Symphony program juxtaposes forgotten, familiar
Conductor Eckart Preu and members of the Spokane Symphony and Symphony Chorale took Friday’s Casual Classics audience at the Martin Woldson Theater at the Fox on a whirlwind tour of music from 1619 through 1775. The concert furnished a refreshing vacation from the standard stops on the symphonic road and included some fine work by the Spokane Symphony Chorale.
Preu began Friday’s program with three Psalm settings by Henrich Schütz written about the time the Pilgrims were just setting out for the New World. The conductor noted in his spoken program notes that Schütz was a pioneer, too, taking a trip to Venice to learn from the Italians, writing the first sizable body of church music in German (not Latin) and in his Italian-fed feeling for words – not only the literal meanings of the texts but the weight and textures of the sound of words in German.
Friday’s performances showed the variety of color Schütz achieved with his chorus divided into equal parts, into large and small groups and, in the final Psalm 8 (Oh Lord, our Lord, how excellent is Thy name) two choruses with string orchestra. The chorale members sang good clear German, but the audience had the benefit of English supertitles, as well.
George Frideric Handel, like Schütz, Preu said, learned the art of melody from his time in Italy. And Preu made Handel’s Concerto Grosso for Strings, Op. 6, No. 7 sing and dance in the five short movements. The crisp playing of the string orchestra and lively interplay of solo players with the larger group showed where Schütz’s colorful contrast led in purely instrumental writing.
After intermission, Preu led his tour across the border from the baroque to the classical era with the Symphony in C major by Carl Phillip Emanuel Bach, J.S. Bach’s second-oldest son. The younger Bach’s contemporaries admired him extravagantly; but he soon nearly disappeared from orchestral programs. The symphony was full of little surprises. “This music sounds, well … a little funky,” Preu told the audiences.
Sure enough, some scurrying scales pulled up abruptly short or went on a little longer than the listener expected. Harmonies veered from textbook patterns and the work’s Adagio had dissonant tugs that seemed straight out of Papa Bach’s organ chorales. Preu led a lively performance of a winning piece heard all too infrequently.
The crown of the evening was Mozart’s Symphony No. 29, so sure-handed and urbane you would never believe it is the work of a 19-year-old. I was most impressed by the subtlety Preu brought to Friday’s performance. It often was quiet enough to seem like overheard dance music. Especially fine was the quality of the Andante with its muted violins. But there was boldness, too, with those ominous knocking rhythms in the Menuetto and a light, fleet finale.
The symphony’s French horn duo sounded uneasy Friday with tentative playing and some outright clinkers scarring Mozart’s courtly mood.
Cell phones have become an unfortunate part of today’s concert life. A ring broke the quiet at the end of a Schütz Psalm. And applause that came at the end of every movement of the Handel’s and Mozart works is an annoying price audiences pay too often at concerts now (and not just in Spokane, either). Neither of these vexations ruined the concert, but were annoyances, still.
Preu introduced the evening’s encore saying, “And now a work by the one who has been missing.” The “missing one” was J.S. Bach and the encore a perennial favorite, “Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring.”