Oregon Symphony Review: The Enduring Music of Stravinsky, Ibert, and Shostakovich

Guest review by Thomas Meinzen

Marina Piccinini and conductor Hans Graf | Photo credit: The Oregon Symphony

The Oregon Symphony’s matinee on the Ides of March was a beguiling and dramatic testament to the transcendency of music through time. Under the steady and artful guidance of Austrian conductor Hans Graf, the symphony performed three remarkable works, each written close to a century ago in the period between WWI and WWII. At times dazzling, unsettling, and even sinister, these compositions recall the brutal and tumultuous times of their authors, reflecting and resonating with the conflicts and fears we face today. The show left me wondering if my contemporaries will pen works that capture the sorrows, injustice, and strife of our society in so enduring a manner as Stravinsky and Sostakovich.

Belying its forthcoming dark intensity, the concert began gently, with melodic woodwinds and accenting strings. Igor Stravinsky’s four-movement Divertimento from La Baiser de la fée (The Fairy’s Kiss) follows the story of Hans Christian Andersen’s The Snow Maiden: a young man, kissed by a fairy at his birth, is claimed and taken away by the fairy on his wedding day. Stravinsky draws the ballet’s themes from the piano music and songs of Tchaikovsky. He writes, “The fairy’s kiss on the heel of the child is also the muse marking Tchaikovsky at his birth—though the muse did not claim him at his wedding, as she did the young man in the ballet, but at the height of his powers.” As strings and brass coalesced with rising potency, this sense of music claiming the composer was palpable in the Oregon Symphony’s performance; the muse may even have reached out and pulled in the audience.

Photo credit: The Oregon Symphony

While the darting, playful conversation of The Fairy’s Kiss showcased the deft collaboration of many orchestral sections, the next work spotlighted the superb musicianship of an individual artist. Renowned flautist Marina Piccinini headlined Jacques Ibert’s Concerto for Flute and Orchestra, Op. 37, a work at once silvery-smooth to the ear and devilishly difficult to perform. Hearing Piccinini, one quickly left behind any misconceptions of the flute as timid or peaceful: here was glittering intensity, rapid-fire arpeggios, twisting articulated lines, and swirling cadenzas.

After this bold Allegro introduction, Ibert’s Andante movement gave a brief breather, the strings laying out a subtly shifting tapestry for the flute to shimmer atop. Then the final movement, Allegro Scherzando, came flying in with syncopated accents, screaming horn triplets, and Piccinini gliding and twisting over virtuosic lines. When the flautist’s extended cadenza finally emerged, it recalled a jazz pianist’s solo, smooth held notes melting into modulating licks that spun up and down the register. Mystical and mournful tones transformed suddenly into whimsy. The orchestra rejoined Piccinini with characteristic trios of accents, soon rising to a bright and fiery ending. Piccinini’s effortless control and range of tone brought the audience to their feet.

Where Ibert’s Concerto soared to great heights, Dmitri Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 1 in F minor delved deeper into the darkness and volatility of Europe’s interwar period. Shostakovich wrote this work—the first of his fifteen symphonies—as an eighteen-year-old, facing poverty, civil war, and malnutrition in the years following the Bolshevik Revolution.

The passion and irreverent genius of young Shostakovich shines through in the symphony, which filled the hall with beautiful brass chords and cheeky piano octaves, swells of energy and flashy high notes from the concertmaster. And yet, the work also seems to capture the anxiety and anguish of the composer’s early life and times. Basses and cellos shift together in low, haunting passages. The second movement’s march-like motif slides chromatically downward, majestic and foreboding—a statement of authority turned ominous. In the Lento movement, one could almost feel the lights dim in the Schnitzer. A great, lugubrious monster rouses itself, languid yet unsettling. The melody fragments into many parts, bringing to mind a nest of wasps or ants slowly stirring as the weather warms. One hundred years later, the piece still captivated, and the fine-tuned Oregon Symphony made no error to break the spell.

A rousing final movement concluded the concert, featuring a panoply of percussion and low brass. As applause filled the hall, I reflected on the symphony’s sense of great anguish, and the staying power of one teenager’s interpretation of the world through music. One hundred years later, the world is a very different place, and yet in both music and society, the past remains intensely relevant.

Thomas Meinzen is a composer, pianist, writer, and ecologist. Thomas studied music composition and orchestration with John David Earnest and Eric Funk. He has worked across the U.S. and Costa Rica as an avian field biologist and currently teaches natural history, ecology, arboriculture, and music through several local nonprofits, in addition to coordinating Portland tree-planting efforts with Friends of Trees. An avid bicyclist, birder, and public transit advocate, you can find his writing at greenbirder.substack.com and music at thomasmeinzen.bandcamp.com.