Symphony review: Mateusz Wolski’s devotion to music, performance ever present in Masterworks 7
It is a mark of the unique relationship between the people of Spokane and Mateusz Wolski, the concertmaster of their orchestra that, in providing a title to the seventh concert in this season’s Masterworks Series, Music Director James Lowe felt no need to provide a grandiose synthesis of all the pieces on the program, but simply to announce “Mateusz Plays Bruch.” If you take pleasure in seeing someone play who loves music, and is devoted to his instrument, his orchestra and his audience, that is all you need to know.
The “Bruch” mentioned in the title is Max Bruch (1838-1920), whose Violin Concerto No. 1 in G minor Op. 26 was so marvelously well played for us by Wolski, is among the best and most beloved of all works for violin and orchestra. It was certainly one of the highlights of Saturday’s concert, but not the only one. The program began, as is becoming customary at Masterworks concerts, with a contemporary work for orchestra: Mighty River, composed by the celebrated British Composer Errolyn Wallen, who was born in Belize in 1958, and who wrote the work in 2007 to commemorate the signing into law of the End of the Slave Trade Act in 1807 – almost 60 years before Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation
As is true of so many of the contemporary works performed at these concerts, “Mighty River” shows its composer to have mastered the art of writing for a large orchestra. She creates striking new sonorities and artfully fuses them together in a work that powerfully depicts the determination and resourcefulness of a people torn from their homeland, which manages not only to endure but transcend hostility and oppression. This transcendence is announced at the outset of the work by the solo horn, played on this occasion by principal horn Clinton Webb, who broke the silence by giving a rendition of “Amazing Grace.” The title applied every bit as well to Webb’s playing as it did to the words of the hymn. The passage only lasted 10 seconds before Wallen brought other winds into the mix, but it was long enough to astound everyone in the hall with Webb’s absolute command of his instrument, and all the beauty of tone, elegance of phrasing and variety of color of which it is capable. It was only 10 seconds, but it could serve very well anyone looking for a guide for how to spot a great horn player when you hear one.
Wallen’s procedure in “Mighty River” is to lay down a repeating rhythmic pattern in the strings upon which she superimposes an ever-changing series of fragmentary interjections by winds and brass. This allows her to represent the ceaseless pressure of work which the displaced Africans moderated, and ultimately overcame, with the insistence on beauty and the power of community inherent in their culture. It is an ambitious conception, resulting in a very challenging musical work. James Lowe and the Spokane Symphony overcame its many thorny difficulties of timing and ensemble as though they had known the piece all their lives, allowing the audience to enjoy the richness of the composer’s invention and to feel the power of her message, while also savoring the unique pleasures provided by orchestral virtuosity of the highest order.
The great warmth of the applause that greeted Mateusz Wolski was, no doubt, the result of his special relationship to the orchestra and the audience. The cheers, shouts and “bravos” that greeted the conclusion of his performance of the G minor Concerto of Max Bruch, however, would have been showered even on a stranger, had he managed to deliver a performance of that masterpiece as full of surging Romantic feeling and rich in instrumental mastery as we heard on that night. In his radio interview on Friday with Jim Tevenan on KPBX, Wolski credits the playing of Pinchas Zuckerman as an inspiration to him in his study of the piece and, indeed, one could detect some influence of the Israeli violinist in the suave elegance with which Wolski dispatched the solo part. There was, however, no sign of the frosty emotional detachment which crept into Zuckerman’s playing in the 1970s, ultimately blighting the work of that fabulously gifted artist. Rather, Wolski tapped a flood of feeling – be it tenderness, passion or joy – in every bar of the concerto and communicated it to the audience in a manner that was irresistible. If one wished to sort through master violinists of the past to illustrate the nature of Wolski’s playing, one could do worse than Nathan Milstein.
The dramatic structure of the relationship between the orchestra and the soloist in Bruch’s Concerto is essentially the same as that in Beethoven’s Fourth Piano Concerto: the gruff, stern, minor-key-voiced orchestra tries to shout down the sweet, major-key voice of the soloist, at last giving way in a show of major-key positivity. In the Bruch, this dialogue starts with the beginning of the work and proceeds seamlessly – there is no break between movements – to the joyous conclusion. It was telling that, during the passages in which the violin was silent, Wolski would close his eyes and concentrate on the playing of the orchestra, often smiling with delight at passages that went especially well. The audience sensed this unusually close bond between soloist and orchestra, and its contribution to the exceptionally high level of collaborative expression.
Following the aforementioned shouting and clapping, Wolski returned to the stage with a unique encore: a solo violin work, based on Harold Arlen’s “Somewhere Over the Rainbow,” which he was inspired to compose for astronaut Anne McClain on hearing the news that she was returning to the International Space Station. Wolski’s piece is not a whimsical gesture scribbled on the back of a cocktail napkin. It is a very substantial, albeit delightful, concert etude, plainly cast in the mold of Paganini’s formidable Caprices for solo violin. Amateurs need not apply. It formed a fitting capstone to Wolski’s latest assumption of the role of soloist, and one expects that it will begin to appear on the music stands of professional violinists throughout the world.
James Lowe singles out Finnish composer Jean Sibelius (1865-1957) as one of his favorite composers, due, it seems, to his embody qualities of the Finnish character Lowe especially admires, specifically a determination to persevere in the face of harsh adversity. One notes with interest that this is the very quality celebrated by Lowe’s friend and fellow Scottish transplant, Wallen. Though Sibelius’ works appear not infrequently on programs of the Spokane Symphony, this is the first appearance of this strange and magnificent work in recent memory. It is the composer’s highly idiomatic handling of melody that accounts both for its magnificence and its strangeness. Strange; in Sibelius’ fitful and irregular introduction of melody and magnificent for the fact that, when melody suddenly emerges from a cloud of nattering detail in the winds and indistinct muttering in the lower strings, it does so with such heart-stopping and soul-satisfying effect.
As Wallen’s “Mighty River” begins so grippingly with the solo horn, so Sibelius begins his First Symphony with a gloomy, timeless solo by the solo clarinet, and, in much the same way as our attention was riveted by the magnificent playing of Clinton Webb, so Chip Phillips’ artistry and technique seized our attention and inspired wonder at the opening of Sibelius’ First Symphony. Still, it was but a prelude to a performance of the whole work that was so stunning in its perfection of ensemble and subtlety of balance, so satisfying in every detail as to put to rest for good any talk of the orchestra as “really surprisingly good,” or “remarkable, considering [fill in qualifying negative of choice].” No, this performance of the Sibelius symphony showed not only the brilliant skills of individual players like (again) Clinton Webb, Chip Phillips, Keith Thomas (Oboe), Julia Pyke (Flute), Lynne Feller-Marshall (Bassoon), John Marshall (Cello) and others, but of all the brass, all the percussion, all the strings. Indeed, breaking down the ensemble into its component parts, while expected in a review of this sort, violates in a way what they all strove for throughout the concert: that Finnish/African/American determination to overcome the fragmenting tendency of chance and circumstance to achieve unity of thought, feeling and intention. This, coincidentally, is the aspiration underlying every form of art.