Symphony Review: Nakahara and guest pianist Buechner together bring energetic performance for 100th anniversary of ‘Rhapsody in Blue’
The third in this season’s series of Masterworks concerts came at the perfect time. With all the uncertainty surrounding the upcoming general election, what could be more comforting and steadying than a program of music highlighting the historic phenomenon of American music? When they took their seats this weekend at the Fox, members of the audience plugged themselves into a live circuit of energy running from the conductor, former Assistant Music Director Morihiko Nakahara, through every member of the Spokane Symphony and into eager pairs of ears in the hall.
The origin of that current of skill, creativity and discipline originated, we would have to say, with the composers of the five substantial works that made up the program: “A Celebration Overture ” (2022) by Spokane musician Gregory Yasinitsky, “Concertino Cusqueño” (2012) by Gabriela Lena Frank, “Rhapsody in Blue” (1924) by George Gershwin, “The Chairman Dances” (1985) by John Adams and Leonard Bernstein’s 1944 ballet “Fancy Free.”
It would be hard to find a more characteristically American piece of music than Yasinitsky’s overture. Of all the pieces on the program, this makes the least obvious use of borrowed content or techniques. To anyone familiar with Tommy Dorsey, Stan Kenton and Nelson Riddle, all great band leaders of the wartime and post-war eras, none of the harmonies, gestures or rhythms of the piece would seem strange. Yasinitsky’s composition technique shows a thorough mastery of classical forms, particularly in his use of polyphony, or writing for several voice simultaneously, which is employed very effectively throughout the piece. In pre-concert remarks, Yasinitsky explained that one of his goals was to provide as many players as possible a solo opportunity to shine. Most notable among those is the lovely, chaste melody voiced first by the orchestra’s superb Principle Flute, Julia Pyne, before being taken up by English Horn Sheila Armstrong, whose playing is always a flowing source of pleasure.
It must be acknowledged, though, that one of the chief characteristics of American concert music is its energetic appropriation of the music of other cultures and other times. Frank’s “Concertino Cusqueño” (“Little Concerto in the style of Cuzco”) is a brilliant example. Herself a product of several cultural and racial strands, Frank shows enormous skill and ingenuity in combining Indigenous Peruvian melodies and rhythms with instrumental techniques developed by Hungarian composer Bela Bartok and brief snippets borrowed from the English Benjamin Britten. Frank shows a sure hand in combining these disparate elements to form a sound-world uniquely her own. The opening of the piece features the unusual but strikingly effective duetting of the piccolo and bass clarinet, joined then by celesta, tympani and harp. Later in the piece, Frank draws on the principal players of each of the string sections to form a string quintet. Though this may sound like so much grandstanding by the composer, the effect is utterly natural, direct and beguiling.
This year marks the 100th anniversary of the composition of Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue,” which was itself premiered at a concert staged to explore the question, “What is American Music?” In recounting the experience of taking a train ride in which the racket of the wheels was transformed in his mind into music, Gershwin recalled, “I heard it as a musical kaleidoscope of America, of our vast melting pot, of our national pep, of our blues, our metropolitan madness.”
Soloist in the “Rhapsody” was Sara Davis Buechner, whose website lists a limitless variety of works in her repertory, but who appears to feel a special affinity for the music, and indeed the person of George Gershwin. The driving energy, the impetuosity, the swaggering self-confidence and utter command shown in the few recordings of Gershwin at the piano (two galvanizing videos of him playing “I Got Rhythm” and “Strike up the Band” are available on YouTube) were all combined in the performance she gave on Saturday night. It is remarkable that these qualities are combined in Buechner’s playing with a tone that is warm, rounded and expressive throughout the dynamic range of the piano.
We should remember that the connection between Gershwin and the piano was broad and profound. He never felt so alive as when he was at the piano, and often had to be physically ejected from parties after playing the piano for hours. Furthermore, he lived in the golden age of 20th -century pianism, with names like Rachmaninov, Godowsky, Lhevinne, Hoffman, Horowitz and Rubinstein appearing beside the entries to Carnegie Hall. It was their brand of bravura playing that Gershwin must of had in his ears when he composed the “Rhapsody,” and that we had in our ears when Sara Davis Buechner was playing.
As an encore, Buechner played an arrangement of a foxtrot, “Do, Do, Do What you Done, Done, Done to Me,” which she learned by listening endlessly to a Gershwin recording. The frenzy with which the audience responded to her performance of the “Rhapsody” was repeated at the conclusion of the encore.
This combination of intensity and subtlety was equally in evidence in Nakahara’s interpretation of the orchestra’s role in “Rhapsody in Blue,” which we heard, as is customary, in the orchestration of Ferde Grofe. As he has for twenty years, Nakahara stands before the orchestra as an absolute fountain of energy, attent to every turn of phrase, every instrumental balance, every subtle emphasis, and able, thanks to an adamantine technique, to convey them to the orchestra.
The two works that comprised the second half of the program – Adams’ “The Chairman Dances” and Bernstein’s “Fancy Free” made for an illuminating pair. The Adams is an outtake from his tremendously successful opera, “Nixon in China,” and has become established in the contemporary standard repertory. It is plain to see why, as it makes effective use of Adams’ mastery of the minimalist technique of building carpets or curtains of shimmering, subtly shifting sound out of short melodic phrases and rhythmic patterns, repeated without varying either tempo or dynamic level, but constantly making slight changes in pitch and instrumentation. If this description sounds dry and intellectual, it is because it so often conforms to the effect of Adams’ music. While this music excites the pleasure we naturally feel in a lively and colorful auditory input, it also constantly requires that we focus our minds on detecting subtle and unexpected changes in that input, which is an obstacle to achieving the sort of fusion of understanding with feeling that results from listening to Bach, Beethoven, Schubert and, for that matter, Gershwin.
Or, it turns out, from listening to Leonard Bernstein’s early masterpiece (he was 25 – the same age as Gershwin at the time of the “Rhapsody”), the ballet “Fancy Free.” Though it was composed 40 years before Adam’s foxtrot, Bernstein’s score makes use also of often-repeated melodic “cells,” of fragmented development, of complex and disorienting rhythmic patterns, it adds elements that are deliberately absent from the later music, elements best described by Gershwin in his allusion to “our national pep, of our blues” in other words, kinetic emotional energy, and drama, i.e. sexuality. Bernstein and Robbins’s ballet has to do with three sailors who are briefly on leave and seriously in need of heterosexual contact. The drama, which drives the music, arises from an imbalance between the number of sailors and the number of potential contacts, and Bernstein’s genius allowed him to imbue every phrase of the music with this drama.
The resulting music is not what one might expect from the title: It is not gay, light-hearted and filled with fun. It is densely written, often jagged (Stravinsky’s influence is evident throughout the score) and rhythmically complex. It poses as many challenges to the orchestra as Adams’ “Chairman Dances,” but its effect on the listener is to free the imagination, rather than keeping it distracted by the need to count eighth-notes, and to summon distinct images of time (1944) and place (New York City). The effect of this specificity is contrary to what we might expect. While the Adams’ piece is bound to its place in the evolving fashions of musical style, Bernstein’s ballet, due to the emotions it evokes, is timeless.