Symphony review: Spokane Symphony takes audience on successful mission, otherworldly journey to the stars

From the midst of the audience at the opening of Saturday’s concert of the Spokane Symphony at the Fox there sounded a plaintive song, longing for release from the disappointments and alienation of earthly life and a wish that the singer be able to take flight and live out his life beyond the sky. It was a deeply touching Ukrainian song of the 19th century and the singer was Michael Sinitsa, whose beautiful baritone voice and crystalline diction must have melted the hearts of everyone present and set the tone for the moving and thought-provoking concert that followed.

The song itself, “Watching the Sky and Thinking a Thought” was sung on Aug. 12, 1962, by Pavlo Popovich, a Soviet cosmonaut, following his escape from the earth’s atmosphere. It served to introduce the theme of the concert, which was the role played by music in conveying the nature of humanity to other intelligent beings who had never encountered it. The works following it on the program were Dario Marianelli’s “Voyager Concerto” (2014), “Primal Message” (2020) by Nokuthula Ngwenyama and the Symphony No. 5 in C minor by Beethoven, a portion of which was beamed into space in 1974 as part of the “Arecibo Message.” It must have occurred to many in the audience that the question underlying this program is asked, though less conspicuously, by every concert: What is there in this music that aids me in seeing more clearly and feeling more deeply just what it is to be human?

Marianelli’s “Voyager Concerto” was inspired by the space probe launched by NASA in 1977 and composed for violinist Jack Liebeck, who performed the work at this weekend’s concerts. It is a challenging work in several respects. It is a challenge to the soloist, whose part requires pinpoint accuracy of intonation and great emotional expressivity. It challenges the orchestra, which must negotiate the work’s constantly changing harmonies while maintaining a surface finish of calm serenity and tonal beauty. It also challenges the audience by omitting some features it has come to expect in a concerto.

First, the piece does not employ a tonal center with which to organize its harmonic structure, allowing the composer freedom to employ harmonies, sometimes in sequence and sometimes simultaneously, that have no fixed relationship to one another, but are dictated entirely by the impression the composer wishes to make on the listener. Marianelli portrays a voyage from earth into deep space that is full of beauties and wonders that came into being with no relationship to one another. Why, he seems to ask, compose a work in which all parts must bear some relationship to A major, when the universe exhibits no such structure? Thus, it takes a while for listeners to get their bearings in the gravity-free environment of the Voyager Concerto. Once they do, however, there is an exhilaration akin to what an astronaut must feel upon beholding the limitless variety and awesome extent that is theirs to explore.

Nokothula Ngwenyama is a highly regarded American composer and violist with roots both in Japan and South Africa. Inspired by the Arecibo Message, she composed what was originally a string quintet that employed harmonic relationships based on prime numbers. In this way, she felt that a listener seeking insight into human nature would learn something about “our intelligence, our emotions, our goodness.” This has been the goal of many composers preceding Ngwenyama, and so we find the terrain of her “Primal Message” quite familiar. It abounds in melody – sweet, heartfelt and engaging – though its handling of harmony is quite free. The strings of the Spokane Symphony played with the unanimity and refinement of a chamber ensemble, though with much greater richness of tone and coloristic variety than a chamber group could achieve.

The return to a more traditional form of composition in “Primal Message” prepared us for the greatest composition of 1810 and a path to greater understanding of human nature that has been trod by more feet perhaps than any other: Beethoven’s Symphony No. 5. Familiar as this work was to the audience, we could not have been prepared for the rendition it received from Music Director James Lowe and the Spokane Symphony. From the iconic first four notes, it was charged with an electricity that remained constant until the echoes of the final C major chord were supplanted by roaring applause.

How is it possible to put forward a view of a musical work familiar to a mature audience, in some cases since their childhood, as though it were being first conceived of before their very eyes and ears? To begin with, the orchestra must play exactly what is written, especially since the composer in this case poured so much thought and labor into producing it. This our orchestra did with a degree of exactitude and of fervor that was not short of astonishing. Not only the notes, but the silences between the notes, and the phrasing that linked or separated them, and the tonal shading that gave them expression and coherence – all these essential elements were observed at every moment of the performance, giving it the quality of something taking place in the moment, rather than cobbled together by tired instinct from half-remembered recordings.

Beethoven set down his vision of transcendence of earthly sorrow in an apartment in Vienna two centuries ago, and, by so doing, achieved immortality, achieved the end longed for in the sad little song which opened the program. We were all able to partake in this vision and feel our own humanity more vividly without traveling to Cape Canaveral, but simply by paying the modest price of a ticket and setting aside a few hours on a Saturday night.