Symphony Review: Masterworks 1, with Grammy-award winning pianist Awadagin Pratt, is strong beginning to 2024-25 season
The first concerts by the Spokane Symphony in the 2024-25 Masterworks Series took place this weekend at the Martin Woldson Theater at the Fox. James Lowe, the orchestra’s music director was their conductor in a program that was linked in novel and stimulating ways to the recitals held the previous week at Barrister Winery as part of the Northwest Bachfest. The two series had one important participant in common: pianist Awadagin Pratt, who not only contributed his superb musicianship, but his probing and adventurous approach to programming, and by so doing helped to open the minds of Spokane audiences to new possibilities in the appreciation of music.
These possibilities were alluded to in the title of the Masterwork 1 concerts: “The Turning World,” a quotation from one of a group of poems entitled “Four Quartets” by the American poet T.S. Eliot and which has had a powerful influence on Pratt. Eliot’s ambition in “Four Quartets” is no less than to reveal links between all the world’s great religions and to define mankind’s relationship to time and eternity. While an understanding of these lofty matters was certainly not necessary to get great pleasure from these concerts, it was the hope of the presenters that the audience feel motivated to look beyond the audible beauties of the music, into the ideas that inspired those who created it.
It must be admitted, however, that the first number on the program, the Overture to Mikhail Glinka’s opera “Ruslan and Ludmilla” (1842) was not there to inspire profound thought, but simply to provide great pleasure, to celebrate the opening of a new season, and to show off the condition of the Spokane Symphony. It served the same function at the Labor Day concert at Comstock Park, but the superb acoustics of the Fox (and the absence of cavorting children) allowed us to hear just how terrific that condition is.
Glinka’s lively, tuneful overture is a well-established orchestral showpiece. It served for many years as a calling card for two of the world’s great orchestras, and the Spokane Symphony played with a unanimity of ensemble, clarity of articulation in the strings, agility in the winds and warmth in the brass that were all fully comparable to any in memory or on record. In particular, the richness and intensity of tone in the strings here and throughout the rest of the program were arresting – especially considering that the season is just beginning.
James Lowe accompanied Pratt onstage, but then left to join the audience, leaving Pratt to be both soloist and conductor in Bach’s Keyboard Concerto No 4 in A major. As we saw one week ago, when Pratt performed the same piece as a piano solo at Barrister Winery, the small string orchestra that accompanied Pratt on this occasion was left in good hands. Not only is Pratt an established conductor, serving currently at the head of orchestras in Miami and Pittsburgh, but he possesses a radiant energy at the keyboard that is transmitted both to collaborating musicians and their audience.
As it did at the Bach Festival performance, the music seemed to spring from Pratt as though it were improvised, and that same vigor and spontaneity communicated itself through the small string orchestra surrounding him. Very remarkably, his spontaneity comes at no expense of accuracy or attention to detail. On the contrary, he took the utmost care that every phrase be expressive and meaningful, and that Bach’s artful polyphony be voiced distinctly.
Pratt was particularly drawn to Eliot’s evocation of a point of stasis outside of time which is accessible to us through contemplation, meditation and spiritual purification. This “stillpoint” led him to organize a series of commissions for outstanding composers whose work might be helpful in an effort to transcend the dispiriting aspects of earthly life and to attain a higher state of spiritual harmony. One commission went to Jessie Montgomery (1981-), already regarded highly as a composer, teacher, violinist and social activist. The result was a work for piano and strings entitled “Rounds” (2022), which she composed for Pratt, which he performed in a recording that won this year’s Grammy for Best Classical Composition and that he played with Lowe to close the first half of the program.
Like Bach’s Concerto, “Rounds” presents a series of moments that teem with detail, but when viewed as a whole, reveal a pattern of balanced repetition of such mathematical exactitude as to recede into infinity the more it is examined. This use of constant change to lead us to a vision of unchanging constancy is exactly what Eliot has in mind in “Four Quartets,” and what Pratt had in mind in starting his “Stillpoint” musical project.
It cannot be denied that what we heard on Saturday night was an immediately and persistently engaging work for piano and strings that was rhythmically vital, melodically attractive and emotionally gratifying. Midway through its 15 minute course, Montgomery places a lengthy solo cadenza which is partly composed, but partly left open to the soloist’s improvisation. The result was both tightly integrated into the piece’s recurring themes and motifs, yet constantly surprising in its shifts of mood and unexpected turns of harmony. ”Who,” one is left asking oneself, “can be compared to Awadagin Pratt?”
Following intermission, Lowe essayed another approach to creating a “stillpoint” for the audience by preceding a performance of Tchaikovsky’s celebrated Symphony No. 5 in E minor Op. 64 (1888) with one of Max Richter’s 2003 composition, “On the Nature of Daylight,” which, we are told, holds the record as the internet’s most often streamed classical composition. That may well be true, but it is also true that the levels of insight, inspiration and authenticity represented in the Richter piece fall very far below everything else on the program. Sitting through its vacuous approximations of the style of much greater artists, such as Arvo Part and Olivier Messiaen, whose works were played at last week’s Bachfest, led not to spiritual enlightenment, but to deep discomfort and scarcely tolerable impatience in waiting for Tchaikovsky’s symphony to begin.
Fortunately, we did not have long to wait, and when it did begin, it soon became obvious that it would be well worth it. The rendition of Tchaikovsky’s E minor Symphony not only displayed an orchestra with vast resources of color and virtuosity, but a conductor able and determined to extract every ounce of those resources in tracing the composer’s narration of an exhausting struggle against discouragement and depression, concluding, ultimately, in triumph. In his preconcert lecture (a fabulous free resource of which more people should take advantage), Lowe expressed some uncertainty about the effectiveness of the work’s triumphant final pages. Surely, that uncertainty cannot have survived the storm of applause that washed over the stage, calling him back time and again, and rising in pitch as he recognized the players and sections of the orchestra who were featured in the performance.
If the Tchaikovsky Fifth was to play a part in illustrating Eliot’s argument in “Four Quartets,” it must be as a depiction of the constant struggle of being subject to the inevitable changes brought by time. Lowe’s approach to the work is not, therefore, to highlight its formal balance or to glamorize its melodies, but to render with real intensity every shift from hope to despair, longing to disappointment, every shadow cast by melancholy on a depiction of rustic revelry or of the beauties of nature. He accomplished this, first of all, through very skillful flexibility of tempo, allowing a phrase to breath or a melodic section to slow slightly, in order to achieve a special intensity of expression. He did this, moreover, without ever allowing the beat to falter or vitality to drain from a phrase. His second resource in achieving a performance so far beyond the ordinary was to obtain a very rich, saturated tone from the orchestra. Violins dug deeply into their strings, while the tonal balance of the orchestra shifted slightly to the lower strings. Horns and trombones were given special prominence. All this produced – as it should – a very different effect from the performances of Berlioz and Ravel Lowe has offered, and testifies to the still-expanding resources of our orchestra.