Concert Review

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Just as conductor Eric Garcia was about to launch the Seattle Symphony Orchestra into Herbie Hancock's "Sonrisa," the jazz pianist, seated at a Fazioli grand with sheet music spread out before him, suddenly raised his glasses, like a baton.

The audience laughed as Garcia looked over his shoulder to see what was going on.

Hancock was not doing slapstick. He explained that even "a little smudge" on his lenses distracted him.

Hancock's casual, chatty demeanor set the tone for a lovely Friday evening at Benaroya Hall that freely hopped across boundaries of both protocol and musical form. This felt entirely appropriate for a concert centerpieced by George Gershwin's "Rhapsody in Blue," the first major composition to weave jazz and classical music together.

Hancock, who had expressed disarmingly humble trepidation in an interview before the concert about executing the piece's trickier passages, acquitted himself more than well. Admittedly, he skated over some of Gershwin's sparkling runs and dappled excursions, but when it came to the difficult polyrhythms in the "Rhapsody's" Latin-ish section, the cross-handed somersaults and machine-gun hammerings of individual notes, Hancock's percussive jazz background shined brightly. As promised, he also "swung" parts of the score, starting with the bluesy second theme.

When the orchestra swelled slowly into the final, dramatic melody, Hancock somehow gave the refreshing and almost startling impression that he was composing the music in the moment.

SSO's smartly programmed first half nicely prefigured the unguarded romanticism and splashy angularity of jazz with a gorgeous rendering of Samuel Barber's "Adagio for Strings" and an at-first tentative but ultimately rousing edition of Stravinsky's "Firebird Suite."

Hancock, wearing a black suit, shirt and matching neck tie, strolled out solo for the second half. His improvisations on Wayne Shorter's "Footprints," Gershwin's "Embraceable You" and his own "Canteloupe Island" frankly felt a bit eager to please, with their "classical" flourishes, though his playing was clearly genuine. The symphony then came out to play a rather inflated orchestration of "Sonrisa" by Oregon-based musician George Whitty, who was in the crowd, and introduced by Hancock.

It was another casual moment in an evening that cut across boundaries in an altogether pleasant way.

Paul de Barros: 206-464-3247 or pdebarros@seattletimes.com