A musical journey to old Venice

The Spokane Symphony and Symphony Chorale on Friday took a sizable audience at The Fox to the splendor of Venice.

In vocal and instrumental music, the Casual Classics concert showed the truth of conductor Eckart Preu’s claim that Venice “was the center of the musical universe in the 17th and 18th centuries” and a bracing introduction to some fine, if unfamiliar, music.

The concert opened with the symphony’s brass section playing Giovanni Gabrieli’s “Canzona in 8 Parts” from the balcony at The Fox. Hearing the sound of brass coming from various unexpected stations gave the concert an adventurous beginning and showed off the stereophonic effects that became the trademark of Venetian composers of the baroque period.

Some of the most moving work was done by the Symphony Chorale in performances of works from Gregorio Allegri’s 17th-century “Miserere” to two short choral prayers by Igor Stravinsky written in the 20th century.

The chorale numbers more than 80 members, but the singers’ precision of ensemble, their clean diction and the ensemble’s control over the wide dynamic range from very soft to very loud was imposing. Though Preu conducted the chorale in the concert, special credit is due the chorale’s new director, Júlian Gómez-Giraldo.

Antonio Lotti’s two settings of the “Crucifixus” – one for 8 separate parts, the other in 10 – made fierce demands on the singers because of Lotti’s dramatic use of dissonances that refused to be resolved reflecting the anguish and sorrow of the text.

Lotti was an opera composer as well as a composer of church music; he knew how to manipulate musical tension. Even with discreet organ accompaniment, it is hard to keep those dissonances from leading the pitch adrift, but Friday’s performance showed the singers handsomely managing Lotti’s stunning dramatic effects.

Stravinsky’s connection with Venice lies only in the fact that he loved the city so much he asked to be buried there. Oddly, his two intimate choral prayers, “Pater Noster” and “Ave Maria,” sounded more like “early music” than the Lotti works composed 200 years earlier.

Preu decided to separate Lotti and Stravinsky with a program addition, “Albinoni’s Adagio” for organ and strings. This piece is not by the 18th-century Venetian, Tommaso Albinoni, but by Albinoni’s 20th-century biographer Remo Giazotto. But it is a charming and familiar work and its gentle beauty, along with some showy violin passages played by concertmaster Mateusz Wolski, made it a good buffer between Lotti and Stravinsky.

Allegri, the composer for the papal chapel in Rome, not to be outdone by his Venetian counterparts, wrote a setting of the “Miserere” considered so beautiful that singing it outside the Sistine Chapel was forbidden until modern times. Eventually, the music sneaked out. (The 14-year-old Mozart heard it twice and wrote it out from memory.)

Three groups of singers – one section in the balcony, another to the side of the auditorium, and a larger group on stage – demonstrated how Allegri’s alternation of chordal singing, sections of simple Gregorian chant, and improvisational solo voices must have captivated popes and laymen alike.

Of the orchestral work on Friday’s concert, certainly the most imposing was Antonio Vivaldi’s Concerto in B minor for Four Violins and Orchestra. Vivaldi led Venice’s (and perhaps Europe’s) most famous orchestra in the early 18th century – all girls and young women in an orphanage. The soloists, Wolski, Amanda Howard-Phillips, Jason Bell and David Armstrong, met Vivaldi’s virtuoso challenges splendidly. They were clearly enjoying Vivaldi’s pairings, one-against-two (or three), as well as portions where all four played together. Audience enthusiasm was rewarded by an encore of the concerto’s finale – played maybe a bit faster even than the first time around. Preu conducted from the harpsichord in this and in a suite drawn from Claudio Monteverdi’s opera “Orfeo.”

There was instrumental Stravinsky, too, with a lively performance of the Concerto in E-flat for 15 Instruments, sometimes called the “Dumbarton Oaks” Concerto. It showed Stravinsky knew Bach’s and Vivaldi’s concertos, but knew how to give a tart, sometimes jazzy, 20th-century twist to an 18th-century form.