Symphony review: Masterworks 2 provides perfect balance of nature and art

In his First Symphony, which was featured in last month’s season opener, Gustav Mahler employed the power of music to transport him – and us – beyond the steamy boudoirs and salons of fin-de-siècle Vienna, and to evoke and celebrate the natural world. In Masterworks 2, Conductor and Music Director James Lowe and the Spokane Symphony followed Mahler’s lead, and performed four works which irresistibly suggested a sense of place.

In the case of Hamish Maccunn and “The Land of the Mountain and the Flood” (1886) it was Scotland. Claude Debussy was inspired by his friend Stéphane Mallarmé’s poetry to write Prélude a l’après-midi d’un faune (1894),” set in the south of France. Finnish composer Einojuhani Rautavaara took us above the Arctic Circle in his “Concerto for Birds and Orchestra” (1972). Finally, led by Norwegian Edvard Grieg in the music he composed for Ibsen’s verse-drama “Peer Gynt,” we follow Peer as he travels from Norway to Africa and back.

Judging from “The Land of the Mountain and the Flood,” written while the composer was still a student, Hamish Maccunn was no prodigy. He was certainly enthusiastic, and no doubt highly motivated, but this stringing together of attractive, characteristic Scottish tunes with transitional passagework plainly skimmed from textbooks shows little of the skill and none of the originality of the many notable British composers who followed him. The orchestration is sturdy, though the orchestral sections are kept rigidly separate from one another, like sections of the choir at a provincial Scottish church. Nevertheless, the Spokane Symphony performed the work as though it were a newly discovered work of Brahms’ maturity, playing with compelling energy and immaculate discipline.

One wonders whether Lowe was motivated by his impish sense of irony to place after this rather awkward bit of Victoriana a work like Debussy’s, which is arguably the most exquisitely refined, most skillfully crafted and most immaculately finished work in the entire orchestral repertoire. It was plain that Lowe is fully aware of its remarkable attributes, since every single one of them was present in his performance.The orchestra played as though they had learned the piece in childhood, and had been working on it ever since.

It fell, of course, to principal Julia Pyke to play the evocative opening flute solo, which she did not only with gorgeous tone, but with a subtle attention to phrasing that was riveting. She set the mold for the entire performance, in which the players were listening attentively to each other. Had they not, such balance and ensemble would not have been possible. What emerged most vividly from Lowe’s interpretation – and this was true throughout the program – was not so much an evocation of place or atmosphere, as a sense of narrative structure– of a story being quite clearly and compellingly laid out for us from beginning to end.

Such a goal might appear more difficult to reach in a piece like Rautavaara’s “Cantus Arcticus (Arctic Song),” which seeks to evoke the desolate lands north of the Arctic Circle, and has no text to provide structure. In fact, Rautavaara’s piece is quite carefully structured to convey a sense of the (one hopes) eternal cycles of departure and return of the many varieties of wildfowl that inhabit that region. The composer himself recorded these birds, both individually and en masse, and employs those sounds in the manner both of instruments and chorus throughout the work. Furthermore, he integrates the recordings into the orchestral texture very effectively by exploiting the ability of the flute, clarinet, oboe and bassoon to emulate birdsong. This led to some very demanding passages for Pyke and her colleagues, Colleen McElroy and Jennifer Slaughter, flutes, Lynn Feller-Marshall, bassoon, Chip Phillips, clarinet, and for the oboe, which on this occasion was played (very admirably) by Brent Hages, sitting in for Keith Thomas.

Through much of the Concerto, birdsong seems to come and go randomly, while the orchestra intones melodic lines which recall choral music of the Eastern Orthodox Church. These melodies, which gradually rise and fall, impart feelings of majestic strength and endurance, as though revealing the presence of an eternal will underlying the apparent disorder of the creatures of nature. This random quality falls away as the piece approaches its conclusion, building to a compelling climax, focusing on a part for solo trumpet played by principal trumpet Larry Jess. Jess’ trumpet emerged subtly from the orchestral texture with a scale motive that was repeated, each time at greater volume and at a higher pitch. Never during this crucial passage did a smudge appear on Jess’ golden tone, nor was there ever a gap in his molded phrasing. The result was a perfect blending of nature and art.

As further evidence of his wish to communicate to his audience as much as possible of the meaning of the works he places on the program, Lowe himself created a novel way of presenting the Prelude and two suites which Grieg created out of the ninety minutes of music he wrote for “Peer Gynt.” Using a mixture of original narration and dialogue taken directly from Ibsen’s text, Lowe created a text that provided context and ligature for the nine orchestral excerpts. In this way, he provided structure and specificity to each segment, allowing the audience to imagine with greater clarity the scenes and actions Grieg was attempting to suggest. Lowe’s text calls for two speakers, whose parts were very ably taken by local actors Andrea Olsen, who nimbly shifted between the roles of narrator and those of various female characters in Ibsen’s drama, and Paul Villabrille, who portrayed Gynt himself in his progress from youthful braggart to broken and repentant supplicant for forgiveness.

Grieg’s massive score presents challenges for the orchestra as a whole, as well as for individual players. These include extended solo passages for viola and violin. Principal viola Nick Carper, the movement of whose right arm is in itself a thing of beauty, brought to his part not only beauty of sound, but arresting character. Since Concertmaster Mateusz Wolski was not in his chair for these concerts, the solo violin part was taken by associate principal Jeanne Bourgeois, who brought a touch of elegance to Grieg’s rustic double-stops, exploiting the full resources of her gorgeous instrument.