Review: Spokane Symphony’s ‘Masterworks 6’ includes pianist Archie Chen, Ukraine national anthem
Music director James Lowe and the Spokane Symphony planned last year to celebrate the 75th anniversary of the orchestra’s founding with a gala concert, but, as Lowe has remarked, “COVID-19 had other plans.”
As a result, audiences at Martin Woldson Theater at the Fox on Saturday evening were treated to a celebration of the orchestra’s 76th anniversary, which was made all the happier and more meaningful by the awareness that it had survived the trials of the intervening 12 months.
Before the 8 p.m. Saturday program “Masterworks 6: The Genesis of the Spokane Symphony” began, the symphony performed the Ukraine national anthem in solidarity with the nation. There was big applause when Lowe made the announcement and a long standing ovation after it was played.
“We’re playing the Ukraine national anthem in solidarity with people who are dying in Ukraine,” Lowe said. Lowe also quoted Leonard Bernstein, who once said, “This is our reply to violence – to make music more intensely, more beautifully, more devotedly than before.”
The orchestra then performed a program of works that appeared in its inaugural season starting with the very first work on the very first program on Dec. 18, 1945: the Overture to Iphigénie in Aulis (1774) by Christoph Willibald Gluck.
The remaining works were Robert Schumann’s Piano Concerto in A minor Op. 54 (1845), in which the orchestra was joined by Spokane-based pianist Archie Chen, a Suite of American Fiddler Tunes (1943) by George Frederick McKay and Antonin Dvorak’s Symphony No. 8 in G major Op. 88 (1889).
One could recognize thematic ties linking the program’s works. One was the interplay between a bright, positive public voice and an inner, personal voice. Schumann was keenly aware of these opposing traits in his own personality, so much so that he gave them names: Florestan (forceful, energetic, dynamic) and Eusebius (intimate, solitary, meditative). This psychological duality became a hallmark of the Romantic era of European music.
It is seen, in fact, in the works of Gluck, who is one of the most important progenitors of Romanticism in music. The overture to his opera Iphigénie in Aulis begins with a slow unfolding of spare, open chords of ambiguous tonality. Lowe emphasized the dark, brooding atmosphere by asking the strings to play with little or no vibrato, removing much of the warmth from their tone.
In an instant, the gloomy mode is broken by a burst of vigorous, energetic music performed by the orchestra with the split-second perfection of ensemble that characterized their playing throughout Saturday evening.
These virtues were very much in evidence in their performance with Chen of the celebrated Schumann Concerto. In this concerto, he achieves a subtle interweaving of the orchestra with the piano soloist. This was brought off with total unanimity of purpose by Lowe, Chen and the orchestra to a thrilling and heartwarming effect.
As, for example, in the magical passage in the first movement in which Chen traded Schumann’s theme back and forth with principal clarinet Chip Phillips while the strings murmured their commentary. Coordinating interplay of this kind with such subtlety and refinement requires musicianship of the very highest order.
There were points in the Schumann Concerto at which the effects of Chen’s recent and very serious battle with COVID-19 were apparent. At times, the energy required to focus on Schumann’s quicksilver shifts between Florestan and Eusebius seemed to desert him.
At times, his normally infallible technique faltered momentarily, resulting in the smudging of some of the exhausting rapid passagework in the last movement. Of much greater effect, however, than these slight signs of fallibility were the intensity of Chen’s collaboration with his colleagues onstage and his passionate expression of the deep feeling that courses through Schumann’s music.
Dvorak’s Symphony in G major, which closed the program, is one of the composer’s most popular and widely performed works. Even so, Lowe and the symphony presented it as though it were newly minted, without a hint of stale routine or conventionality.
It represented yet another in a growing line of startlingly fresh, exciting readings of repertory staples offered in the Masterworks series, in which the quality of the orchestra’s finish, the suppleness and beauty of their sound and the brilliance of their execution have deepened and renewed the audience’s awareness and gratitude for the transcendent power of music.