Aram Demirjian, now in his eighth season as music director of the Knoxville Symphony Orchestra, led the Portland Symphony Orchestra in an all-20^th century program at Merrill Auditorium. While it would be almost impossible to bring together all, or even most, of that stylistically chaotic century’s musical currents, Demirjian offered a handful that sat together comfortably, and highlighted some of the tendrils connecting them.

Demirjian also offered a nod to Black History Month, opening his program with Florence Price’s “Dances in the Canebreaks” (1953). Price, who lived from 1887 to 1953, has been enjoying a revival in recent years, ever since a stack of her manuscripts was discovered in an abandoned house in Chicago, and given to the Center for Black Music Research.

Last season, the Portland String Quartet performed her magnificent “Five Folksongs in Counterpoint” (1951), and judging by both that work and “Dances in Canebreaks,” more pleasant surprises are undoubtedly forthcoming. Perhaps in a future season, the Portland Symphony will program her Symphony in E minor, which the Chicago Symphony Orchestra premiered in 1933, making her the first African American, female composer to have a work played by a major orchestra.

The three-movement “Dances in Canebreaks,” one of Price’s last works, was composed for solo piano, and was orchestrated after Price’s death by William Grant Still. Its language is that of spirituals, blues and early jazz, couched in the harmonies and techniques of the European classical tradition – pretty much the recipe for an American style that Dvořák proposed during his visit to the United States in 1892.

Still’s orchestration gives this melodic, rhythmically vital music an extra measure of depth and perspective, and honors its essentially neo-Romantic spirit. Demirjian led a supple performance that kept the music’s folk inspiration and structural techniques finely balanced and always clearly in sight, and the orchestra gave it a beautifully subtle performance.

The rest of the first half was devoted to Ravel’s Piano Concerto in G (1931), which embraces Ravel’s love of jazz, but mixes it with other currents of what was then modernism. The solo piano line, and at times the orchestral fabric, make blatant allusions to Stravinsky, whose “Firebird” suite was the major offering in this concert’s second half.

This could have been a superb performance. The orchestra’s winds and brass played vividly, and its strings and harp provided the right measure of Ravelian lushness and textural magic. But in a piano concerto at the Portland Symphony Orchestra, there is always the hurdle of Merrill Auditorium’s Steinway, a dry instrument, particularly in the middle range, that some players are able to conquer, and others fight valiantly without making it truly sing.

Joyce Yang, the soloist here, is a fine pianist whose performance had all the right contours and exactly the kind of agility the Ravel demands. But timbre is always an issue in Ravel, and there Yang was thwarted by this piano’s dullness.

It seems odd that an auditorium that is home to a magnificent organ, the Kotzschmar, should also have such a spectacularly unspectacular piano. It’s time for the orchestra, Merrill (the piano takes its toll on Portland Ovations recitals, as well) or a wealthy, piano-loving donor, to upgrade this instrument before it muffles another performer’s work.

After the intermission, Demirjian and the orchestra gave a sumptuous, otherworldly reading of Delius’ “The Walk to the Paradise Garden,” an interlude from the composer’s fourth and most popular opera, “A Village Romeo and Juliet,” followed by its polar opposite, the suite from Stravinsky’s alternately gauzy and brutally energetic “The Firebird.”

Stravinsky’s suite of six connected movements touches on most of the highlights of the full ballet score, particularly the “Infernal Dance,” with its aggressive brass, throttling percussion and tightly compressed string writing. Here again, the chemistry between Demirjian and the orchestra seemed perfect. He shaped the performance carefully but with an ear toward the ballet’s story line, and the orchestra responded with a vibrant, texturally transparent account. Standing ovations often seem indiscriminately granted at the orchestra’s concerts, but the players, and Demirjian, earned this one.

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

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