‘Symphony on the Edge’ rings in new era of sound

The Spokane Symphony heard at the Knitting Factory on Friday seemed miles away from the group that performs regularly just across Monroe Street at The Fox. “Symphony on the Edge” seemed just the right name for the concert.

The edginess of the music Friday cut through symphonic sensibilities. But the tangle of dissonance and rhythmic complexities in the music – programmed and expertly conducted by Morihiko Nakahara – went way beyond the rock and rap most often heard at the Knitting Factory.

It was a marvel to hear how well these players could deal with such complex music in the three rehearsals allotted for these concerts. But it was a little disappointing to hear how the new sounds of the youngest composers on the program sounded strangely like the new sounds of 50 years ago.

Nakahara opened Friday’s concert with “Confluences” by Huang Ruo, the fourth of the composer’s quartet of chamber concertos. And he closed the first half of the program with Derek Bermel’s “Three Rivers.” Both these works were written just into the new millennium. Both employed aspects of exotic sounds, from China and Africa, respectively. Both involved the layering and merging of differing ideas. Both employed sections that were improvised or sounded improvisatory.

There was impressive percussion work in both. I was particularly impressed by the percussion dialog between Paul Raymond and Rick Westrick in the Bermel piece. But, despite their punchiness, both Ruo’s and Bermel’s music wore out their welcome well before these short pieces were over.

The centerpiece, and most interesting work on the program’s first half, was the oldest piece, Ingram Marshall’s “Fog Tropes” – a 1979 overlay of live brass sextet playing against the background pre-recorded sounds of fog horns, surf, wind, vocalizing and bamboo flute. The blend of recorded sounds and live brass was hypnotic, yet it built the kind of tension one experiences standing by the shore in dense fog. Marshall shaped the sounds in an ever-rising crescendo before allowing them to sink magically back into quiet mystery.

The works on the second half were described by Nakahara in an interview earlier this week as “more conservative.” Maybe so, but the craft of invention and imagination took hold firmly and satisfyingly in all three works played after intermission.

Steve Reich has a reputation as a “minimalist,” a composer who builds works out of tiny developing melodic cells. But his Triple Quartet goes far beyond minimalism in its overlapping and echoing melodies that drift in and out of phase with each other. The second of its three movements was surprisingly expressive for a composer alleged to be attracted to mechanistic procedures. Nakahara chose to perform only the second and third movements of the Triple Quartet, but I would not have minded hearing them all.

Even more moving was Aaron Jay Kernis’ “Musica Celestis,” a kind of outer-space exploration of eerie hymnlike harmonies building to first one climax and then another before receding to deep space. Nakahara suggested a parallel with Samuel Barber’s Adagio for Strings. Kernis’ music shares a mystical quality with Barber’s together with a superb command of instrumentation. But Kernis’ projects an unmistakable individuality.

Spokane Symphony audiences recently heard the premiere of Michael Daughtery’s “Letters from Lincoln.” Nakahara elected to close Friday’s program with “Strut,” an early Daugherty work that pays a tribute to Paul Robeson, the iconic African-American singer, actor and social-political activist. The performance had a jazzy swagger, with little touches of elegiac sadness associated with Robeson’s career. Even at 35, Daugherty could command exciting and moving effects.

Friday’s concert provided a vista of classical music trends of the past 30 years and a showcase of the skills of the symphony players stepping close to the edge of those trends.