Symphony review: Final Masterworks concerts of season celebrates nation, immigrants with ‘To America’
The past weekend saw the final concerts in the 80th concert season of the Spokane Symphony – a remarkable and gratifying achievement. In designing the program, Music Director James Lowe had the excellent idea of taking the occasion to celebrate not only Spokane’s success in supporting its flagship arts organization, but also the 250th anniversary of our country’s founding. To do this in a way appropriate for a symphony orchestra, he decided to perform works by immigrants who, oppressed and harried by circumstances in their native countries, responded to America’s promise of individual freedom and prosperity, assigning to the program the plain-spoken title of “To America.”
These concerts also provided a public platform from which Lowe, in speaking for everyone in the auditorium, expressed appreciation for two musicians whose long tenure with the orchestra came to a close at Sunday’s concert. After 35 years as principal saxophone, Greg Yasinitsky is retiring. Audiences at the symphony heard him last in a Masterworks concert providing a haunting veil of color over sections of Sergei Rachmaninoff’s “Symphonic Dances.”
A scarcely credible 55 years have passed since Larry Jess joined the Spokane Symphony. If, as he says, the current orchestra is the finest he has ever known it to be, that is to no small degree thanks to Jess, himself, who exemplifies the most admirable qualities of a professional musician; piecing together gigs playing at weddings and church services, teaching in his own studio and at public institutions, doing, in short, whatever he can to use his talent and love of music to provide for his family and benefit the community at large.
Sydney Guillaume’s (1982-) family emigrated to the U.S. from Haiti when he was 11 years old. In the ensuing time, he has managed to become a prolific composer of beautifully crafted and emotionally effective music, much of which makes use of his skill as a choral director. “Between Homelands” is the third of his works we have heard in these concerts, and the second to have been composed on commission from the Spokane Symphony. In this case, the commission was underwritten by the family of Sara Duggin, a devoted supporter of the orchestra.
As we heard in his earlier works, “A Taste of Freedom” and “Lavil Okap,” Guillaume possesses a fine ear for orchestral sonorities, which he delights in using to combine timbres in ways which , while unusual, yield engaging and immediate pleasure. They certainly engaged the emotions of Lowe, who several times came close to channeling Leonard Bernstein by dancing on the podium without ever dropping a cue. Indeed, it is hard not to yield oneself to Guillaume’s compelling use of Haitian rhythms and harmonies that manage to be at once familiar and new.
Different as he may have been from the 11-year-old Guillaume, the young Rachmaninoff also found himself cast violently out of his homeland and forced to make his way in the world as an itinerant performing musician, rather than the patrician composer he expected to become. He enjoyed the very distinct advantage of being one of the greatest pianists of his time, who was further capable of composing music for his own use that won the admiration of huge audiences around the globe, making each of his appearances and recordings an historic event.
Like Guillaume, Rachmaninoff was deeply nostalgic for the culture of his youth, and so, after enjoying great success as a U.S. resident in the 1920s, he relocated to Switzerland, where, in 1934, he composed the last of his five works for piano and orchestra: “Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini,” into which he poured his most advanced writing for the piano and his liveliest, most inventive and most consistently excellent writing for orchestra.
Evren Ozel is as comfortable in this work as was Rachmaninoff himself. In fact, he was born to play the music of Rachmaninoff, to which he brings the very same qualities we hear in the composer-performer’s recordings: technique that is unlimited in its command of velocity, variety and accuracy, tone quality of enveloping warmth at every volume level and such a degree of spontaneity in interpretation that one could easily believe that the music was being created at that moment.
Especially evident in his performance of the Paganini rhapsody was one quality that, while very prominent in Rachmaninoff’s own recording of the piece, is almost wholly absent from succeeding recordings: a pervasive wittiness and playful sense of humor. No matter how great the technical demands, nothing escaped Ozel’s notice: every expressive gesture made its mark, no opportunity was missed for pointing out a bit of humor, a touch of sentiment, a hint of self-satire. Every measure was expressive, and every measure allowed us to drink from Ozel’s inexhaustible well of gorgeous, warm tone – another hallmark of Rachmaninoff’s playing.
After sharing the limelight with Ozel, the Spokane Symphony had it all to themselves in the final work of the program: Bela Bartok’s “Concerto for Orchestra” (1943). From the opening fanfare of “Between Homelands” through the nattering woodwinds and pulsating strings of the Paganini rhapsody, brilliant orchestration was a supportive and vitalizing element in the program. With the “Concerto for Orchestra,” it became the primary focus, the actual subject of the work.
Consider what Bartok meant by calling his work a “concerto,” while all previous concertos, including several great ones of his own, consisted of a solo instrument or group of instruments and a separate and distinct larger group of instruments. Here, there is one group of instruments: an orchestra. Yes, there are many passages in which individual instruments or groups of instruments are highlighted, but that is true of almost all orchestral works. In the concertos of Mozart, Beethoven and Brahms, the soloist is the hero and the orchestra and opposing force to be won over. In Bartok’s concerto, the opposing force is silence, which must be overcome by the hero, music, here represented by the most complete means yet devised of producing music: the symphony orchestra.
Beginning with a slow-moving sequence of tones in the low strings, followed by a dissonant, barely audible tremolo in the strings, Bartok goes on adding instruments, pairs of instruments, choirs of instruments, and increasing layers of rhythmic and melodic complexity as the work proceeds, ultimately concluding in a triumphant blaze of sound. owe could not have chosen any other work that better embodies the power, variety, violence and beauty inherent in the modern orchestra than the Bartok concerto.
The Spokane Symphony seemed to revel in the challenge of performing a work in which almost every instrumentalist needs to perform at the level of a soloist. Blending pungency and sweetness, Jess’ trumpet appeared throughout the work whenever it seemed an extra dose of energy was called for, as though he was bestowing a final blessing on the ensemble to which he had given so much. Lynn Feller-Marshall’s bassoon contributed both po-faced comedy and tender nostalgia, as only that instrument can. Principal clarinet Chip Phillips found exactly the right tone color for each of the crucial entries Bartok assigned to that instrument. Principal flute Julia Pyke, along with her colleagues, Colleen McElroy and Jennifer Slaughter received a hail of “bravos” for having found so much vibrant color and lyricism in their slender instruments.
The orchestra, then, was the hero, but, for guiding it from the quiet emergence of music on the molecular level to its cosmic conclusion, not to mention his role in giving us all the opportunity to experience that journey, special credit for that heroism must go to Lowe. His love of music and his ability to lift it from the page so that it can fill an auditorium and the lives of all the people in it is just what Bartok was hoping for when he composed his masterpiece on American soil. It surely makes one grateful that they both decided to go “To America.”