Symphony review: Conductor Shira Samuels-Shragg delivers elegance, precision as violin soloist Gabrielle Després provides extraordinary performance

The audience at Saturday’s concert of the Spokane Symphony – No. 6 in their Masterworks Concerts series – had no reason to expect anything more than another one of many pleasant evenings of familiar music at the Martin Woldson Theater at the Fox, but they were in for a surprise.

On its face, the program for the evening promised nothing out of the ordinary: a cheerful contemporary piece to open – the “Toast of the Town Overture” by contemporary composer Quinn Mason (b. 1996), followed by two reliably enjoyable pillars of the standard repertoire: the Violin Concerto in D major of Erich Wolfgang Korngold and Antonin Dvorak’s Symphony No. 7 in D minor, making its third appearance at these concerts in recent memory. Violin soloist Gabrielle Després and conductor Shira Samuels-Shragg have enjoyed considerable success in recent years but are yet to join the ranks of internationally celebrated stars in the firmament of classical music. The audience could hardly be blamed for having modest expectations, but these expectations were not merely exceeded, but the audience was blown away by what was heard on Saturday night.

The first number on the program, “The Toast of the Town Overture,” provided only a glimpse of what lay ahead. According to the composer, the piece is meant to evoke the world of popular musical theater in the 19th century, as exemplified by the works of Gilbert and Sullivan and Jacques Offenbach. Mason’s overture has several superficial features in common with such works, such as lively tempi, catchy rhythmic patterns and colorful orchestration – all of which were rendered impeccably by Samuels-Shragg and the orchestra – but one crucially important element was missing: melody. From the time of Mozart, it was melody that sold tickets and produced commissions, and melody was even more important in determining the success of a work of musical theater in the later 19th century and remains well into our own time.

Though a precise definition of melody is a matter of some controversy among scholars, we certainly can, if we confine ourselves to the period defined by Quinn Mason, define it as a series of notes having a beginning, middle and an end, which is intended by the composer to produce a certain type of emotional reaction. One may scour the score of “The Toast of the Town Overture” without finding a passage that meets that definition. It is comprised, rather, of segments of connective passagework, such as other composers have used to bridge the gap between melodies. Unfortunately, melodies themselves never appear in Mason’s work. The effect is rather like regarding a painting of the Last Supper that fails to include the guest of honor: momentarily intriguing, technically excellent, but incapable of producing any lasting pleasure.

Shortly after the reappearance onstage of Samuels-Shragg accompanied by Després, the tenor of the evening changed dramatically. In fact, from the very first phrase Després played to open the Korngold Concerto, we knew we were in for something extraordinary. The concerto was premiered by Jascha Heifetz, the greatest and most influential violinist of the 20th century, who was renowned for his ability to wring the most intense effect possible from every measure. Consequently, most succeeding violinists, following Heifetz’s example, have played that opening statement of the theme as a full-throated, passionate cry, and the opening salvo of a dazzling romantic concerto in the manner of Tchaikovsky, Saint-Saens, Wieniawski and others.

The piece can certainly be viewed in that way, but what was shown to us by Després and Samuels-Shragg was how much could be gained by filtering out the effects of the Heifetz tradition and taking a fresh look at Korngold’s score. What was revealed was a work possessed of much greater subtlety and emotional variety than is commonly credited. Després gave us a musical simulacrum of the human mind at work – hoping, doubting, achieving and celebrating. This requires a technique capable of varying tone color and dynamic level throughout a phrase – sometimes within a single note – and Danielle Després commands all the technique needed to accomplish this and, indeed, anything else she feels is needed to interpret a piece of music truthfully and feelingly. She commands a gorgeous, rich tone when the music calls for it, but can also project full intensity through the softest, whispered passages, as she often found occasion to show us.

She also possessed the patience and discipline to trust Korngold to make his own points in his own time, rather than lathering on attention-getting devices often used by violinists when they fear the audience’s attention may not be remaining fixed on themselves. In fact, there are many points at which Korngold wants us to pay attention to what is happening in the orchestra, and we were fortunate that Samuels-Shragg remained so acutely tuned to every such demand in the score, and that the orchestra responded so magnificently. The perfection of interplay between soloist and orchestra in this performance of the Korngold Concerto was one of its most outstanding features. It demonstrated musicianship of the highest order on the part of everyone involved.

There were many passages of chamber music intimacy between Després and members of the orchestra. But perhaps the most remarkable involved was principal horn Clinton Webb who, in the many passages in which Korngold duets the horn with the violin, displayed a degree of virtuosity quite on the same level as the soloist’s. Contributions from Nick Carper, principal viola John Marshall, principal cello, Keith Thomas, principal oboe and principal flute Julia Pyke, also lit Korngold’s varicolored canvas in shades both bright and dark.

The Dvorak Seventh Symphony, which occupied the remainder of the program, allowed us to focus more steadily on Shira Samuels-Shragg, to learn more about just how she achieved such brilliant results in the Korngold Concerto, and to regard with wonderment at her combination of superb technical accomplishment with a unique and unmistakable musical gift. In previous renditions by the Spokane Symphony, we have heard the symphony interpreted in quite different ways: both as a faultless symphonic structure and as Dvorak’s emotionally turbulent expression of despair and determination in the face of personal and political tragedy. What we heard on Saturday night was none of this, yet all of it. It was not so much a reinterpretation as a rebirth of the music itself, achieved through a clear-sighted mastery of the score transmitted to the orchestra by means of an utterly perfect conducting technique.

With balletic elegance and precision, Samuels-Shragg modeled the onward flow of Dvorak’s inspiration to the orchestra, moving from phrase to phrase, section to section and movement to movement without once allowing the encompassing arc of the symphony to become lost, or even smudged. Her absolute security of ongoing pulse allowed each instrument or choir of instruments ample time to give every phrase its fullest expression and to clarify the rightful place of each phrase in the larger argument of the symphony. In her hands – and arms, head and body – each beat was not a point, but a pulse. Each change in tempo and dynamics was linked to what preceded it and what followed.

There was one gesture that Samuels-Shragg did not use. I refer to a gesture employed by many conductors in which the left hand is extended to the orchestra and shaken back and forth, asking for more – more volume, more excitement, more intensity. She never asked for “more,” trusting that the musicians before her, who had devoted their whole lives to getting the most they could from their instruments, would give all they could if given the chance. It was her job, then, to give them that chance, and she succeeded.