Powerful performance for Mom

The Spokane Symphony will celebrate Mother’s Day weekend with a concert Friday of music about powerful women.

Not necessarily good women, or women one would choose as the ideal mother – just powerful women.

Conductor Eckart Preu has chosen music about everybody’s favorite good girl, Cinderella, and a group of less-than-good women: Liadov’s Russian witch, Baba Yaga; Smetana’s man-hating Sarka; Schmitt’s biblical bad girl, Salome; and Berg’s tragic seductress, Lulu.

“I wanted to close the season with music about powerful people,” Preu says. “When you look at the the music written about powerful men, you find a lot of heroes and good guys. But with women, so much of the best music is about women who are really, really bad.

“Maybe bad women are just more interesting,” he adds.

Well, interesting to male composers, anyway.

Friday’s season-ending concert opens with Anatol Liadov’s musical portrait of Baba Yaga, a fixture as both a witch and a powerful wise woman in dozens of Russian folk tales. She lives in a hut that stands on fowl’s legs and flies through the air in a cup-shaped mortar with it pestle as an oar.

She also appears musically in Mussorgsky’s “Pictures at an Exhibition,” scheduled for the symphony’s 2007-08 season.

“Liadov doesn’t really tell a story about Baba Yaga,” Preu says. “But he pulls out the stops in a brilliant orchestral picture with Halloween-ish sounds suggesting the scary character of this witch – almost like movie music.”

Preu also has selected a short except from Alban Berg’s final opera, “Lulu,” about the tragic beauty whose allure leads from one murderous episode to another.

Berg’s intense music has led the opera, even though it is incomplete, to its status as a 20th-century classic.

“What I have always done each season,” Preu says, “is to introduce some contemporary music that goes a little beyond of the ordinary experience of our audiences and what people think they like.”

Like most of the works on Friday’s program, Florent Schmitt’s “La Tragedie de Salome” has never been performed before by the Spokane Symphony.

“I first heard a recording of it when I was studying in Paris, and I was fascinated by the sonorities Schmitt achieved,” Preu says. “It’s French music with an edge, much more direct than Debussy or Ravel.

“If you compare it with Strauss’ treatment of the Salome, the craziness of Schmitt’s Salome just sticks out – very much unlike the sensuousness of Strauss. The story line in Schmitt is very easy to follow, and it’s very different from Strauss, too.”

Bedrich Smetana’s “Sarka” is one of the six tone poems making up his cycle “My Fatherland.”

“We always hear ‘The Moldau’ from this set, but not nearly so often some of the others which are fine pieces, too,” Preu says.

He’s ending the concert with a suite of pieces he put together from Serge Prokofiev’s ballet “Cinderella.”

“We have to have one good woman on this program,” Preu says. “And ‘Cinderella’ is a major piece the orchestra hasn’t played in quite a while.

“Prokofiev himself made three different suites of dances from the ballet, but he mixes the dances up, and none of his suites tells the story. I wanted to made a suite where the audience could follow the story line.”

Preu 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.

The conductor also will discuss the music on the program as a part of the Gladys Brooks Pre-Concert Talks series in the INB Performing Arts Center auditorium on Friday at 7 p.m.