominous clouds and nightmarish anxiety. Preu and his players relieved the emotional strain of the “Elegia” with the high good humor of the following “Interrupted Serenade.”
The finale of the Concerto for Orchestra is one of the most demanding movements in music, and the Spokane Symphony met those demands of scurrying perpetual motion and densely woven counterpoint. It was a great evening of passionate and persuasive music making.