Travis Rivers: Tribute to women makes a grand finale

May 12, 2007

Author: Travis Rivers

Position: Correspondent

Source: Spokesman Review

The Spokane Symphony celebrated the end of its 2006-07 season Friday with a dazzling display of works about powerful women. Despite the fact that this was also the beginning of the Mother's Day weekend, most of the women represented were evil, wicked or downright murderous. But the music was vivid, and the playing under conductor Eckart Preu was dazzling.

Preu opened the evening with Anatol Liadov's symphonic picture of "Baba Yaga," a staple character of Russian tales who is sometimes a witch and other times a wise old crone. Liadov's representation was certainly of Yaga's witchy side, flying through the air in the mortar she sometimes uses to grind up the bones of those who cross her. It gave a hint of what the ballet "Firebird" might have been had Liadov not been too lazy to undertake it, allowing it to be taken up by that young upstart Igor Stravinsky.

Alban Berg's opera "Lulu" is a masterly picture in drama and music of a seductress who sinks lower and lower in decadence until she is murdered by her final lover, Jack the Ripper. Preu chose the all-too-brief set of Variations from Berg's "Lulu Suite," which serves as an interlude in Act III. The whole thing lasts only four minutes, a work of frightening humor in which a childish melody becomes twisted into lurid angularity before its ending in the wheezing banality of an organ grinder tune. It was a tantalizing sample, but only a morsel from a potential great meal.

The work that will stay in my mind of all those on Friday's concert was the symphonic poem Florent Schmitt drew from his ballet "Le Tragedie de Salome." Schmitt's music is almost unknown in America but seems a brilliantly inventive evocation of Salome's strangely mad character seen through the ears of a Frenchman whose career straddled the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The ballet is unlike Strauss' opera or Oscar Wilde's play. It was written for the dancer Loie Fuller, who experimented wildly with innovations in stage lighting. One could hear those lighting effects in Schmitt's evocative orchestration Salome's dance can be seen only in flashes of lightning, the mountains in the background explode, the Dead Sea turns blood red. There were many fine solo passages from the Spokane woodwind and percussion sections and from violist Nicholas Carper. Kudos, too, to the offstage women's voices, whose wordless vocalizing so frighten King Herod and his incestuous queen.

After the most murderous of Friday's powerful women, Smetana's "Sarka," Preu ended the concert with a good girl, Prokofiev's "Cinderella." The suite of eight dances that Preu chose summarizes the high points of the story and demonstrates just how beautifully Prokofiev managed to create a Tchaikovskian ballet in 20th-century language.

After the suite's quiet ending, a rambunctious encore followed: Saint-Saens' orgiastic "Bacchanale" from "Samson and Delilah." It was a rattlingly good end to a fine concert and a splendid season.