Review: Harpist highlights drama, intensity

Morihiko Nakahara, the Spokane Symphony’s resident conductor, is most often seen conducting the orchestra’s SuperPops concerts. But this weekend’s Classics concerts at The Fox showed him fully as adept in the “serious” symphonic repertoire as he brought a masterful intensity to an unusual program of modern and romantic composers.

Nakahara opened the concerts with Zoltan Kodály’s “Dances of Galánta,” a musical tribute to the composer’s childhood experience with Gypsy music in the little town where he grew up. Nakahara explained that Kodály used the form of the “verbunkos,” a recruiting dance used to lure country boys into the Austrian imperial army with dancing and singing. (The conductor neglected to mention that strong drink often played a part in the recruitment, as Kodály’s friend Béla Bartók noted.)

Musicians from the orchestra, especially clarinetist Chip Phillips, contributed some splendid solo passages in dances that ranged in style through doleful, heroic and coy to a frenzied ending in Kodály’s brilliantly orchestrated work.

American harp virtuosa Yolanda Kondonassis proved an outstanding advocate for Alberto Ginastera’s fiendishly difficult Harp Concerto, making the most of the work’s drama and intensity while showing her technical command of the instrument along with the musical imagination of a great artist. There is more to the harp’s huge range of colors than the angelic strumming and glissandos of wedding harpists. Ginastera’s Concerto is a display case of that range of colors. Kondonassis produced radically different tones by playing on different parts of the string, producing harmonics by touching the heel of her hand against the string as she plucked, and playing with her fingernails (ouch). There were even more exotic effects, like drumming her hands on the instrument’s soundboard or producing a “whoosh” by sliding the hand up the instrument’s lower strings.

Equally interesting were Ginastera’s orchestral effects, which included a large but carefully used battery of percussion – five players on more than 30 instruments!

But Ginastera’s Concerto is more than a display of effects. Both soloist and orchestra delivered a captivating performance, showing just how well the composer integrated extreme harp techniques into a work whose musical values – whether fiercely dramatic or meltingly lyrical – came first.

Kondonassis responded to the audience’s ovation with Carlos Salzedo’s 1927 “Chanson de la Nuit,” which incorporates many of the techniques Ginastera used in his 1965 concerto.

Robert Schumann’s symphonies take a bad rap. Some conductors insist they are poorly orchestrated, with many melodic lines needlessly doubled by several types of instruments and too much striving after intensity with fidgety tremolos and passage work muddying the texture. In this weekend’s performances of Schumann’s Symphony No. 2, Nakahara paid careful attention to balancing in those doublings and subdued the accompanying passage work to allow the beauties of Schumann’s music to glow. This symphony – Schumann’s tribute to his symphonic predecessors and contemporaries – made beautiful sense this way.

The orchestra’s musicians acknowledged Nakahara’s command of the work with a hearty foot-stomping ovation before rising with him to accept the audience’s applause.