Instant classic
The Spokane Symphony celebrates spring in December this weekend with its first Classics Series concerts in the newly refurbished Martin Woldson Theater at The Fox.
The centerpiece of the Saturday-Sunday concerts will be Stravinsky’s “Rite of Spring,” which will be heard along with Chopin’s Piano Concerto No. 2 featuring pianist Cecile Licad.
Conductor Eckart Preu will open the performances with Mozart’s Overture to “The Magic Flute.”
The smaller size of The Fox’s auditorium – about 1,600 seats, compared to 2,700 for the orchestra’s previous home, the INB Performing Arts Center – has resulted in two performances of each classics concert, giving audiences a chance to hear an evening performance on Saturday, or an afternoon performance Sunday.
“I chose this program very deliberately to show our audience how the Fox sounds with a small classical-period orchestra, with very big 20th-century orchestra and how it sounds with a piano soloist in a lighter 19th-century concerto,” says Preu.
Soloist Licad, who last performed in Spokane in 1999, was born in Manila in the Philippines. She began piano lessons with her mother when she was 5, continued her studies with Rosario Picazo and made her public debut in Manila at age 7.
She moved to the U.S. when she was 13 to study at the the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia, first with Mieczyslaw Horszowski and Seymour Lipkin, then with Rudolf Serkin.
Licad made her U.S. debut with the Boston Symphony at the Tanglewood Festival in 1979 at age 18. She received the Gold Medal of the Levinritt Awards two years later and quickly established an international career that has included orchestral and recital appearances and several highly regarded recordings for the Sony, EMI, Naxos and Musical Heritage labels.
As for the piece she’ll perform this weekend, Preu says: “Everybody loves Chopin, and I chose this concerto very deliberately because of the way it simply floats compared with the heavy groundedness of the ‘Rite of Spring’ that follows.
“Chopin’s piano concertos have a very transparent orchestra part,” the conductor adds. “He says all that he really needs to say with the piano.
“But even though the solo part is very elaborate and very difficult, it is never just showing off – ‘Look at me, how loud and fast I can play!’ Sometimes I think of his melodies and the way they are ornamented as being almost like baroque melodies.”
“Rite of Spring,” whose name in Russian means literally “Sacred Spring,” tells of the ritual welcoming of spring in remotely ancient Russia. Elders select a virgin from the village maidens, the Chosen One dances herself to death to appease the god of spring, and the villagers lift her body in triumph.
Its premiere in Paris in 1913 produced a riotous confrontation between the proponents and opponents of avant-garde ballet and music.
“The audience then had experienced as much dissonance in music before,” Preu says. “But what they hadn’t experienced was the roughness of those very inventive sounds he gets from this huge orchestra.”
Despite the ruckus at the premiere, everyone wanted to see “Rite of Spring,” and it soon became a modern classic. One recent writer, the English musicologist Peter Hill, summed up its position as “the benchmark by which all virtuoso orchestras are judged.”
The German-born Preu first encountered “Rite” when he was a high school student in Dresden.
“It was an extraordinary experience with Pina Bausch’s ballet company from Wupperthal,” he recalls. “And it remains always an adventure. There is no place where you can just relax and let go.”
Saturday’s performance will be a benchmark for Preu – his first time to conduct the work.
“With this piece, I am a virgin, so to speak,” he says. “But I hope at the end there won’t be a sacrifice.”