Travis Rivers: Symphony’s farewell is powerful, intense

Eckart Preu led the Spokane Symphony and Symphony Chorale plus a quartet of soloists Friday in a magnificent farewell to the INB Performing Arts Center, a hall that has served as the symphony’s home since 1974. The work was Giuseppi Verdi’s great Requiem, a work whose scale, depth and intensity made it ideal for the occasion.

Verdi’s Requiem still packs the punch that moved its first audience 133 years ago. Preu, in his pre-center talk to audience members, called the work “a phenomenal piece, one of those works that goes straight to the heart.” From the performance that followed, Preu clearly meant what he said.

This week has been an uneasy one for the symphony. Having already had to replace the originally scheduled tenor soloist, the orchestra discovered Tuesday that the soprano had to withdraw because of illness. Both replacements – the American tenor Roy Cornelius Smith and the Japanese soprano Mihoko Kinoshita – proved outstanding additions to their colleagues in the solo quartet, mezzo-soprano Jan Wilson and baritone Nmon Ford.

Verdi wrote the Requiem’s solo parts for four outstanding operatic voices of his own time, and each of those parts require not only beauty of tone and commanding vocal technique but a dramatically convincing emotional presence, as well. And don’t forget power.

This quartet had power to spare. But it was in the tenderness of Kinoshita and Wilson in the Recordare or in the Wilson-Smith-Ford trio of the Lux aeterna that gave me goose-bumps. Kinoshita provided more of them in the final Libera me which took her soprano into her highest range with a quiet leap up to a high B-flat and then a sustained high C. The work ends with the soprano invading alto territory in a chant-like repeated note at a barely audible degree of softness.

Smith, the other replacement in the group, brought a nice ring to his tone in the Ingemisco along with an impressive heft to the sound of his ensemble work. Only a couple of phrases betrayed his suffering from a touch of congestion. Ford had a slightly lighter voice than Verdi might have imagined for the Requiem’s bass part, but the sound was beautiful and used with great intelligence.

From the very quiet opening of the Introit, the Symphony Chorale sang the Latin text with admirable clarity and good intonation. Both qualities were especially notable in the complex Sanctus with its excited double fugue for two choruses.

Verdi has always been credited with his memorable writing for voices. And I heard people humming some of those melodies at the stoplight as I waited to cross the street after the performance.

But what Friday’s performance reminded us was just what a wonderful way Verdi had in imaginative scoring for orchestra. Think of that storm in the last act of “Rigoletto” or the shimmer of high, muted strings in the preludes to the first and last acts of “La Traviata.” There are echoes of those in the Requiem, but the hellish storm of the Dies irae and the glow of the orchestral strings in the Domine Jesu are, perhaps, even better than their operatic sources.

Sometimes Verdi’s adventurous scoring went awry Friday. The onstage trumpets suffered aggravating lapses of intonation accuracy in the Tuba mirum.

Still, Friday’s performance made a dramatic finale to the symphony’s Classics Series in the INB Center in a work that led Verdi’s younger German contemporary Johannes Brahms to declare, “This could have only been written by a genius.”