Symphony warms up image of composers

Jan 15, 2007

Author: Travis Rivers

Position: Correspondent

Source: Spokesman Review

Composers often do not need a reason for writing music; writing music is just what they do. But sometimes the music comes from some specific personal experience. That is what conductor Eckart Preu and the Spokane Symphony brought to the audience at the Bing Crosby Theater on a cold Saturday night, and repeated Sunday afternoon.

Preu opened the concert with Richard Strauss' particularly heartfelt "Metamor- phosen," a work composed as World War II brought down the world that Strauss knew and loved.

Preu introduced the work by showing briefly how the composer created a kind of 20-minute unfolding of a single musical idea, transforming it to resemble themes from Strauss' own works, and from Beethoven and Wagner, until it reaches a climax with a quotation from the Funeral March of Beethoven's "Eroica" Symphony.

The work calls for 23 solo string instruments, and Spokane Symphony players delivered the rich sonorities of Strauss' densely textured work with handsome intensity.

Though tracing the successive transformations of the theme can be a complicated musical detective plot, Preu told his audience, "It is perfectly all right to allow yourself to get lost in this music."

The clarity Preu gave the piece made it easy for the detective-minded, but the sonorous richness made it equally easy just to lose oneself.

Bruce Bodden, the orchestra's principal flutist since 1990, was the featured soloist in Mozart's Concerto in G major and Frank Martin's Ballade. Bodden played Mozart with elegance and taste.

The listener was never conscious of how difficult this innocent sounding concerto is just the way Mozart would have liked it.

"The passages must flow like oil," the composer wrote to his father.

Under Bodden's fingers they did just that, and his cadenzas and improvised transitions were short and stylish.

Martin wrote his Ballade for Flute, Piano and Strings at a time when he was searching for his own mature style.

At 48, Martin was already a highly regarded composer swimming, as Preu pointed out, in the influences of composers from Bach to Schoenberg, from Debussy to jazz.

The Ballade is one of the first works in which Martin manages a convincing fusion while calling in every trick in the flutist's technical vocabulary.

Bodden seemed to vault easily over every hurdle Martin set up rapid-fire repeated notes, jumps from full-sounding low notes into the instrument's piercing high register, shifts from aural fireworks to languorous jazzy sections. It was all there making me want to hear more of Martin's music.

Preu closed the concert with Beethoven's Symphony No. 8, the shortest and perhaps least appreciated of Beethoven's nine.

What makes this symphony so personal for the composer was its demonstration of Beethoven's funny side at a time when his life was as full of anguish as he had ever endured.

"This symphony is full of jokes," Preu told the audience.

"Some of them are insider jokes, but some of them aren't."

The conductor illustrated one of the insider jokes by having four violins play a canon Beethoven wrote for a farewell dinner for the inventor Johann Maelzel, the inventor of the metronome, that tick-tock device that is supposed to make music students play in time and give professionals an accurate indication of tempo.

Sure enough, the tune and the ticking turn up in the Eighth Symphony's second movement.

Preu and the orchestra brought high energy, refreshing clarity and witty contrasts.

Preu's choice of works and his conducting showed some of the ways those remote-seeming titans of music let listeners into their personal lives.

It was a warming experience for a very chilly evening.