Concert review: Gonzaga Orchestra, with violinist Gil Shaham, brings time-bending performance

Many of the people attending Tuesday night’s concert by the Gonzaga Orchestra under its director, Kevin Hekmatpanah, had to put up with extra difficulty in locating a place to park. Some had to walk an extra block or two to get to the Myrtle Woldson Performing Arts Center, only to squeeze past a jam-packed row of people to find their seats. It was worth it.

The reason for the crowd was the presence on the program of violinist Gil Shaham, who for more than 30 years has been ranked among the world’s leading classical musicians, and who was only the most recent member of the parade of elite performers Hekmatpanah has brought to Spokane. Trumping his own ace, Hekmatpanah had prevailed upon Shaham to join his orchestra in performing the mightiest, most passionate, but also the most interpretively challenging of all the great concertos in the repertoire, the Concerto in D for violin and orchestra, Op. 77 (1878) by Johannes Brahms.

But the concerto was reserved for the second half of the program. First, the audience was presented with an array of what the English conductor Sir Thomas Beecham referred to as “bon-bons”: engaging and delightful orchestral works of moderate length so full of melody, color and charm as to appeal to absolutely everyone, regardless of age, level of knowledge or attitude toward “classical music.” First, we had an overture by Mozart, this one to his opera “Don Giovanni.” It is an example of the sort of flabbergasting masterpiece which only that composer was capable of dashing off before dinner, perhaps allowing time for a game of billiards, for a premier taking place that evening, Oct. 29, 1787.

Also characteristic of this composer, the Overture to Don Giovanni is no mere assemblage of tunes from the opera, but a wordless drama in itself, in which the moods and themes of the libretto are brought before the audience in a musical structure possessing its own thematic coherence. Though the Gonzaga Orchestra was much larger than any that Mozart might have had at his disposal, all of the inner detail of the music was vividly audible, preserving the effect of the dissonant passing tones that give the first section of the piece its uneasy, foreboding character. Hekmatpanah’s meticulous observance of phrasing, with sharp attacks and prompt releases, allowed the music to maintain a springing gait and kept the very great number of string players from weighing down its progress.

Eighty years separated the composition of “Don Giovanni” from that of Modest Mussorgsky’s tone poem “A Night on Bald Mountain,” and 10 more years passed before Charles Camille Saint-Saens completed his opera “Samson et Dalila,” from which the lengthy orchestral “Danse Bacchanale” was excerpted that closed the first part of Tuesday’s program. As different as these icons are of European Romanticism at full tide from Mozart’s Enlightenment, their goal, which was realized for Tuesday’s audience, is the same: to sweep listeners away to a world far different from their own, surrounding them with powerful emotions.

Some important passages were taken by members of the Gonzaga Orchestra, who are professional musicians and members of the Spokane Symphony. It would be a mistake, however, to think that the excellence that characterized these performances depended mostly on the presence of these professionals. It is true that there was great pleasure to be had from Keith Thomas’ playing of the crucial oboe parts in the “Saint Saens Bacchanale” and the Brahms Concerto, and from Julia Pyke’s negotiation of the demanding flute parts throughout the evening, but they would be the first to insist that the flow of musical energy is reciprocal; that they draw as much inspiration from the dedicated players around them as those players do from them.

It is worth stating that Gil Shaham is not a virtuoso violinist, but a super-virtuoso. Obviously, musicians who aspire to careers as solo performers on their instruments must have something special to offer in the way of technique, which is to say, those skills that are required to master the various challenges of their instrument: producing a pleasing tone, playing rapid passages accurately, and, in general, executing technically difficult maneuvers with a certain degree of ease and panache.

A super-virtuoso possesses these abilities, of course, but adds another. A very few players are able to combine such technical mastery with a union of neurological and muscular coordination so acute and so precise as to allow them to achieve command over aspects of a performance that lie beyond the scope of their really excellent colleagues. Vladimir Horowitz and Joseph Hofmann are examples of pianists who stand in a class of their own. Emanuel Feuermann occupies a similar status in the history of the cello.

For the past 100 years, the symbol of this exalted status has been Jascha Heifetz, whose most amazing gift was not how quickly or accurately he could play a particularly thorny passage, but what he could do – and almost always did – with a single note. His control was so absolute and his “ear” so sensitive that he could impart to each note a life of its own, with its points of creation, flourishing and disappearance all separately fashioned; all meaningful and all moving to the listener.

Such an artist is Gil Shaham. As well as a degree of instrumental mastery and native sensitivity comparable to those of the greatest violinists of the past, he furthermore possesses an ability and a willingness to subordinate his own ego to the wishes and motivations of the composer, whether the motivation be to astound the audience, as is the case with Pablo de Sarasate (Shaham’s “Carmen Fantasy” has to be heard to be believed), or the profound and elusive emotional complexity of Johannes Brahms. Regardless of whether Gonzaga audience members chose to consider the performance of the Brahms Violin Concerto as a totality, as a series of individual movements, as a series of linked passages or as an enormous tapestry of phrases, it was powerfully conceived, deeply felt and movingly conveyed.

One of the most striking attributes of the performance was the intense union that was achieved between soloist and orchestra. At one point in the last movement, in which Brahms bounces phrases between the soloist and the first violins, Shaham and Concertmaster Carrie Samsen locked eyes. From that point, the phrasing and expression of the soloist and a group of two dozen violinists mirrored one another with supernatural accuracy. To witness such unity between past and present, such that the dividing line between them disappears, is a gift that every music lover seeks, but very rarely finds.