Love and death

Who: Violinist Christian Tetzlaff and The St. Louis Symphony Orchestra and Chorus conducted by David Robertson
What: Music of Wagner, Sibelius, and John Adams
Where: Powell Symphony Hall, St. Louis
When: January 21 and 22, 2012

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“Love and Death”. It’s not only a classic Woody Allen movie, it’s also the theme of John Adams’s massive choral cantata Harmonium, the closing work in a varied program that opened with the reverent Prelude to Act I of Wagner’s Parsifal and an electrifying performance of Sibelius’s one and only violin concerto.

The violin was Jean Sibelius’s first musical love. He began playing as a child and showed great promise as a performer, despite an elbow fracture that impeded his bowing technique. Even after it became clear that his real talent was for composition, he continued to play in chamber ensembles and even teach the instrument. It’s no surprise, then, that his Violin Concerto — originally presented in 1903 and then again in a substantially revised form in 1905 — is both thoroughly idiomatic and incredibly demanding. The long solo passages in the first movement and virtuoso fireworks in the finale will test the mettle of the best performers.

Soloist Christian Tetzlaff seemed thoroughly at east with this difficult material. He performed with a score, but appeared to refer to it only rarely, having clearly internalized the music. Even the ambulance obbligato during the first movement failed to shake his concentration. I did get the sense that he was less than completely comfortable with David Robertson’s breakneck pace in the finale, but overall he and the maestro were completely in synch. This was a reading that married technical facility with musical sensibility, with impressive results. The audience responded with a (mostly) standing ovation, and was rewarded with a beautiful encore: the third movement (Largo) from Bach’s Violin Sonata in C Major, BWV 1005.

The contrast between the intimacy of Bach’s solo violin music and cinematic expansion of John Adams’s Harmonium looks pretty stark on the surface. Scored for a large, post-Romantic orchestra that includes piano, celesta, synthesizer, and an expanded percussion section along with a full chorus, Harmonium would appear to be separated from the Bach sonata by more than just chronology. Take a step back, though, and it becomes apparent that there are similarities. Adams has, for example, very different notions of melody and harmony, but the way in which he organizes his music follows a logical pattern that Bach might have recognized.

In a note on the genesis of Harmonium on the web site of his publisher, G. Schirmer, Adams writes that the piece “began with a simple, totally formed mental image: that of a single tone emerging out of a vast, empty space and, by means of a gentle unfolding, evolving into a rich, pulsating fabric of sound.” He goes on to note that “[s]ome time passed before I was able to get beyond this initial image. I had an intuition of what the work would feel like, but I could not locate the poetic voice to give it shape. When I finally did settle on a text for the piece I was frankly rather surprised by the oddity of my choice.”

That’s putting it mildly. The first of the three texts set in Harmonium is a John Donne poem with the surprisingly modern title “Negative Love”. Its meaning is elusive. “Every time I read it,” Adams writes, “it seemed to mean something different.” His response was to embrace that ambiguity and build a setting that starts with a wordless tone cluster for the women’s voices and eventually builds to an ecstatic outpouring for full orchestra and chorus before falling back to serenity on the final couplet. A more explicit interpretation is up to the listener, which only seems appropriate.

The second half of Harmonium is a setting of two poems by Emily Dickinson: “Because I Could Not Stop for Death” and the uncharacteristically unbuttoned “Wild Nights”. The former moves at an unhurried (but not funereal) pace that reflects the calm resignation of the poem. The music fades to a delicate passage for what sounded like Tibetan bells and then slowly and inexorably builds to the delirious ecstasy of the “Wild Nights” text before subsiding to a gentle rocking that suggests (as it says in the text) that the poet’s heart is “in port” and is now “rowing in Eden”.

It’s lovely stuff, really. Bracketing musings on death with two different visions of love works nicely from a dramatic standpoint, and there’s enough musical variety to make me reconsider some of my reservations about John Adams’s expressive range.

The composer notes that a successful performance of this work “should give the feeling of travelling — sometimes soaring, sometimes barely crawling, but nonetheless always moving forward over vast stretches of imaginary terrain.” Without a doubt, Saturday’s performance did all of that. Mr. Robertson and chorus director Amy Kaiser have done a splendid job realizing this fascinating and complex piece. I have always thought Adams’s music sounds challenging to sing, so I think the chorus deserves a particular pat on the back for this one

The performance of the Parsifal prelude that opened the concert was a fine piece of work as well. Wagner liked to refer to Parsifal as "A Festival Play for the Consecration of the Stage" rather than an opera, and the mood of the Act I prelude is appropriately peaceful. This is spiritual love — specifically for the Holy Grail. The orchestra’s performance captured the ethereal beauty of the music nicely.

Next at Powell Hall: Christopher Warren-Green conducts Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 4, Sibelius’s En Saga, and Liszt’s Piano Concerto No. 1 with soloist Arnaldo Cohen. Performances are Friday at 10:30 AM (a Coffee Concert with free Krispy Kreme doughnuts), Saturday at 8 PM, and Sunday at 3 PM, January 27–29. For more information you may call 314-534-1700, visit stlsymphony.org, like the Saint Louis Symphony Facebook page, or follow @slso on Twitter.