Review: An eclectic, intense performance
Do symphony orchestras play in nightclubs? If you’re in Spokane they do.
The Spokane Symphony performed one of its Symphony on the Edge concerts at the Big Easy on Friday to a large and quite receptive audience. Some were graying symphony regulars. But some I talked with were classical music newcomers, maybe a little puzzled but fascinated by the experience of hearing “serious” music (and some not-so-serious) written by composers their own age.
Morihiko Nakahara, the symphony associate conductor, is not afraid of the Internet, where he discovered several of the works he programmed for Friday’s performance. Nakahara is also not afraid of banging some ears.
The program opened with Randall Woolf’s “Shakedown.” Even Nakahara was unsure of what was being shaken down, but the piece moved through rhythms that edged apart before breaking into a nicely lyric section then back again to driving rhythms with a bit of boogie.
Nakahara warned his audience that two of the composers on this program were dead. “The oldest but perhaps edgiest piece you’ll hear tonight,” he said, “is Varèse’s ‘Octandre,’ written in 1923.”
What a piece! “Octandre” lasts less than eight minutes, but in those few minutes, in three very short movements, Varèse moved blocks of sound around in time the way a child would move colored blocks around on the floor – big blocks, tiny ones, moving in bright, sharply contrasting colors. Symphony woodwinds had a field day; so did string bassist Patrick McNally, the star of the work’s finale.
For me, the two works that gave Varèse the greatest competition for my attention were by the youngest composers, Vivian Fung and Xi Wang.
Fung’s “Pizzicato for Strings” took form over a throbbing pulse with patterns that shifted and merged, interrupted by other patterns that seemed to stretch like a rubber band over the prevailing patterns. Fung ended the piece calling on the players to use the bodies of their instruments like drums thumped by the player’s fingers. Highly effective.
Xi, who was present at Friday’s performance, was cagey about what dream had been broken in her “Shattered Dream.” But the music moved from a dreamlike melodic opening into a dark section of heavy, marchlike drumming dissipated by a flute-dominated epilogue. Keyboardist Linda Siverts gave beautiful shape to Xi’s piano line that assembled itself slowly out of fragments of melody before crashing in sweeping glissandos.
Nakahara included two works by Toru Takemitsu, the other dead composer of the evening – his early Requiem and a late work, “Tree Line.” The first combines elements of Debussy with a dissonant melodic line out of Schoenberg. The second is all Takemitsu – music that floats like images on Japanese scroll painting which seem not attached to the page.
John Mackey’s “Strange Humors” for string quartet and djembe (a West African drum) seemed to need the physical of the two-man ballet for which it was composed. But Paul Raymond’s drumming was mighty impressive.
Evan Chambers’ “Crazed by the Flame” took a while to move to the groove that interestingly combined Middle Eastern melodic twists and wails with sometimes jazzy, sometimes techno rhythmic drive.
The Big Easy is a little dry acoustically to hear complex music. But Nakahara’s choice of music and the level of intensity the players brought to the performance made Friday’s concert just what Spokane needs in the way of contemporary music.