Musicians simply soar on ‘Flights’

The Spokane Symphony and conductor Morihiko Nakahara took their audience on “Flights of Fantasy” Friday at the INB Performing Arts Center, introducing two recent works and revisiting an astounding masterpiece.

The concert opened with “The Night of the Flying Horses,” music drawn from Osvaldo Golijov’s score to Sally Potter’s 2000 film, “The Man Who Cried.” This short work begins with a Yiddish lullaby that opens and closes this affecting film and transforms itself into a lamenting, then troubling, restless gypsy song. While “The Night of the Flying Horses” seems too short to make much of a musical impression, the emotional juxtaposition of the two styles served as a reminder, to me at least, what a deeply moving film this is and how compelling the score is when heard along with the movie.

The saxophone has never received enough attention from classical composers. The sound of the instrument, for all its variety, is forever associated with jazz and other popular styles. And the instrument just attracts too many players that make it bray or sound yakkity.

Classical composers – all kinds of composers – should hear Tim Ries. He is a master, and a versatile master at that. Here is a player who has the beauty of sound and stunning technique treasured by classical musicians, the improvisatory imagination of a jazz master, and the firm rhythmic grip of a rocker.

Ries brought all those qualities to Takashi Yoshimatsu’s ear-pleasing “Cyber-bird Concerto.” He was joined by the fine playing of pianist Brent Edstrom and percussionist Rick Westrick. Each movement of the concerto portrayed a different aspect of a bird – a bird seen in various colors, a bird in grief, and a bird in the wind. The elegiac slow movement showed a quiet interplay among the three solo instruments against an orchestral cushion of sound. Ries responded to the audience’s standing ovation with his jazz arrangement for sax and piano of the Rolling Stones song “Ruby Tuesday,” which showed the melodic and harmonic strength of a song too often dismissed as a mere popular hit. There was nothing mere with either the song or Ries and Edstrom’s performance of it.

You’d think that 21st-century composers had learned all the tricks of orchestration. Surprise. For the most brilliant display of orchestration and the most brilliant playing, Nakahara turned back the clock to 1830 and Hector Berlioz’s “Symphony Fantastique” in a performance that had a startling impact.

But this was no parade of sound effects. Nakahara and the orchestra sustained the narrative tension of these “episodes in an artist’s life” as the scenes shifted from the daydreams of passions and waltzes to the drug-fueled nightmares of abandoned love, murder and a demonic witches’ sabbath.

I was especially taken by the variety of sounds from the beautiful exchange between Keith Thomas’ oboe and Barbara Cantlon’s English horn in the third movement to the grating cackle of woodwinds and the rattling of bones as the string players hit the wood of the bows on the strings in the finale. There was something every modern composer can learn on every page of Berlioz’s score, and Nakahara was there to bring the listener’s ear right to it.