A range of music, but all of quality

The Spokane Symphony’s concert Friday night at the INB Performing Art Center furnished plenty of cause for celebration.

The concert was part of a season-long commemoration of the 100th anniversary of the birth of distinguished musicologist and manuscript collector Hans Moldenhauer. The performance was led by guest conductor Gunther Schuller, who first appeared with this orchestra 25 years ago. And this was the occasion of the Spokane debut of Mark Kosower, an outstanding young cellist.

Best of all, though, the performance of all three works on the program were excitingly revelatory. Whether the music was unfamiliar, like Karl Amadeus Hartmann’s Symphony No. 5, or famous but not often performed, like Ernest Bloch’s “Schelomo,” or very familiar and frequently performed, like Beethoven’s Symphony No. 7, Friday’s performances had the freshness of the ink not being quite dry.

Hartmann’s Symphony No. 5 was new to the Spokane audience. It originated in 1933 as a young, untried composer’s cheeky tribute to an enormously successful contemporary. A listener could have passed the time during this symphony counting the number of quotations and near quotations from Stravinsky’s music.

The instrumentation was unusual – woodwinds and brass plus two cellos and two string basses. Hartmann’s way of using these unmixed colors in this symphony proved a delight whether in the near quotation from “Rite of Spring” in the middle movement or the circuslike atmosphere of the finale. It was a work that deserves to be heard again and not taken as “deeply serious” modern music. It was just serious fun.

Bloch’s Hebraic rhapsody, “Schelomo,” was an entirely different matter. It is deeply serious, inspired by King Solomon’s pronouncements against vanity in the first chapter of Ecclesiastes. “Vanity of vanities, all is vanity. … I have seen all the works that are done under the sun; and, behold, all is vanity and vexation of the spirit.”

Kosower seemed the ideal embodiment of Solomon. His tone had the fullness and assurance of a prophet. And he played with intense concentration, drawing the audience into an Old Testament world of cantorial melodies and Middle Eastern rhythms that may sound overly familiar now because they have been raided so often for the scores of Biblical movie epics. It was wonderful to hear this great original work done so powerfully.

Speaking of power: Schuller’s delivery of Beethoven’s Seventh lived up to one of the conductor’s favorite quotations, “God is in the details,” a saying often attributed to the architect Mies van der Rohe.

What a world Beethoven made of minute details – melodies hidden away in dense textures, shadings of loud and soft, or quick change from soft to loud that can generate mystery or explode as bursts of excitement. Even in a single movement such as the scherzo of this symphony, Beethoven can change from an innocent playfulness to wild propulsion in a flash.

Schuller not only explored the details, he brought them together as a beautifully satisfying whole in a performance that received a well-deserved standing ovation. For a quarter of a century Sc`huller has acted as the Spokane Symphony’s musical conscience – proof that musical honesty and artistic beauty are the best of partners.