Bangor symphony springs into new season

The Rite of Spring by Igor Stravinsky is one of the most celebrated of seminal works that issued in the modern era. At its opening in 1913 in Paris, the disquieting piece created a public scandal that has reverberated through music history.

As the first offering at yesterday’s Bangor Symphony Orchestra classical concert at the Maine Center for the Arts, The Rite marked a watershed in local musical history, too. In 97 years of music making, the BSO has never attempted such a massively jagged and demanding score that is both upsetting to hear and, apparently, dangerous to perform.

Yet, the BSO, under the last-minute direction of Portland’s sparklingly capable Toshiyuki Shimada (filling in for Maestro Werner Torkanowsky), gave a performance that was ennobling to the musicians and rewarding to the audience. If some moments tended to be wobbly or missing a bit of the music’s bite, the high-energy concentration and exuberant form were so firm that one scarcely noticed, much less minded. From the first twitterings of strings to the crashing percussive madness, that marks this revolutionary piece, the BSO showed Stravinsky’s sense of spring in all its weird, disturbing, and glorious contours.

For the harsh flair of this sophisticated instrumentation, Stravinsky relied on permutations of meter, or, as David Klocko humorously labeled it in his pre-concert lecture, the “pick-a-beat” changes of time signatures. These are the real bugaboos of this ballet (originally written for Diaghilev’s Ballet Russe). But the BSO worked as one, huge (91-piece) machine that, all things considered, would surely have caused Stravinsky to utter the same word he spoke when he hailed Bernstein’s earliest recording of The Rite: “Wow.”

Beethoven’s Symphony No. 7, the second work of the afternoon, was actually comforting after the Stravinsky one, and the orchestra breezed through it with admirable freshness and crisp, fast tempos. The joyful A Major key is often associated with springtime, so the presence of this seemingly unrelated piece on the program was a perfectly natural and delightful choice.

Flutist Susan Heath and oboist Jo-Anna S. Tensa played with vividness and virtuosity in the first and fourth movements. And principal percussionist Nancy Rowe Laite gave dramatic urgency with thrustful rhythms (in both the Beethoven and the Stravinsky.)

Shimada beautifully sprung the fullest of sound and rhythm throughout this sometimes somber and tragic, sometimes racing and funny symphony. He brought an infectious excitement to the swirling melodies, especially in the two final movements. Torkanowsky’s station is a hard one to fill, but Shimada earned both gratitude and admiration for his participation in this kickoff concert. He surely endearing himself through music to the BSO audience, which saluted with a standing ovation at the end of the concert.