And all that jazz

Gershwin
in a characteristic pose

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Music with a heavy jazz and Afro-Cuban influence takes center stage at Powell Hall this weekend as the St. Louis Symphony presents an evening of music by George Gershwin and John Adams. Saxophone virtuoso Tim McAllister and pianist Jon Kimura Parker join music director David Robertson for what promises to be a high-energy evening.

Things kick off with Gershwin's "Cuban Overture," a kind of musical postcard of a 1932 trip to Havana. Composers have been drawing on their travels for inspiration for centuries, of course. Mendelssohn's "Hebrides Overture," Tchaikovsky's "Capriccio Italien," Saint-Saëns's "Egyptian" piano concerto—the list goes on and on. Gershwin did them all one better, though. He brought back not only some Afro-Cuban tunes (including Ignacio Piñeiro's "Échale Salsita") but some traditional percussion instruments as well. The haul included a bongo, claves, gourd, and maracas—all of which would be featured in a piece originally titled "Rhumba" (and performed under that title for the first time in August, 1932) and later retitled "Cuban Overture." It's lively stuff, made even livelier and more visually interesting by Gershwin's instructions (in the autograph version of the score) to place the Cuban percussion downstage in front of the conductor instead of off in the percussion battery. I don't know whether Maestro Robertson plans to follow that instruction or not, but the results should be interesting in any case.

John Adams

Next up is the local premiere of John Adams's newly minted "Saxophone Concerto," first performed on August 22nd by the Sydney [Australia] Symphony with Mr. McAllister (for whom Adams wrote it) as the soloist. Mr. McAllister's performance of the piece here is being recorded for Nonesuch on a disc that will also contain the recording of Adams's "City Noir" he made with the SLSO last season. Mr. McAlliser had some interesting insights into both pieces in the "minterview" I did with him, and I invite you to read what he said there.

Quoted in Paul Schiavo's program notes, Adams says that his "lifelong exposure to the great jazz saxophonists" inspired him to write the work. When he met Mr. McAllister and realized both his virtuosity and "exceptional musical personality," he knew he had found the perfect match of performer and composition.

The SLSO has had a close relationship with John Adams during Mr. Robertson's tenure, performing many of his works and recording four discs worth. Indeed, the orchestra's 2009 recording of the "Doctor Atomic Symphony" (based on themes from the Adams opera of the same name) was named "Classical Album of the Decade" by The Times of London. The symphony has always done well by Mr. Adams, in my view, so I'm looking forward to the concerto.

Tim McAllister

Adams is, along with Philip Glass, one of the most well-known advocates of a school of composition known as "minimalism," a term borrowed from the visual arts and first applied to music by composer, filmmaker, and photographer Michael Nyman in the early 1970s. "Prominent features" of minimalism, sayeth Wikipedia, "include consonant harmony, steady pulse (if not immobile drones), stasis or gradual transformation, and often reiteration of musical phrases or smaller units such as figures, motifs, and cells." I'm not entirely convinced that the emotional scope of the approach isn't a bit limited, but in the hands of composers like Adams it often generates a tremendous amount of excitement.

The music of John Adams is featured again after intermission, with a performance of "The Chairman Dances, Foxtrot for Orchestra," written for but eventually dropped from his ground-breaking opera "Nixon in China." It was intended to accompany a surrealistic scene in which a painting of Chairman Mao comes to life and dances with his widow during a state dinner. It has since had a life of its own as a concert piece, and is probably one of the composer's most commonly heard short works.

Jon Kimura Parker

Next is the other Big Piece of the evening, Gershwin's 1925 "Concerto in F" with John Kimura Parker at the keyboard. The concerto isn't particularly complex from a purely structural point of view, but I still find it amazing to contemplate that it was written only a year after the far more rudimentary "Rhapsody in Blue." Gershwin's development as a serious composer took place with an almost supernatural rapidity, as though he somehow knew that his life on this planet would be tragically short (he died of a brain tumor just a few months short of his 40th birthday).

As it is, the "Concerto" is a beautifully crafted piece: lean, powerful, without a spare note. Reviewing the December 3, 1925 premiere of the concerto for the New York World, critic Samuel Chotzinoff noted that Gershwin's "shortcomings are nothing in the face of the one thing he alone of all those writing the music of today possesses. He actually expresses us. He is the present, with all its audacity, impertinence, its feverish delight in its motion, its lapses into rhythmically exotic melancholy." You can feel and hear that "jazz age" urgency in every note of this music. Soloist Jon Kimura Parker is both an experienced virtuoso as well as an ardent advocate for music in the popular media, so he looks like an ideal choice for this piece.

The St. Louis Symphony's jazz-inflected concerts this weekend are Saturday at 8 PM and Sunday at 3 PM. For more information: stlsymphony.org, where you can also download the program notes. The Saturday concert will be broadcast live on St. Louis Public Radio at 90.7 FM and HD 1, as well as via their web site. My experience has been that the web stream has the best sound quality.

If want to really geek out, you can also download the scores for the "Cuban Overture" and "Concerto in F" (only the two-piano reduction for the latter, alas) and follow along with the music. The Adams scores are, of course, under copyright and not available on line.