Et in Arcadia Ego

Stèphane Denève

Who: The St. Louis Symphony Orchestra and Chorus conducted by Stèphane Denève with pianist Eric Le Sage
What: Music of Schumann and Ravel
Where: Powell Symphony Hall, St. Louis
When: November 4 and 5, 2011

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If I had a plethora of laurel wreathes (is that the right collective noun?) to throw around I’d crown the Saint Louis Symphony Orchestra, guest conductor Stèphane Denève, and every member of Amy Kaiser's chorus with them for their joyous performance of Ravel’s Daphnis et Chloé Friday night. The composer called it a "symphonie choréographique"; the choreographer Michael Folkine of the Ballets Russes, for whom it was written 100 years ago, called it a ballet; and nearly everyone since has called it Ravel’s greatest work. As performed by Mr. Denève and the orchestra, I call it a great success, with flawless solos, precise ensembles, and gorgeous sound overall.

Like Ravel, Mr. Denève has studied at the Paris Conservatoire. Unlike the composer (who was expelled), Mr. Denève graduated with honors and has gone on to make a name for himself as an exponent of French music. He certainly seemed to be right at home with Daphnis et Chloé, conducting with passion and, perhaps more importantly, impressive precision.

Precision matters because, for all its lush harmonies and brilliant orchestration (when was the last time you heard an alto flute solo?), the ballet is nevertheless very logically organized. The composer himself noted that it was "constructed symphonically according to a strict tonal play by the method of a few motifs, the development of which achieves a symphonic homogeneity of style." It’s a reminder the Ravel was, as Eric Salzman has noted, a classicist at heart.

With a running time of nearly an hour, Daphnis et Chloé is Ravel’s longest work and follows a very detailed scenario describing the courtship of the shepherdess Chloé by the goatherd Daphnis. A band of pirates kidnaps Chloé, but she’s rescued by Pan and all ends happily with an exuberant "Danse generale". The music is vividly descriptive of the stage action, so the decision to project a translation of the scenario on a screen in synch with the music added considerably to the experience. With very little effort, I could reconstruct the entire ballet “in my mind’s eye” (as Hamlet says). Pictures of what I assume to be sketches of Leon Bakst’s original Ballet Russes costumes were shown before the music started, which also helped to set the mood. The Symphony is making very creative use of their projection capabilities these days and doing so in ways that always enhance the music.

The concert opened with another Ravel ballet score, a far more modest orchestration of four movements from Schumann’s magnum opus Carnaval. The arrangement was made for a 1914 London performance by Ballets Russes star Vaslav Najinsky, who was attempting to form his own ballet company. Najinsky came down with the flu, the performance never happened, and the Carnaval arrangements had to wait until 1975 for a public performance. This weekend marked the first appearance in St. Louis.

I’d like to say the Schumann/Ravel Carnaval is an undiscovered gem, but in fact it felt more like “Ravel Lite”. The orchestration is modest and, aside from some witty moments in which the melody is tossed back and forth between sections in the final march, not terribly interesting. It got a first-class performance, though, and it did help set the musical stage for the big work of the first half, Schumann’s popular Piano Concerto in A Minor.

Eric Le Sage was the soloist for the Schumann. Making his local debut, the young French pianist has been hailed as something of Schumann expert, having recorded all of the composer’s piano output in a prize-winning series for the French Alpha label. His program bio notes that critics have praised “his very subtle sound and his real sense of structure and poetic phrasing”. If his performance of the concerto Friday night is any indication, the critics couldn’t be more accurate.

If your piano preferences run toward the flashy, this would not be the interpretation for you, but it might be one that Schumann would have admired. His intent was always to create a kind of symphony for piano and orchestra rather than the sort of virtuoso showpiece that he and his fellow contributors to the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik disdained, so I think he would have appreciated the way in which Mr. Le Sage’s pianism seamlessly integrated with the orchestra under Mr. Denève. This was an A Minor Concerto of chamber music–style intimacy and the kind of close, cooperative give and take that goes with it. I’m not completely persuaded by it, but there’s no denying that Mr. Le Sage and Mr. Denève made an awfully strong case for it.

All this fine work was done for a disappointingly small house on Friday. I realize that everyone (justifiably) loves it when Mr. Robertson in on the podium, but Mr. Denève is a very charismatic conductor who takes an obvious joy in his work. He’s part of long list of distinguished guest conductors that have appeared at Powell Hall over the years. They all deserve our support, as does the orchestra as a whole.

Next at Powell Hall: Jun Märkl is on the podium for more Ravel (La Valse), Strauss’s Death and Transfiguration, and Beethoven’s Concerto No. 5 (“Emperor”) with Horacio Gutiérrez at the keyboard. For more information you may call 314-534-1700, visit stlsymphony.org, like the Saint Louis Symphony Facebook page, or follow @slso on Twitter. 

This article originally appeared at 88.1 KDHX, where Chuck Lavazzi is the senior performing arts critic.