
Mateusz Wolski was just a young boy in Warsaw, Poland, when he first heard Tchaikovsky's Violin Concerto.
"I had an aunt that was studying in a music school, and I remember her trying to convince me that I should listen to this record," he says. "Of course, 7-year-old me was like, 'I don't want to listen to this!' But as soon as she left the room, I would go and put it on and start listening. That was the first violin concerto I fell in love with."
Back then Wolski was a fledgling violinist, and the fundamentals of the concerto format were new to him. Much to the amusement of his music teacher at the time, he tried to show his appreciation for the work by attempting to play both the orchestral parts and the solo parts himself.
Nearly four decades on, he's still feeling the tug between those two roles. As the Spokane Symphony's resident concertmaster, Wolski is responsible for leading the orchestra, acting as a sort of liaison between the musicians and the conductor. But once a year he gets to "switch hats completely" and take center stage as a solo performer with a work of his choice.
"As a concertmaster, you're a little like a shepherd's dog, trying to guide the flock. As a soloist, you're in an antagonistic relationship with the orchestra. It's a David-versus-Goliath kind of story where the whole fun of the concerto is that you have this one little violin that has to carry a tune, and the orchestra roars back at it. It's imbalance by design. That's what creates this absolutely wonderful tension that great composers know how to exploit."
And so, in preparation for this weekend's performance of the Tchaikovsky Violin Concerto with the orchestra he usually helps lead, Wolski finds himself deliberately trying to adopt that more independent, rivalrous mindset.
"The way the soloist typically works is that we get people from out of town. They fly in, they say hello, they show up for two rehearsals, they play their piece, and they go home. And in some ways, in order to deliver your performance well, you have to get into that headspace," he says.
"As a concertmaster, you're a little like a shepherd's dog, trying to guide the flock. As a soloist, you're in an antagonistic relationship with the orchestra."
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Alongside the Tchaikovsky concerto, the Spokane Symphony's Masterworks No. 5 "Pictured Within" program features works by three other composers born at various points in the 19th century. There's Samuel Coleridge-Taylor's "Danse nègre," William Grant Still's Wood Notes and Edward Elgar's Enigma Variations. Each work draws on a very different source of external inspiration.
In the case of Coleridge-Taylor, it was the poems and pro-African cultural advocacy of American writer Paul Laurence Dunbar that prompted the English composer to create his African Suite, from which "Danse nègre" is taken. Although he found transatlantic fame during his lifetime with the choral cantata Hiawatha's Wedding Feast (itself inspired by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's epic The Song of Hiawatha), Coleridge-Taylor sold the rights to his music for short-term income and died in near poverty in 1912.
Similarly, Still was also inspired by poetry, but his four-part orchestral suite Wood Notes was a very intentional collaboration that originated in pastoral verse by erstwhile Alabama Poet Laureate J. Mitchell Pilcher.
"This is a suite that depicts the countryside of the Deep South. Grant Still himself said this was very important because it was a Black man from the South writing music inspired by a White man from the South. It's very clear that there was a symbol of unity in him writing that music," says Spokane Symphony Music Director James Lowe, who'll be conducting this Masterworks concert.
"It's such a beautiful and evocative piece. Grant Still paints these pictures of landscapes at times of day and times of year so wonderfully. And his sketch of things that are extra-musical seemed to pair so well with the Elgar."
As famous for its dedication "to my friends pictured within" (hence this concert's title) as its lingering unsolved musical riddles, Enigma Variations was the work that made Elgar, a professional late bloomer and something of a prickly outsider, into a recognized talent in classical music.
"Theme and variation is a very common musical form. You play a melody and then noodle around with it for half an hour," Lowe laughs. "But what Elgar does is, he takes it and plays it through the characters of his friends. He captures the laugh of one, the seriousness of another. It's such a compelling portrait, and he's so inventive with it. You really feel like you get to know their personalities through these variations."
More than that, however, he says the program showcases how "humanity is united by music." Even Wolski, in his temporarily "adversarial" role, says that unity between the soloist and the orchestra is the necessary conclusion to the Tchaikovsky concerto: "It's a happy ending when we reach harmony and join forces at the end together." ♦
Spokane Symphony Masterworks 5: Pictured Within • Sat, Feb. 5 at 8 pm; Sun, Feb. 6 at 3 pm • $19-$62 • Martin Woldson Theater at The Fox • 1001 W. Sprague Ave. • spokanesymphony.org • 624-1200