Concert Review: Spokane Symphony’s Masterworks 2, led by Darko Butorac in Lowe’s absence, offers dynamic exploration of beauty and tragedy
The Spokane Symphony would have likely canceled its second Masterworks concert due to conductor James Lowe falling ill had his colleague Darko Butorac not been available to stand in for him. Butorac is conductor of the Asheville Symphony Orchestra in Ashville, North Carolina, whose current schedule had been cleared due to the devastating impact of Helene.
Thus, when a call came in the evening of Sept. 30, asking Butorac whether he might be able to fulfill Lowe’s request that he serve as guest conductor, he was able to book a flight in time to lead the orchestra’s first rehearsal Tuesday night. It was fortunate he could, because the concert proved a memorable one for both the audience and musicians. It introduced almost everyone to two brilliant pieces of contemporary music and then offered a profound and moving reinterpretation by Butorac of music that we thought was already well-known and well understood.
The contemporary works were “Glisk,” by the Scottish composer and musician Aileen Sweeney (1994-), and the Flute Concerto (1993) by the late American composer, Christopher Rouse (1949-2019). The established repertory work was the Symphony No. 3, the “Scottish Symphony” (1829-42) of Felix Mendelssohn (1809-1847).
“Glisk” is a Gaelic word, used to describe the effect of sunlight breaking through a blanket of cloud. In her brief tone poem of that name, Aileen Sweeney is astonishingly successful in reproducing the effect that phenomenon has on our senses. She accomplishes that through a most remarkable sensitivity to orchestral sound. It was a thrilling experience watching a group of well-known instruments produce a type of sound we had never heard before that came at us in shimmering waves. Instruments were combined in unique ways, as when rapidly running figures in the flutes and upper strings were combined with sonorous rumblings in the brass and lower strings, and accompanied by steady hammering on a muted triangle. The piece lasted less than five minutes; one may find oneself wishing it would never end.
In the two years since Julia Pyke served as the Spokane Symphony’s principal flute, we have awaited an opportunity to know this remarkable musician better; this was our chance.
To take time detailing a list of her musical attributes (exquisite and varied tone, herculean breath-control, eye-popping virtuosity in rapid and complex passages, etc.) would simply shift attention from her signal virtue, which is a heart eager to move an audience to think and feel deeply. All the technique she has – and there is plenty – is employed in the accomplishment of that single goal.
Pyke made an impression walking onstage in a beautiful sparkling white dress in contrast with the dark formal wear of the orchestra. Her stage presence, however, was highlighted by the beauty of her playing as she began Christopher Rouse’s Flute Concerto. Butorac describes the work as a masterpiece, and ranks it as one of the most important pieces of music of the past thirty years. He is absolutely right. In its melodic poignancy, perfection of orchestration, formal coherence and – most important – communicative power, it is a masterpiece, regardless of style, period or form. It takes the form of five movements, rather than three of the conventional concerto. In this way, the composer creates an archlike structure, leading us up to and then away from the work’s emotional center, a gripping elegy dedicated to the memory of a toddler whose shocking murder in London at the hands of two 10-year-olds in 1992 gripped the British public and affected the composer deeply.
Julia Pyke’s realization of Rouse’s outpouring of melody in the opening and closing movements was indescribably beautiful, not least because it was accompanied with such sensitivity by Butorac and the strings of the Spokane Symphony. Throughout, the soloist revealed ever more potentialities of her instrument, tracing Rouse’s exploration of his tragic subject.
If anyone wonders why people would devote their life’s energies to the study of music and the mastery of an instrument, they would have found their answer in Julia Pyke and Darko Butorac’s performance of this piece.
The popularity of such works by Mendelssohn as his Overture, “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” composed in 1826 and widely considered “the greatest marvel of early maturity that the world has ever seen in music,” has influenced interpreters to regard all of his succeeding works in the light of that early masterpiece, and to perform them as the tuneful, light-hearted productions of an emotionally serene and technically impeccable master. No one, however, who witnessed Darko Butorac’s potent, emotionally exhausting performance of the “Scottish Symphony,” will be able to think of the work as a tuneful travelogue.
Like all truly great interpretations, this one was not intended to display the conductor’s idiosyncracies. It took its force from Butorac’s minute observation of the composer’s written instructions, in the light of the historical and biographical circumstances surrounding the work’s composition. In his preconcert lecture, the conductor explained that the symphony was conceived while Mendelssohn was on a grand tour of the continent, which he viewed as the demarcation between youth to adulthood, a transition from his belief that everything was possible for him to an awareness of the inevitability in life of disappointment, loss and death.
By asking the orchestra to give full weight to the many sudden, strong accents in the score, by not languishing over lyrical passages, but maintaining a steady pulse, and insisting that every strand of Mendelssohn’s complex counterpoint be made audible, Butorac revealed a far richer, more profound view of this inexhaustible score than we had thought possible.
Of course, the conductor did not do this by himself, but by calling on a group of dedicated musicians who were both willing and able to follow his every instruction with passion and precision. Larry Jess and Chris Cook performed the demanding trumpet parts, through which Mendelssohn imparts rhythmic clarity to the score with faultless accuracy. Colleen McElroy, who assumed the first chair of the flute section in Julia Pyke’s absence, performed that instrument’s key role in the third movement with penetrating intensity, in keeping with the conductor’s serious, rather than langorous take on that portion of the score.
A mosaic of these and innumerable other individual contributions allowed Butorac to place the Mendelssohn A minor Symphony squarely in the great line of Austro-Germanic symphonic works of tragic scope. A wave of shouting, foot-stomping applause signaled the audience’s acknowledgment of what he and the orchestra had achieved.
In return, and as a final, exultant celebration of the program’s Scottish theme, the orchestra was joined in full regalia by Daniel Scott, bagpipes, in an encore entitle “Cathcart,” by Phil Cunningham. It brought more cheers and shouts of gratitude, and sent the audience back into the chilly Spokane evening with a renewed awareness of music’s power to reveal the powerful forces that shape our everyday lives.