By any measure, the program of music performed by the Missoula Symphony Orchestra on Saturday and Sunday was unusual. For the season-ending pair of concerts, the ensemble lurched from a foreboding overture, to a nostalgic concerto, to a single movement from a much longer symphony, and finally to a highlight-reel of instrumental numbers from an opera. During much of the program, the orchestra itself was cut to a portion of its normal forces, only to bring on extra firepower for the finish. Even the featured soloist, Ana Vidovic, arrived on stage toting an instrument rarely seen in the context of orchestral music: an acoustic guitar.
Yet by any measure, this was one of the most consistently fine performances put on by our local orchestra in modern memory. In this musical mish-mosh, magic was made.
The concert kicked off with a run through Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s overture to the opera, “Don Giovanni.” Few works by the great Austrian composer carry such a powerful sense of doom – which, in the opera, sets the stage for the title character’s spectral comeuppance. On Sunday, conductor Darko Butorac led the orchestra in a performance that generally softened the edges and muted the contrasts in the score, giving it an even gloomier cast – though, with fine playing throughout, the approach was undeniably effective.
After the brief overture, the orchestra was joined by Vidovic, who glided onto the stage in a floor-length dress of swirling black and white. During much of the first movement of Joaquín Rodrigo’s “Concierto de Aranjuez,” her playing seemed to reflect her color choices: high in contrast and sharp in definition.
The jaunty and melodically thin music of this concerto’s first movement calls for more than just good articulation; and the orchestra itself gave much in that regard, providing a colorful and nuanced accompaniment. Still, as seems often the case in performances of this piece, the movement ultimately played out as little more than a prelude to the justly famous second movement.
Any sense of perfunctory playing in the first movement was completely swept aside in the ruminative, flowing music that followed. As Vidovic stretched and twisted the guitar’s dreamy melodies, the orchestra wafted around her like a halo. English horn soloist Jennifer Gookin Cavanaugh responded sensitively to Vidovic’s every searching gesture; the orchestra’s strings provided beautiful echoes and elaborations throughout, climaxing in a gorgeous utterance of restrained longing before fading to breathtaking silence.
Against that standard, almost any performance of the third movement – which, like the first, lacks for strong thematic material – would seem anticlimactic. Yet both orchestra and soloist gave it a strong reading, with snappy and seemingly effortless articulation of the tricky rhythms.
After an intermission, the orchestra’s string section returned to the stage for a performance of the famous Adagietto movement from Gustav Mahler’s Fifth Symphony. Though less than ten minutes in length, this is music of the deepest kind, awash in ineffable emotions that flow together in a swirl of astounding beauty.
Rising to the challenge on Sunday, our local musicians dug deeper than ever, baring both the unsettled spirit and the passionate heart of the music. Throughout, the musicians played with a richness of tone and vividness of phrasing that would have been frankly unimaginable from the MSO even five years ago. Though paced at a somewhat up-tempo clip under Butorac’s baton, time seemed to stop utterly as the violins bowed the music’s final melody. When it finally faded away to nothingness, one could have heard a pin drop on the other side of town, so rapt was the audience and orchestra alike. It was, simply, a shattering performance.
Last came perhaps the oddest-seeming element in the weekend’s program, a suite of music from Richard Strauss’ 1911 opera, “Der Rosenkavalier.” Culled out of an opera that can last more than three hours, these orchestral interludes offer a broad sketch of the opera’s underlying character – which was, even in its time, rather nostalgic and lighthearted, particularly given Strauss’ prior reputation as a musical firebrand.
Not surprisingly, the suite has an episodic feel to it – pleasant enough from moment to moment, but not tied together into one grand statement. As such, on paper, it seemed a somewhat curious place to finish out the orchestra’s season.
Yet there was no anticlimax in this performance, which showed the entire orchestra at its most well-drilled and characterful. In the famous Rosenkavalier Waltz, Butorac pushed and pulled the rhythmic flow to the far extremes of rubato; yet the players held on tight, imbuing the melody with a sense of daring decadence. Principal French horn player Vicki Johnson soared through Strauss’ stratospheric lines, adding plenty of thrills to a score that seems to ravish the ear at every turn. In the end, the bacchanalian finale shook the rafters – and shook the crowd out of its seats with a collective roar.
The Missoulian, Joe Nickell