Review: Spano and SSO skillfully serve 20th-century classics

Robert Spano is one of those eminently successful maestros who seem to do better with music in romantic and 20th-century styles than with the Viennese classics. This program, comprising works written respectively in 1906, 1901, and 1984-85, played cleverly to his strengths, and he led the Seattle Symphony through it with much skill and artistry.

The three works chosen also related to each other in illuminating ways. Sibelius' "Pohjola's Daughter" and John Adams' "Harmonielehre" share a surprisingly similar penchant for low string sonorities as foundation for some of their most striking invention. No less surprisingly, the fascinating rhythmic slippage of lines in the second part of the Adams was surely anticipated eight decades earlier in the slow movement of Rachmaninoff's Second Piano Concerto.

"Harmonielehre" ("Study of Harmony"), the big orchestral triptych that apparently broke a writer's block that Adams had been struggling with in the early 1980s, is still in my judgment his finest work. Even his relatively minimalist moments seem uninhibitedly maximal compared with the relatively simplistic creations of his colleagues Steve Reich and Philip Glass.

There are admittedly a few moments in the work's 40-minute span that are not so much grand as grandiloquent, but "Harmonielehre" as a whole is an authentic and indeed awe-inspiring achievement. It contains climaxes fit to clear the listener's sinuses, but also some lyrical melodic writing that tugs at the heartstrings. This, moreover, was a splendid performance, including the bracing sound of three piccolos tootling merrily away, some stirring proclamations from the brass, a majestic unison near the end from the horns, their bells held aloft, trenchant percussion incursions, and many paragraphs of soaring eloquence from the strings.

The evening began with a performance of Sibelius' saturnine tone-poem that was taut and often beautiful, if less impressive than some I have heard. (Tuomas Ollila and the Tampere Philharmonic have recorded a quite stunning performance on an Ondine CD.) Soloist Dejan Lazic then offered a revisionist reading, lithe and crisply nuanced, of Rachmaninoff's Second Concerto. Faced with the composer's seemingly perverse determination to give almost all the big melodic effects to the orchestra, the young Croatian-born pianist and composer intelligently refrained from challenging them in sheer sonority, preferring instead to emphasize the brilliance and delicacy of the piano's decorative work. The result was less rich plum pudding than usual, and much more filigree. So in a stimulating way, the Rachmaninoff emerged sounding almost more modern than the committedly romantic Adams piece.

Bernard Jacobson: bernardijacobson@comcast.net