Symphony, Big Easy prove a good match

Oct 16, 2004

Author: Jim Kershner

Position: Staff Writer

Source: Spokesman Review

Here was a first for a Spokane Symphony concert: The security guards carded everybody at the door and slapped hot-pink wristbands on their arms.

Umm, they don't do that at the Opera House.

Here's another first: The conductor, Eckart Preu, greeted the audience by encouraging everybody to drink up.

This first-ever Spokane Symphony concert at the Big Easy was an experiment to see if (1) the orchestra could pull off a show in a nightclub setting and (2) the orchestra could draw a younger, more diverse crowd.

The answers are yes and yes.

Nearly 700 people jammed the Big Easy. Many were the same symphony supporters who go to the Opera House shows, but there was no shortage of "nontraditional" (i.e., not-so-old) audience members as well.

The crowd was quiet and respectful during the pieces or at least as quiet and respectful as you can expect in a place with a full bar. But the crowd was suitably raucous at the end of the numbers. I swear, I saw a young woman in the balcony doing that pushing-up-with-the-hands motion during the standing ovation. That may be another symphony first.

The success of this show can be attributed, first of all, to a music director who is ideally cast. Preu is a born raconteur, and he instinctively knows how to set a crowd at ease.

For instance, he explained why he was wearing all black, even though all of the musicians were wearing blue jeans.

"I realized I don't have any," he said. "I once bought a pair of blue jeans and wore them for my American girlfriend at the time. She just looked at me and said, 'You German guys don't know how to wear jeans.' I threw them away."

Preu also knows how to guide an audience through the music. At one point, he asked audience members to think of a favorite sound. The audience came up with a motorcycle, the wind and a bird. So he asked the brass section to play a motorcycle sound, the strings to play the wind, and the woodwinds to play a bird song.

Then he had them play all three sounds at once, in a weird cacophony.

"And that," he said, "is how you write 20th century music."

This was his way of preparing the audience for John Adams and Charles Ives pieces, both of which could also be described as weird cacophonies.

Preu did a clever job of balancing this "edgy" music with some familiar melodies (a medley from Bernstein's "West Side Story"), some beloved classics (Vivaldi's "Winter" from "The Four Seasons") and some real heart-pounders (Ginastera's "Malambo" from "Estancia").

The acoustics were not perfect in this space the brass, surprisingly, got a bit lost but the musicians performed with great dynamics and energy, perhaps feeding off the crowd.

Soloists Jason Bell on violin and Greg Yasinitsky on sax proved that guitar-slingers aren't the only people who can perform some pyrotechnics on this stage.

The experience might have made some people grateful for the Opera House, with better seats and better acoustics.

But can you grab a cocktail between movements?