Symphony Review: Quilting of borrowed pieces, narration lends to mindful performance

A glance at the program listing for the past weekend’s concerts by the Spokane Symphony suggests that the audience enjoyed an evening of pleasant music assembled in no particular order. If there was a common thread, it seemed to be that all of the pieces employed themes “stolen” from earlier composers, primarily J.S. Bach. The more experienced concertgoer might also notice that Music Director and Conductor James Lowe had decided to forego the customary concert offering of: 1. Overture plus 2. Concerto … Intermission/glass of wine … and 3. Serious Symphony-by-familiar-composer. As a substitute for the concerto, Lowe proposed a suite for viola and orchestra, to be performed by Nick Carper, the orchestra’s principal viola and longtime fan favorite. To distract from the absence of a symphony, Lowe had arranged with Jess Walter, a local bestselling novelist, humorist and podcaster, to perform Benjamin Britten’s “Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra” with a witty new narration created and delivered by Walter himself.

That is a perfectly reasonable reading, and most likely what the audience expected when they took their seats on Saturday night and Sunday afternoon. What they experienced, however, was something quite different, more illuminating and more moving. For, as the concert progressed, an image (if I may call it that) began to take shape in the mind of the listener of a concept that embraced the entire program and gave each work a significant place in a larger form. In short, we did in fact end up hearing what one might call a “hidden symphony,” composed by James Lowe out of musical compositions he “stole” from these composers.

To see how he did this and why, it is necessary to keep in mind what we mean when we call a piece of music a “symphony”: a single composition made up usually of four separate sections, called “movements.” Though each movement has its own character, they all fit together in a specific order to form an argument or significance beyond what each possesses when considered separately. Regardless of whether the symphony in question is by Haydn, Beethoven or Franck, the argument moves predictably from the many to the one, from uncertainty to resolution, from a condition of doubt to the possession of wisdom. With this in mind, James Lowe’s “Masterpiece 5” symphony took shape in the following way:

First Movement: The suite that William Walton drew from his ballet, “The Wise Virgins,” is comprised of six dances, each one of which is based on a chorale from the works of Bach. The use of the orchestra is extremely brilliant, as one would expect from Walton, who was among the last century’s greatest masters of orchestration, as shown in such works as his First Symphony and his choral masterpiece, “Belshazzar’s Feast.” This allowed the orchestra to display the full variety of its sonic resources in creating a range of moods from contemplative to ebullient, all of which will be called upon again during the course of the concert. During the first dance alone, Walton shifts from a lively duet between flute Julia Pyke and oboe Keith Thomas to a sonorous chorale involving the entire brass section. Pyke was called upon again in the fifth dance, following a particularly beautiful and arresting introduction by Concertmaster Mateusz Wolski and Harp Eareka Tregenza Moody.

Second (Slow) Movement: The first sign that something was going on more than first met the eye was Lowe’s turning to the audience to ask that we please not applaud between the next two items on the program: the Vaughan Williams “Fantasia on a Theme of Thomas Tallis” and Paul Hindemith’s “Trauermusik” (Music of Mourning). The effect was to combine the two works into a single programmatic episode devoted to contemplation of matters of a solemn, or at least serious nature. Though separated in time by 25 years , the two works joined with scarcely a seam visible. Both employ modal harmonies and are scored for strings only. In fact, the Tallis Fantasia contains a prominent passage for solo viola, very sensitively voiced by Associate Principal Jeannette Wee-Yang, which anticipates Hindemith’s suite for solo viola and string orchestra.

The second innovation by which Lowe joined the pieces by Vaughan Williams and Hindemith was to bookmark them with contributions from the Spokane Symphony Chorale, under the direction of their leader, Meg Stohlmann. On a cue from the podium, the auditorium was filled with the sound of a chorus, both robust and refined, emanating from the back of the auditorium, as a reduced contingent of the chorale sang the brief psalm setting Tallis prepared in 1567 for the archbishop of Canterbury, and which inspired Williams 343 years later. The chorale remained in their place throughout both Williams’ and Hindemith’s “Fantasias,” so that they could perform the Bach chorale setting on which the conclusion of the “Trauermusik” is based. The vital intensity with which the chorale rendered these two bits of ancient music removed the abstraction of knowing that one piece is “inspired by” another, and brought the force of those hymns dramatically into our consciousness.

The turbulent beauty of the “Tallis Fantasia” had not fully concluded in its final, long-fading chord when Carper quietly walked onstage. As it did, he moved to his place before the orchestra, while Lowe signaled the orchestra to begin the introductory measures of Hindemith’s “Trauermusik.”There are no rhetorical flourishes or virtuosic throat-clearings when the soloist enters, as there are in the violin concertos of Beethoven, Brahms and Tchaikovsky. Rather, the soloist comments upon and develops the shifting moods introduced by the orchestra. In this, Carper employed a variety of tone color that was not merely beautiful, but strikingly poignant in its approximation of the human voice. One felt that, if one could only listen closely enough, one could make out the words, so immediate and direct was Carper’s power of communication through his instrument. Throughout Hindemith’s brief fantasia, Carper maintained the dignity and poise he projects physically from his customary seat in the orchestra, even when it is impossible to distinguish the sound of his instrument from the dense texture of the orchestral fabric.

Third Movement (Scherzo): Grace Williams’ “Fantasia on Welsh Nursery Tunes.” Despite the break for intermission, the tuneful suite made up of nine nursery tunes from the composer’s childhood in Wales performed exactly the same role as does the scherzo movement in Beethoven’s Eroica Symphony: it dispelled the solemnity of the preceding slow movement and prepared the listener for the resolution that lay ahead in the final movement. It also re-introduced all of the instruments that had been banished from the stage during the preceding movement: winds, brass and percussion….and how! While Grace Williams was not as audacious in her orchestration as William Walton, she was skillful enough to provide settings for her chosen tunes that were consistently piquant and delightful, while restoring the bloom that had faded from the cheeks of the orchestra during the preceding “movement.”

Fourth Movement (Finale): Benjamin Britten’s evergreen “Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra,” while obviously unlike the finale to the Eroica in many ways, is also surprisingly similar to it. They are both made up of a set of variations on an earlier melody, and they both employ the baroque device of a fugue with which to sum up the fiercely imaginative activity that precedes them. Of course, Beethoven’s Third Symphony does not include a vocal element, but his Ninth certainly does, and it also concludes with a set of variations, of which one is a fugue. Jess Walter’s narration, is wittily tongue-in-cheek and irresistibly funny. It is, at the same time, very carefully crafted to stay in balance with the music and to make its points deftly and economically without detracting from the brilliant work being done by the musicians behind him. As a package, this version of Britten’s masterpiece, which has received numerous revisions of its narration in the past several decades, certainly warrants repetition for Spokane-savvy audiences in the future.

What, then, is the value in organizing these works as James Lowe did? What are we to gain from viewing these works in this way? The effect is to bring into high relief the process that lies behind not only the works on this weekend’s program, but all works of music in what we call for want of a better term the “classical tradition.” They all force us to look beyond the limits of the few minutes they occupy in our lives, into the past, into other works, not only of music, but literature, painting, dance, architecture, to confront the constant elements of the human condition. The love of God and of his fellow man and of the sensory pleasures of life that were felt by Bach have not grown old. They were not considered outdated by any of the composers we heard this week. Rather, they provided them with guidance and inspiration throughout their lives, as they do us at every concert of the Spokane Symphony.