New Portland Symphony Orchestra Music Director Eckart Preu conducting. Photo courtesy of the PSO

The inaugural season of a new music director’s term is always an exciting time for an orchestra, and its audience as well. Although the musicians will have played a few concerts with the new director, both as part of the search process and during that official-but-not-quite period when the new conductor is the music director designate, the relationship is still fresh and packed with hopes and expectations of what might change for the better, in terms of everything from repertoire to the way their sound is built and shaped.

Listeners have hopes as well, some paralleling those of the musicians, others based on aspects of the orchestra’s programming or performances that they liked or disliked during the previous director’s tenure – or during the newcomer’s performances so far.

In Eckart Preu’s case, those between-administrations performances with the Portland Symphony Orchestra have been deeply satisfying, both in terms of his repertory choices and his ability to draw a rich, unified sound from his ensemble, so the formal start of his tenure, leading the orchestra’s Sunday afternoon concert at Merrill Auditorium, was something to look forward to.

Preu did not disappoint. He assembled a program that was meant to show the orchestra at its best in a pair of familiar works, Sibelius’ “Finlandia” (Op. 26) and Richard Strauss’s “An Alpine Symphony” (Op. 64), and to put a spotlight on some of the repertory adventures in store with an unknown score, Lilian Elkington’s “Out of the Mist,” a 1921 tone poem about the return of the body of the Unknown Warrior to Britain after World War I.

The Elkington piece comes with an interesting provenance. Elkington, a British composer born in 1900, was a piano prodigy who went on to study composition – but gave up her musical career, except for work as a church organist, when she married in 1926. After Elkington died in 1969, her husband remarried, and when he died, his second wife disposed of Elkington’s scores. The performance materials for “Out of the Mist” were discovered in the 1970s by musicologist David J. Brown, who found them in a used bookstore in England.

Preu has performed the work with his former orchestra, the Spokane Symphony, and with the Long Beach Symphony Orchestra, where he is still music director. (For the record, he retains a third position, as music director of the Cincinnati Chamber Orchestra.) His championship of the work comes at a time when the classical music world at large is trying – too slowly – to discover and revive music composed by women over the centuries, while also commissioning new works from women composing now.

Elkington’s score is meant to evoke a vision of the flotilla bearing the soldier’s body emerging from the mist over the English Channel, as well as the emotional underpinnings of the occasion, and it succeeds beautifully, and movingly, with thoughtfully wrought string writing that begins in the violas and cellos and takes in the rest of the orchestra as the ship comes fully into view. There are no traces of nationalistic triumphalism, here – Elkington’s music is sober and focused, melancholy but never overwrought. Preu and the orchestra gave it a rich, enveloping performance.

The concert began with a vivid account of the Sibelius, to which the orchestra brought a solid, hefty sound with memorably biting brass textures and assertive percussion in the introduction, and energetic wind and string playing as the work’s grand gestures unfolded.

Preu’s agenda here was to show the players at their most sizzling, and they were up for it, as they were in the Strauss, to which the second half was devoted. I must confess to not much liking “An Alpine Symphony.” True, Strauss’s pictorialism may be at its zenith here, but the work’s narrative – an ill-fated hike up a mountain and back – is pretty dull, its clangorous thunderstorm and its amusingly cowbell-laden meadow visit notwithstanding.

But the work has its enthusiastic adherents, and Preu’s detailed, fluid readings make it clear that he is one of them. I can’t say that his enthusiasm for the piece won me over, but the precision and clarity with which he marshaled the 110 players on Merrill’s stage was impressive, and there was a great deal to admire in the sheer execution of the work. As in the Sibelius, the brass playing was textured and often thrilling. The percussionists produced the score’s vital dramatic effects and splashes of pastoral color magnificently, and the expanded woodwind and string sections met the score’s constantly shifting demands with both suppleness and vitality.

Whatever one might say about the individual works, as a glimpse of what the Portland Symphony Orchestra can do – and as a hint of what the Preu era might bring – the concert could hardly have been better.

Allan Kozinn is a former music critic and culture writer for The New York Times who lives in Portland. He can be contacted at: allankozinn@gmail.com
Twitter: kozinn