Robert Spano (Photo: Andrew Eccles)

Two things drew me to Benaroya Hall last night–conductor Robert Spano and Rachmaninov’s Piano Concerto No. 2–and I found two more reasons to feel glad of my choice by the end of the concert: pianist Dejan Lazić and John Adams’ Harmonielehre. The program repeats on Saturday and Sunday, May 1 and 2, and tickets start at just $9.

As awe-inspiring as Lazić was at the keyboard, I walked out trailing sparks from the Symphony’s performance of the Adams work. Adams admits it contains a “daunting” rhythmic complexity, but conductor Spano, drawing boxes in the air, kept the outpourings lucid. (All evening he got a wonderfully modulated performance from the brass, letting them blast and thunder, but also coaxing them into hiding a bit behind the strings, and just peeking out.)

The first movement begins with pulsing chords that Adams says was inspired by a dream where he watched a supertanker take off from the Bay into the sky “like a Saturn rocket.” For me, laboring with the handicap of being awake, the result was more like having a microphone inside someone’s head, hearing their pulse’s regular rush, while the noise of traffic on a city street–horns blaring, engines racing–were caught in that microsecond before conscious identification, when they are just primal sound. 

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In the second movement, Adams meditates on the legend of the Fisher King, via Jung, and his unhealing wound. It’s queasy, and the pain’s mounting comes in shrill outcries from woodwinds and brass. An audience member in front of me discreetly plugged his ears. Titled “Meister Eckhardt and Quackie,” the final movement is a distinct change of pace, starting with a cradle song, shimmering with celeste and pipings as you gambole among the cotton-candy clouds, before (Adams again) “a tidal wave of brass and percussion” sweeps you out of the hall, mind blown and ears ringing.

The contrasts with late-Romantic Rachmaninov are instructive; though it’s true both works raise the decibel meter to unsafe heights, they are as unalike in their assembly of sound as a dacha in the countryside and Frank Lloyd Wright’s Falling Water.

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Adams’ post-Schoenberg post-minimalism isn’t interested in throwing off melodies like candy at a small-town parade (Factoid! Frank Sinatra got two pop songs out of Rachmaninov’s Piano Concerto No. 2, “I Think of You” and “Full Moon and Empty Arms,” while Eric Carmen got “All by Myself”). His music has personality and color, but it organizes itself differently, foregrounding structural shapes (through repetition and abrupt changes). It adds up to a soundscape, rather than, for instance, a melodic thread you follow. It’s music the Tetris generation simply intuits. 

Dejan Lazić

Whether he’s conducting Adams or Rachmaninov, Robert Spano is one of those conductors who help you hear the music. He’s not up there directing traffic–right, left, right, left–but telling a story. If you heard him conduct Wagner’s Ring at Seattle Opera, you knew he could get marvelous playing out of Symphony musicians already, but popped out of the pit, his dynamism is on full view. Watching him entreat the oboes, soften the strings, or wind up the percussionists is like reading the score along with him.

He took the orchestra strong into the Piano Concerto, after Sibelius’s tone poem Pohjola’s Daughter, which I’m told has something to do with an unpronounceable protagonist from the Kalevala. You can either listen to it as music to injure yourself with an axe by, or just enjoy the colors.

At the piano for the concerto, Dejan Lazić met Spano’s dynamism with Croatian fire. He took off with his left hand in power bass mode, for the concerto’s bell-ringer of an opening, and only occasionally let the orchestra, towering over the piano like a wave, engulf him. Otherwise, you simply could not credit your eyes with the prodigious amount of notes spilling into your ears. When he got to the march, he torched it. Somehow, though flinging himself into the music, he produced hushed solo moments that hung, decaying, into a suddenly silent hall. (Also, listen for the violas–at one point I was listening with eyes closed and opened them to check that humans were making a sound so in unison.)

The audience exploded after the Rachmaninov, standing ovations, multiple bows. The gentleman next to me shouted “Bravo” a few times, and then, abandoning convention, cried out “Good job!” instead.