SPCO celebrates America's creative spirit

What is specifically American about American classical music? In the search for answers, William Bolcom's "Commedia, for (almost) 18th-Century Orchestra" is as good a place to start looking as any.

"Commedia" opened Saturday evening's Thanksgiving weekend concert at the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra. It is full of the unpredictable, heterodox energies that mark the American creative spirit.

Take a liberal dose of Ives, add a splash of Berlioz, stir it up with Bolcom's own gleeful sense of mischief, and you get the picture: a swirling, multilayered jitterbug of a piece, a happy, mashed-up metaphor for America itself, in all its bustling complexity.

David Pharris' screeching clarinet riffs stood out in the SPCO's droll, affectionate performance of "Commedia." So did the urbane playing of the offstage string trio, a graceful memory from a calmer, less crazily jumbled era.

Retrospection loomed even larger in John Corigliano's "Snapshot: Circa 1909," a musical meditation on an old family photograph of the composer's father and uncle.

The tone was sepia-tinted, the detail etched by two outstanding sensitive soloists on violin — the sweetly nostalgic Kyu-Young Kim, and Ruggero Allifranchini, spinning a stratospherically aspiring line above him.

More Bolcom followed — his "Graceful Ghost Rag," in a svelte account by violinist Maureen Nelson and pianist Timothy Lovelace.

The house and stage lights dimmed to virtual darkness after intermission for a movement from Kevin Puts' "Arches," a work originally written for a single violinist.

The SPCO version used five soloists, stationed on stage and around the balcony, their location pinpointed by lights on the players' music stands.

The effect was haunted-house eerie, the sinuous, gradually accelerating strands of music unraveling as if from different strata of the memory.

Aaron Copland's "Appalachian Spring" followed without a pause, its clean lines dispelling the shadowy, subconscious murk in which Puts' piece had been presented.

The effect was cleansing and therapeutic. "Appalachian Spring" is often cited as quintessentially American music, and the SPCO's interpretation majored on those qualities of clarity, sap, agility and optimism that make it so.

Copland's original scoring for just thirteen players was used, underlining the shared feelings of intimacy in the pioneer community depicted in the ballet for which the music was written.

The coda was hushed, tender, and more than usually moving. In these days of social turmoil and division, it spoke of kinder times, and a more wholesome outlook.