Symphony’s Finale for Arts Festival Was True Highlight

The San Diego Symphony may not have taken its inspiration from Spike Lee, but it did the right thing. Friday night’s program at Symphony Hall, the final installment of the symphony’s three-week Soviet arts festival programming, admirably saluted the current music of both America and the Soviet Union, using the combined forces of the visiting Soloists of Leningrad and the San Diego Symphony. Not only did this formula look good on paper; the musical results were exemplary.

The string players from Leningrad brought the local band up to 100 players, a more than respectable force to tackle Stravinsky’s “Rite of Spring.” Under the firm hand of guest conductor Vassili Sinaisky, this 20th-Century classic thundered its primitive message with uncommon persuasiveness. Sinaisky knew how to unleash its visceral, mythic power while keeping its complex musical equation in precise balance. The orchestra responded grandly and generously, as it did when the Moscow conductor made his local debut last February.

Two significant premieres graced this program: the world premiere of Joseph Schwantner’s “ . . . long before the winds--” and the North American premiere of Vladimir Tarnopolsky’s “Brooklynsky Bridge.” The local orchestra has never been so ambitious in its infrequent forays into new music.

Schwantner’s work, commissioned for the San Diego festival, is a dramatic, percussive prelude, full of lightening flashes and somber omens. The composer, an Eastman School of Music professor, engaged the orchestral resources skillfully. Because of the work’s narrative style and static structure, the composer veered dangerously close to the overly familiar rhetoric of foreboding movie sound tracks, but he made a formidable statement nevertheless.

The evening’s surprise, however, came from the Soviet composer Vladimir Tarnopolsky’s mock serious “Brooklynsky Bridge,” a work which was intended for--but never played at--last year’s Soviet music festival held in Boston. From Tchaikovsky to Shostakovich, we have come to see Russian composers as ultra serious, even morose, souls. In Tarnopolsky’s four-movement cantata, a soprano and tenor intoned a poem about America written by Vladimir Mayakovsky, a Soviet playwright who visited this country in 1925. The composer’s good humor was everywhere evident, from his unabashed imitation of the preening, pop style of Leonard Bernstein and heavy-handed jazz licks to his cacophonous allusions to Charles Ives. He even gave the violin players lowly percussion duty, forcing them to swallow their pride and pick up maracas, and the composer joined the music-making, playing a raucous solo on the bayan , the Russian accordion.

If the idiom of Tarnopolsky’s “Brooklynsky Bridge” was unabashedly pictorial, its architecture and instrumentation were surprisingly sophisticated. This jocular musical vision of America’s roaring twenties can be interpreted as the reverse image of Kurt Weill’s bitter American icon, “The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny.” The orchestra gave this new score a rousing reading, although soloists Martha Hamilton and Gerald Whitney needed amplification for their modest, choir-sized voices.

For members of the audience skittish about sampling new music, there were side dishes of J.S. Bach and Tchaikovsky at this orchestral banquet. Sinaisky coaxed a robust interpretation of Tchaikovsky’s Serenade for Strings--but only the first two movements--played by the combined string sections of both orchestras. On their own, the Soloists of Leningrad sprinted through J. S. Bach’s D Minor Concerto of Two Violins, with their leader Michael Gantvarg and San Diego concertmaster Igor Gruppman as soloists.

So why can’t the symphony be this exciting every week?