Symphony review: Violin soloist Dicterow brings refinement, mastery to Bernstein’s ‘Serenade’ at Masterworks 8

For a little more than a minute on Saturday night, the only sound that could be heard in the Martin Woldson Theater at the Fox was the pure, silvery tone of a single violin. The hundreds of people in the audience must have been breathing, but if they were, they were very quiet about it, lest they intrude on the hypnotic beauty emanating from the stage. The violinist was Glenn Dicterow, and the music was the beginning of Leonard Bernstein’s “Serenade after Plato’s ‘Symposium’ ” (1954), the second piece in the eighth concert in this season’s Masterworks series by the Spokane Symphony.

In selecting a soloist in Bernstein’s “Serenade,” Music Director and Principal Conductor James Lowe could hardly have found anyone to match one with the bona fides to match those of Dicterow, whose career has seen him serve as concertmaster of the Los Angeles Philharmonic and, for 34 years, the New York Philharmonic. In fact, on one of the orchestra’s tours, he repeatedly performed the solo part of Bernstein’s “Serenade” under the composer’s direction.

Bernstein’s work is brilliant in translating the Platonic method into musical form. The soloist’s arresting opening contains the germ of the five sections that follow. Unlike a concerto, in which soloist and orchestra frequently confront and oppose one another until the brilliance of the soloist prevails, the solo violin and orchestra in Bernstein’s work collaborate from the start in refining and exploring the meanings pregnant in that opening solo utterance. Thus, it would be wrong for the soloist to employ the egocentric devices that are the solo virtuoso’s stock in trade.

That was exactly the experience we enjoyed on Saturday night – of hearing violin playing of exquisite refinement, of consistently beautiful tone, impeccable phrasing and accuracy of pitch and articulation – all drawing our attention to the subtle interplay of the ensemble and the mastery of the composer’s creation. Lowe, Dicterow’s partner in this dialogue, approached the piece in the same spirit, so that he could help his orchestra, made up in this case entirely of strings, harp and percussion, maintain a perfect balance with the soloist.

Spokane audiences have unknowingly benefited indirectly from this outstanding musicianship for many years, as expressed in the work of their much-loved concertmaster, Mateusz Wolski, who in the early years of his career was taught and mentored in New York by none other than Glenn Dicterow. To express the gratitude and admiration that both men feel for one another, they joined in a spectacular encore following the conclusion of Bernstein’s “Serenade”: the “Passacaglia on a Theme of Handel” by John Halvorsen, arranged by Jascha Heifetz. This is collaboration of a very different kind, in which both players show off their skill at executing the most thrilling leaps, slides, trills, scales and staccatos in a series of variation designed to produce astonishment and awe in the audience – which they did.

While Bernstein’s “Serenade” anchored the first half of the program, the second was anchored by another work that, while strikingly different, forced us as Plato does, to question our customary reliance on the surface of reality as a guide to understanding its true nature. Symphony No. 5 in D minor Op. 47 by Dmitri Shostakovich was composed in 1937, during one of the darkest periods of the composer’s life, and in the history of the Russian people. During a period in which Stalin routinely killed artists, or, worse, had them deported to the Gulag for what they were reported as having said or thought, the communist leader was angered by one of Shostakovich’s works, which precipitated a threatening denunciation in Pravda, Russia. To save his own skin without sacrificing his moral integrity, the composer withdrew his then recently completed Fourth Symphony, and produced the Fifth, which he coyly subtitled, “A Soviet Artist’s Response to Just Criticism.”

Honoring both the composer and his audience, Lowe presented more than an accurate traversal of the music’s surface, a true interpretation, with every tempo choice and shift in sonority based on a clear vision of the composer’s moral purpose. Instead of the airy transparency we heard in his interpretations of Ravel and Berlioz, Lowe transformed the orchestral sonority with saturated colors, fierce attacks and steady tempi, all to aid us in understanding Shostakovich’s method in expressing moral outrage while maintaining “plausible deniability.”

Such a thorough makeover of the acoustic character of the orchestra for the purpose of artistic accuracy is a considerable achievement by the conductor and his players, many of whom contributed notably to the success of the evening. Daniel Cotter, assuming the role of principal clarinet in Chip Phillips’ absence, exploited every tonal and dynamic resource of his instrument. Keith Thomas, principal oboe, underlined the exaggerated gaiety of the second movement, as well as the deep sadness of the third. Shostakovich’s crucial parts for flute and piccolo were delivered either with chaste beauty or penetrating shrillness, as the music dictated, by Julia Pyke, principal flute and Colleen McElroy, piccolo. Greg Yasinitsky, saxophone, continues to amaze by drawing a greater variety of colors from his instrument than anyone would believe possible.

The program opened with “Slava: A Political Overture,” composed by Leonard Bernstein in 1978 to celebrate the installation of the great Russian cellist and conductor Mstislav Rostropovich as director of the National Symphony Orchestra in Washington, D.C. The overture is a sarcastic send-up of the empty promises and conventional evasions that Bernstein objected to in American political life.

The second half of the program began with the “Overture to ‘The Boatswain’s Mate’ ” (1914), a work by English composer Dame Ethel Smyth (1858-1944). The overture itself is little more than a pastiche of conventional musical gestures neatly arranged around a suffragette anthem composed by Smyth. Both of these slight works were performed with a degree of energy, discipline and engagement appropriate to the greatest works of Beethoven or Brahms, and, so, provided great delight to the audience.