The Spokesman Review, WA
Symphony season opens with Russians
Travis Rivers
Correspondent
September 16, 2006
Friday night’s concert at the recently renamed INB Performing Arts
Center (it used to be the Spokane Opera House) made a grand opening of
the Spokane Symphony’s 2006-07 season. Conductor Eckart Preu led a
largely Russian program that included a brilliant piano concerto, one
of the most popular of all symphonies, and a lilting suite of highly
romantic ballet music.
Preu opened with the work of a composer he feels is unjustly neglected
nowadays, Alexander Glazunov, with a suite of dances from Glazunov’s
ballet "Raymonda." The composer has taken a bad rap for being born
too late for his style. His music is firmly in the grand 19th-century
manner, and Preu and the orchestra made the most of it.
The work afforded Friday’s audience a chance to hear acting
concertmaster Daisuke Yamamoto play one of those solos that is every
concertmaster’s dream (or possibly nightmare), the Grand Adagio, a
little violin concerto movement in itself. Yamamoto played
fastidiously, demonstrating a sweet tone and excellent intonation.
Terrence Wilson played the solo part of Khachaturian’s Piano Concerto
with a nearly ideal combination of brilliance and delicacy. This
sprawling concerto has a bit of everything – almost too much of
everything. Khachaturian brought the exoticism of his native Armenia
to the framework of the Rachmaninoff-style virtuoso concerto, then
threw in a musical touch of the razzle-dazzle "novelty" pianists of
the 1920s and ’30s and a bit of Gershwinesque jazziness. Wilson made
the most of every opportunity to roar or sing.
Khachaturian loved exotic instrumental effects with a special fondness
for the bass clarinetist, and Shannon Scott played those solos
beautifully. In an even more exotic choice, the composer employed the
flexatone to double a melody line in the slow movement. The instrument
sounds somewhat like a musical saw with the player gargling. Paul
Raymond handled the instrument’s eerie character excellently.
The evening’s concluding work and centerpiece was Tchaikovsky’s famous
Symphony No. 6 ("Pathetique"). The notoriously self-critical
Tchaikovsky wrote that it was undoubtedly his best work. Like the
Khachaturian Concerto, it is long. Unlike Khachaturian, though,
Tchaikovsky learned a valuable lesson from his own favorite composer,
Mozart. "No matter how long a work might be," Mozart wrote, "never
lose the thread."
Tchaikovsky never allowed meaningless digressions or needless
repetitions in his work. Preu and the orchestra gave a riveting
performance from the mysterious unfolding of the bassoon solo against
the cushion of low strings sounds of the opening, through "waltz in
five beats" that substitutes in places of a slow movement, the scherzo
that begins like elves marching and grows in violence to a march of
giant soldiers, and ending with the quiet "collapse" of the finale.
It was that quiet ending that must have baffled the first-night
audience in 1893.That ending still seems strange here more than a
century later. But it was a shining performance to start the symphony
season.