Classical review: Portland Youth Philharmonic tears into Shostakovich's Fifth

Published: Sunday, March 14, 2010, 4:14 PM     Updated: Sunday, March 14, 2010, 4:21 PM

View full sizewikipedia.orgDmitri Shostakovich in 1942Dmitri Shostakovich's Fifth Symphony is powerful, challenging, and deeply searching. Not kid stuff -- or is it? Saturday night at Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall, Portland Youth Philharmonic tore into it with passion, dedication and keen focus, giving one of their finest performances in recent memory.

The piece was Shostakovich's attempt at redemption after he had provoked official criticism in 1936 with his opera "Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District." Before Stalin walked out of a performance of the opera, the 29-year-old composer had been riding a great wave of international successes; the moment he found himself censured in the pages of Pravda, during Stalin's increasingly horrific purges, was effectively the end of his youth. Arguments still rage over the symphony's intended meaning, its ratio of sincerity to sarcasm, a question mired in politics and complicated by Shostakovich's acquiescence to official pronouncements.

But the players proved that you needn't lose your youth or be steeped in politics to get at the music's visceral appeal and emotive depths (I had one of those wow-I'm-really-old moments just before they started, when it struck me that the Cold War was over before these musicians were even born). They attentively followed conductor David Hattner's nuanced direction over broad dynamic contours, their unified sound testifying to untold hours of meticulous preparation.

Thrills abounded. After the hushed sound faded to silence at the end of the anguished Largo, you could feel the audience retreat from the edge of their seats and take a collective breath. The finale was pulse-quickening, as the orchestra drove forward at a nearly breakneck tempo, carefully negotiating a set of tricky time-signature changes.

Fine details and individual contributions were too numerous to acknowledge adequately here, so let one suffice as an example. There was a passage toward the end of the first movement where a solo flute (principal Jasmine Lee) offered a sinuous line subsequently picked up by piccolo (Emma Davis) and then violin (concertmaster Natally Okhovat); sensitively attuned to each other's playing, they achieved an arresting effect of subtly shifting timbre. I've heard this piece many times, but Saturday night I heard things I'd missed before.

Also on the program was Camille Saint-Saëns' "Introduction and Rondo Capriccioso," with Okhovat giving an assured and electric performance of the virtuosic violin part. Her tone was firm, her phrasing natural, and her left hand precise and jaw-droppingly fast as her fingers raced up and down the strings. Hattner didn't pull back on the tempo to make it any easier for her, to his credit and hers, so the final measures almost exploded with intensity.

Before the Saint-Saëns was Kenji Bunch's "For Our Children's Children," written for the recent Abraham Lincoln bicentennial (the title comes from speech Lincoln gave to a Union regiment in Michigan). As he remarked in his program note, Bunch-a leading figure among young American composers and a former PYP principal violist-couldn't help but be influenced by Aaron Copland's "Lincoln Portrait," the canonic musical tribute to the president. The inspiration was apparent in the musical texture, with its opening clarinet solo, birdlike flute filigrees and solemn brass chorales, but also in the piece's spirit-thoughtful, big-hearted and inspiring.

-- James McQuillen