Harmonic history

The Spokane Symphony will celebrate two anniversaries this weekend of musicians who have been powerful figures in the city’s musical life: Hans Moldenhauer and Gunther Schuller.

Schuller will return to Spokane on Friday to conduct the symphony in a concert kicking off the weekend-long Moldenhauer Music Festival, celebrating the 100th anniversary of the birth of renowned musicologist Hans Moldenhauer.

The concert also marks the 25th anniversary of Schuller’s first appearance in March 1982 with the orchestra that the Pulitzer Prize winner has led so often both in Spokane and at the Festival at Sandpoint.

Schuller will conduct a program that includes Beethoven’s Symphony No. 7 along with Karl Amadeus Hartmann’s Symphony No. 5 and Ernest Bloch’s “Schelomo” for Cello and Orchestra, featuring guest cellist Mark Kosower.

The handwritten manuscript of Bloch’s “Schelomo” is part of a huge collection of musical works, letters and related items assembled by Moldenhauer, who lived in Spokane from 1939 until his death in 1987.

The symphony has been performing works from the Moldenhauer Archives throughout the 2006-07 season. Three chamber music concerts at the Northwest Museum of Arts and Culture on Saturday and Sunday will explore other works from the archives (see accompanying story).

“We, as listeners and performers, are often tempted to rely on what we think we know, what we have heard, or what we have learned,” says Eckart Preu, the symphony’s music director. “But traditions are subjective and temporary.

“What is never going to change – the ultimate sources of musical information – are the primary resources of the music: the manuscripts, the sketches.”

Moldenhauer was born in Mainz, Germany, but moved to New York in 1938 with his Jewish-American wife, Margot, and their two small children.

Though educated as a pianist and conductor, he was a born collector and an avid mountain climber. Seeking out a spot less oppressive (and more mountainous) than New York, he made an exploratory cross-country bus trip and decided to settle in Spokane.

He taught piano, and during World War II served as an instructor in the U.S. Mountain Troops. After the war, Moldenhauer became the first student to attend Whitworth College under the G.I. Bill.

Moldenhauer and his first wife were divorced in 1942, and a year later he married a former piano student, Rosaleen Jackman of Spokane. The couple had two daughters, Trude and Myra, who still live here.

After the war the Moldenhauers began to assemble a collection of music manuscripts to provide musicians and scholars with the ability to view music history from primary sources – an archive that eventually numbered more than 10,000 items covering 400 years of music history.

Moldenhauer continued his work despite becoming legally blind in his later years from an eye disease. He and Rosaleen also wrote “Anton von Webern: A Chronicle of His Life and Work,” the definitive biography of a seminal figure in modern classical music.

After her death in 1982, Moldenhauer married for a third time; his widow, Mary, lives in Spokane.

The Moldenhauer Archives are housed in nine public collections in the U.S. and Europe, including one at Whitworth. The Rosaleen Moldenhauer Memorial Collection at the Library of Congress is what Moldenhauer considered “my Taj Mahal for Rosaleen”; the manuscript of Bloch’s “Schelomo” is a part of that collection.

Schuller, who will conduct the piece on Friday, first appeared in Spokane as a guest conductor and became the orchestra’s artistic adviser and principal conductor in the 1984-85 season.

The Boston resident also is a familiar face here as artistic director of the Northwest Bach Festival and has led performances by the Spokane Jazz Orchestra.

Equally at home in many musical worlds, Schuller is a Pulitzer Prize-winning composer as well as a distinguished conductor, music publisher and record producer. He has received many other awards, among them a MacArthur Fellowship (the so-called “genius grant”) in 1991.

Friday’s cello soloist, Kosower, is a graduate of Indiana University, where he studied with Janos Starker, and the Juilliard School in New York City, where he studied with Joel Krosnik. Prior to his appointment to the faculty of the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, Kosower served as Krosnik’s assistant.

He was the 2002 recipient of an Avery Fisher Career Grant and has performed regularly with the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center as well as with major orchestras in the U.S., Europe, Japan, Taiwan and China.

Schuller will join host Verne Windham of KPBX-FM 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 Cable Channel 5.

On Friday, Schuller and the symphony’s associate conductor, Morihiko Nakahara, will discuss the music on the program as part of the Gladys Brooks Pre-Concert Talks series at 7 p.m. in the INB Performing Arts Center auditorium.