Spokane Symphony debuts 2015 classics series with Mahler, Debussy

Eckart Preu and the Spokane Symphony launched the 2015 segment of their Classics Series on Saturday at the Martin Woldson Theater at the Fox, departing under fair skies, then finding themselves becalmed a while before heading triumphantly into port.

The principal work on the program was the Symphony No. 5 (1902) by Gustav Mahler. Finding other works to balance this leviathan is an impossible task, so Preu chose to begin the evening with two brief works that complemented and commented on it: “Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun” (1894) by Claude Debussy and “Mothership” (2011) by American composer Mason Bates.

Debussy’s masterpiece, which initiated the Impressionist movement in music, begins with a passage for solo flute that is the most famous and most difficult in the standard repertoire. It surprised no one that principal flutist Bruce Bodden seemed unfazed by the challenge, producing tone of such beauty and variety that one could easily have forgotten that only one instrument was playing.

Bodden’s pure, languorous solo set a tone for the composition, which the orchestra maintained to perfection. Debussy sought a hazy ambiguity in his use of harmony and rhythm, but the piece requires the utmost precision of its performers to make its full effect, and Preu maintained admirable control over every aspect of the performance. Intonation, balance and note values were observed with microscopic accuracy. The experience that resulted was not merely of something beautiful, but seemingly of beauty itself.

This precision was also evident in the performance of Bates’ “Mothership,” a work for large orchestra, augmented by electronic instruments and tracks. It is an ingenious and engaging work, combining punchy, rhythmic exactitude from the orchestra, with four improvised solos on electric guitar (Jake Lee), electric cello (John Marshall), theremin (Kendall Feeney) and amplified bass (Eugene Jablonski). The composer displays a rich aural imagination and admirable mastery of form, but one senses a certain lack of substance at the core of the piece, as though cleverness were its subject, rather than means to a larger end.

Society has certainly accorded such a place to Mahler’s Fifth, in which skill and ingenuity are placed at the service of the composer’s passionate desire to portray the full range of human experience. The fabric of the work is woven out of many strands of Mahler’s musical experience: military marches, village dances, popular waltzes, as well as many sounds no one had heard until he set them down.

Mahler seizes our attention at the outset with a haunting trumpet solo, superbly performed on Saturday by principal trumpet Larry Jess, just as Mahler would have wished, balancing between elegance and menace. When Jess was joined by the orchestra to complete the passage, however, one could notice a falling off of energy, which persisted as the strings took up the principal theme of the first movement. This theme was compared by conductor and composer Leonard Bernstein to the keening prayers of rabbis in the synagogue, but there was none of this strong character in the way it was performed on Saturday night. The notes were all there, but where was the music?

The first movement and much of the second proceeded in this same dispiriting manner: careful and accurate, but remaining cautiously on the surface of the music. Dynamic range, which should be huge in Mahler, was attenuated to a narrow bracket between not-too-loud and not-too-soft. With few exceptions, rhythms lacked point and phrasing was slack.

The pause between the second and third movements lasted far longer than usual, during which Preu stood silently before the orchestra. There is no way to know what he was thinking, but when he raised his baton, there was a palpable change. No longer a patient etherized upon a table, Mahler’s Fifth became a living, breathing force, veering between hope and despair, lamenting and exultant, vulgar and refined. The horns, especially principal Kyle Wilbert, epitomized this newfound energy, playing with a mixture of power and agility that simply could not be bettered. Likewise, the playing of the violins in the fourth movement – the famed Adagietto, which was performed at the funeral of Robert Kennedy – plumbed the depths of human emotion, producing feelings of grief and longing almost too great to bear.

So the performance proceeded to its triumphant conclusion with passion and virtuosity. The uncharacteristic loss of energy earlier merely served to remind us that playing the right notes at the right speed is only part of what makes the Spokane Symphony the superb orchestra it is.