Preu puts down the baton to join orchestra

Eckart Preu is almost always behind a podium and in front of the orchestra during the Spokane Symphony’s Classics concerts. But this weekend, the conductor will be briefly putting down his baton and joining the ranks of his musicians.

During a performance of J.S. Bach piece Brandenburg Concerto No. 1, Preu, an accomplished pianist, will be playing along on the harpsichord. Chamber orchestras rarely required conductors in Bach’s day, though they often followed direction from the harpsichordist. Bach’s six Brandenburg concertos were written near the end of the Baroque period, and they are often counted among the composer’s best works.

“There was a time when there were no conductors needed,” Preu said. “It’s basically chamber music. You don’t need anyone beating time or showing you exactly what’s going on. It’s very intimate, very dynamic and a very different way of making music. … Pretty much everybody is a soloist in this piece. The responsibilities are more equally distributed on many shoulders, not just onto one guy up front.”

Pulling double duty as conductor and musician is enough of a challenge, but the intricacies of the harpsichord itself present their own difficulties.

“Unlike a piano, you don’t have weighted keys that don’t have different dynamics, so you have these levers on the side that basically give you two dynamics: loud and soft,” Preu said. “But I don’t have a dominant part to play. I’m the backbone, in a way.”

This weekend’s symphony program is titled “Genius Evolution,” and, along with the Bach piece, it will feature “Sidereus” by the contemporary Argentine composer Osvaldo Golijov’s and Austrian composer Anton Bruckner’s Symphony No. 6.

“You have three composers who were all, at one point or another, considered geniuses,” Preu said. “You can see that evolution from the early 18th century with Bach to the 19th century with Bruckner and then the 21st century (with Golijov), and how the approach to writing that ingenious music has evolved.”

These pieces are also connected, Preu notes, in that they all explore the relationships between heaven and Earth. Both Bach’s and Bruckner’s pieces are more abstract in that exploration, while the theme is more obviously present in Golijov’s “Sidereus,” which is named after an influential astronomical study penned by Galileo.

“There are two big topics that are underlying here for me,” Preu said. “I thought of programming the Bruckner symphony first. He really tries to capture in his music something that’s beyond us here on Earth, of belonging to some bigger thing. Then Bach came immediately to mind. Just like Bruckner, he bridges earthiness with heavenliness, and I think that’s significant to both composers.”