Shoji returns to the Fox for Mendelssohn violin concerto

Having floored Spokane audiences one year ago with her performances of Prokofiev’s Second Violin Concerto, Sayaka Shoji returned this weekend to the Martin Woldson Theater at the Fox to join the Spokane Symphony and Eckart Preu in performing Felix Mendelssohn’s (1809-47) beloved Violin Concerto in E minor Op. 64 (1845). Their collaboration proved both brilliant and provocative.

Brilliant, because Shoji is an absolute master of her instrument and her art. Technical difficulties have long since ceased to present any obstacle to her, so she is able to focus her fine intellect and keen sensibility on interpreting great music as truthfully and feelingly as possible. An uncharacteristic bit of trouble with her bowing at the beginning of the concerto may have explained when, in her preconcert remarks, she related that she was prohibited from bringing her customary bow into the U.S. by laws restricting the importation of ivory. This unintended consequence was soon overcome, and her tone and phrasing regained the security we remembered.

Provocative, because the Mendelssohn concerto emerged in their interpretation as a more serious and complex work than it sometimes is taken to be. This was not achieved through ponderous tempi or fussy phrasing. Tempi were fleet (the first movement is marked “Allegro molto appassionato”) but steady, allowing the orchestra and soloist to phrase meaningfully so that each passage demanded attention and engagement of the listener.

The orchestra participated not as a dutiful accompanist but as a full partner. In the last movement, often taken as an opportunity to exhibit the dexterity of the left hand and the agility of the right arm of the soloist, the low strings of the orchestra were allowed to sing out fully, which balanced the glittering figurations in the solo part and gave us the work as a coherent narrative, rather than an amiable collection of tunes.

Another work that is sometimes used merely as a virtuoso vehicle is the Symphonic Dances of Sergei Rachmaninov (1873-1943), that composer’s final work in 1940. In his preconcert remarks and in the performance that followed, Preu emphasized the elements of tragedy and nostalgia he finds embedded in the work’s brilliant orchestration and haunting melodies, elements familiar to lovers of Rachmaninov’s more famous piano concertos and Symphony No. 2 in E minor.

Admirable as those works are, they exhibit the composer’s difficulty with musical structure. Despite their wonderful melodies and colors, they consist of segments that follow one another with little sense of relationship or coherence, like bricks without mortar. Under Preu’s direction, these dances emerged with elements of both hope and loss woven together in a way that could truly be described as symphonic: not only written for a symphony orchestra, but possessing the structural coherence and cumulative power of a symphony.

The effect of such coherence can only be achieved by an ensemble whose many members function coherently. In the Symphonic Dances, as in last month’s remarkable rendition of Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique, the playing of the Spokane Symphony made it possible for Preu to realize his ambitions. If they were a basketball team, one could praise them for the depth of their bench. While one admired such contributions as Greg Yasinitsky’s transformation of his saxophone into a human voice in Movement I or Sheila McNally’s haunting English horn solo in Movement II (Waltz), it is as a supple, powerful totality that the orchestra made its strongest and most indelible impression.

This impression began to take shape as soon as the evening began with a performance of “Global Warming” (1990) by American composer Michael Abels (b. 1962). The “warming” mentioned in the title is connected not to carbon emissions but to the widespread, short-lived feelings of hope that sprung from the fall of the Berlin Wall and dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1989. Abels gives musical shape to his own hopes that all barriers separating peoples and cultures will fall, by showing how easily a melody arising from one culture can take on the characteristics of another. His tune starts as an Irish jig, only to transform itself into something resembling a Spanish jota, a Jamaican reggae and an Indian raga.

To achieve this, Abels employs considerable skill in managing the coloristic resources of the symphony orchestra, which caused this listener to reflect on just how great those resources really are, and by how much they exceed everything that is possible in the digital domain. As powerful as microprocessors have become, the power of one hundred human minds, enriched by thousands of years of aggregated experience, all listening to one another, all tethered to a single purpose, is something even Watson can never touch.

A recording of this concert will be broadcast at 7 p.m. Monday on Spokane Public Radio, 91.1 FM.