Review: Spokane Symphony returns with praise-worthy talent for Season 80

James Lowe, conductor and music director of the Spokane Symphony, strode onstage Saturday night to begin the first concert of the orchestra’s 80th season as one of the most beloved and highly valued members of the Spokane Arts community.

Nodding briefly to acknowledge the storm of applause, Lowe turned to his orchestra, asking them to rise and giving the downbeat to begin the national anthem. Was it just this listener’s emotional projection, or was there an added measure of intensity – both in Lowe’s direction and the players’ response – to the familiar tune? To be sure, a new season was beginning, but might the higher emotional pitch not also have been a response to the fraught and anxious times in which the concert was taking place? There was at least one member of the audience who felt an outreach by this dedicated group of artists, inviting us to find strength and solace in the power of music to heal, unite and inspire. Surely, feelings of this kind moved Joan Degerstrom to underwrite the substantial cost of the concert we were about to hear, just as a belief in the foundational importance of the Spokane Symphony to our community moved the Avista Foundation to underwrite the 2025-26 season.

Much of the expense of the program was down to the composition that dominated it – the Symphony No. 1 in D (1888) by Gustav Mahler (1860-1911) – which required a greatly augmented orchestra and the rental of a library of pricey sheet music. Degerstrom’s generosity also allowed Lowe the luxury of engaging mezzo-soprano Ashley Dixon to perform a little-known but immensely interesting and enjoyable secondary work: a suite of Sieben Lieder (Seven Songs) by a fascinating young woman, Anna Schindler, who became Mahler’s wife and a commanding figure in the social history of 20th century music.

Schindler also provided a link to the composer of the opening item on the program, the Intermezzo from “Es War Einmal” (“Once Upon a Time” – 1899) by Alexander Zemlinsky (1871-1942), a younger contemporary whose career as a composer was promoted by Mahler, who, by the mid-1880s, had become known as a conductor, though not yet a composer of genius. As suggested by the Intermezzo we heard, Zemlinsky was a highly skilled composer who lacked the ability to communicate to an audience anything beyond a very generalized sort of emotion. He belonged to a school of composition popular in central Europe at the end of the 19th century that was so in love with Wagner’s opera “Tristan und Isolde,” which goes on for four hours before finally reaching a cadence, or point of harmonic resolution, that they swore allegiance to the piece, dedicating their careers to creating nothing but works in its image. The Intermezzo is taken from a work intended as a lighthearted comedy, and so is more conservative and formal in its approach; it shares with Zemlinsky’s other works, such as his “Lyric Symphony” (1923), the trait of being – while plainly serious and carefully crafted – resolutely unmemorable.

What shall remain in memory, however, is the lively, committed performance accorded the piece by the Spokane Symphony. The pointed phrasing in the strings; the heartfelt attempt by oboist Keith Thomas; oboe, flutist Julia Pyke; flute and bassoonist Lynn Feller-Marshall to impart character to Zemlinsky’s faceless writing was very welcome. These and other members of the orchestra, who could not manage to be uninteresting if they tried, found a welcoming object for their artistry in the works to follow.

Though Alma Mahler was barely out of her teens when she was compelled by Gustav Mahler to abandon her work as a composer to focus on his needs, the suite of seven songs we heard gives evidence of a distinct and attractive voice, along with mastery of an advanced harmonic vocabulary. The texts, all by contemporary poets, occupy the fairly narrow range of emotion favored by artists of the period. The scenes described, even when bathed in sunlight, evoke a twilight world of emotion poised between hope and fear, erotic rapture and despair. As a composer sensitive to linguistic nuance, Anna Mahler employs harmonies that suggest delicate shadings, not bold strokes of color and melodies that shift ambiguously between keys, rather than ever being so blatant as to commit themselves to one or another.

It was Dixon’s singing that provided the emotional force and poignancy that is only suggested in the music. The arresting beauty of her voice , the flexibility with which she moves throughout her considerable range and her artfulness in verbal shading resulted in a performance that suggested these little-known songs should become staples of the repertory.

The arrangements of Alma Mahler’s original piano accompaniments for full orchestra were carried out by Colin and David Matthews. Their skill and artistry in emphasizing verbal values by applying instrumental color are evident in every bar. There were several passages in which an overuse of instrumental shifts and touches distracted the listener’s attention from Dixon’s unified projection of text and music, creating a sense more of competition than collaboration. With a musical presence as commanding as Dixon’s to contend with, though, the outcome of the competition was never in doubt.

When experienced in the context of contemporaneous composers like Zemlinsky and Anna Mahler, a performance of Gustav Mahler’s First Symphony gains stature from our ability to see not only what he did, but what he chose not to do. Not for him, the sense of aimless transition or emotional ambivalence that stunted the career of the talented Zemlinsky or kept the brilliant Schoenberg permanently ensconced in the third tier of significant composers. Gustav Mahler’s work never leaves us wondering where the music is headed. It never asks us to exchange powerful emotions for muted ones, or to settle for ambivalence rather than fulfillment. No composer in history is more capable of delivering both emotional and intellectual excitement in measure after measure over lengthy spans of musical argument than Gustav Mahler. That is why he must be included in any consideration of symphonic music along with Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert and Brahms.

Never have all of these outstanding attributes of Gustav Mahler’s music been more thrillingly displayed than they were in this performance of his First Symphony by James Lowe and the Spokane Symphony. Gustav Mahler calls for very large orchestral forces in this work (eight horns!), not only to provide the excitement of continual fortissimo playing, but to provide the widest possible quality of what we would now call “dynamic range”: the experience of extreme stillness or delicacy depends on our also being able to experience extreme vehemence, complexity and power. This axiom could serve pretty well as a thumbnail description of Gustav Mahler’s D major Symphony, which attempts, as he once told Sibelius every symphony should do, to embrace the whole world.

Along with his commitment to tonality and symphonic structure, Gustav Mahler never abandoned melody. This may account for the neglect his music received for the 50 years following his death of heart disease at 51. It also accounts for the relative obscurity in which Zemlinsky, Schoenberg and other of Gustav Mahler’s contemporaries now languish.

Lowe’s unflagging mastery in clarifying the linkage between Gusta Mahler’s stream of melody, his ability to manage the composer’s juxtaposition of contrasting moods and styles, and his ability to reveal an unbroken arc of coherence validated his credentials as a Mahlerian of the first class. Our appetite to hear more was not satisfied, but enflamed. Seeing Lowe and the Spokane Symphony again joined by Dixon in more Gustav Mahler – perhaps “Das Lied von der Erde” (The Song of the Earth) or “Kindertotenlieder” (Songs on the Death of Children) – now there’s a consummation devoutly to be wished.