Symphony Preview: Cold Cuts

Our old friend the polar vortex is paying the Midwest a visit the weekend of January 24th with snow and single-digit lows. So it seems only appropriate that the St. Louis Symphyony Orchestra concerts this Saturday and Sunday bring us music from a couple of fairly frosty countries: Finland and Russia.

Lotta Wennäkoski. Photo by Maarit Kytöharju

Finnish conductor Dima Slobodeniouk will make his first local appearance conducting 21st-century music by fellow Finns Lotta Wennäkoski  (b. 1970) and Jukka Tiensuu (born 1948). Wennäkoski’s Flounce (last performed by the SLSO in 2018 with Hannu Lintu at the podium) opens the concerts, followed by the local premiere of Tiensuu’s 2015 Teoton (Concerto for Sheng and Orchestra), composed in 2015. We move to more familiar territory in the second half with the Symphony No. 4 in F minor by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky (1840–1893),

A commission by the BBC for its 2017 Proms concert series, Flounce, which clocks in at a brief five minutes, is something of an audio funhouse in which short phrases flit back and forth like fireflies. The work opens with an exuberant orchestral outburst which soon gives way to more delicate textures that call for a wide variety of unusual techniques from the players before building again to a big and comically abrupt finish. Or to quote the composer:

The piece is thus largely characterized by brisk gestures “non troppo serioso,” but it also has passages of lace-like ornamenting in a more lightweight and lyrical mood. The same kind of duality is present in the way I’m aiming to combine an often energetic pulse with (sometimes non-conventional) timbral ideas and a feeling of space in the orchestration.

If you want to know what that looks and sounds like, check out the video of a 2023 performance by the Frankfurt Radio Symphony.

The percussion section includes some non-traditional noisemakers like a slide whistle, cowbells (Spike Jones would be so proud!), the vibraslap (a modern version of the African jawbone rattle), a rain stick, and a superball stick (Super Ball by Wham-O, as seen on TV!) for both the bass drum and harp. Superball mallets are rubbed on their instruments rather than struck and produce roaring/droning sounds. The specific effect depends on the instrument, for example, on a harp “[t]he super ball stick produces a ‘whale’-like drone, both on the sound board and on the strings.”

Jukka Tiensuu. Photo courtesy of the SLSO.

You’ll hear some unusual sounds as well in Teoton. The four movements—Fever, Adrift, Game, and Bliss—are played attacca (without pause), and the work lasts around a half hour. Teoton was commissioned by the Seoul Philharmonic Orchestra, NTR ZaterdagMatinee, Norwegian Radio Orchestra, Orchestre Philharmonique de Strasbourg, and National Taiwan Symphony Orchestra. The sheng soloist at the premiere performance by the  Seoul Philharmonic Orchestra was Wu Wei, who will also be the soloist for this weekend’s performances.

Let us then take a few sentences to talk about the sheng.  Per James Howarth in Musical Instruments Through the Ages, the sheng is a free reed instrument, which means the sound is produced by air flowing under a tuned metal reed. Chinese and Japanese free reed instruments date back to the 10th century BC or thereabouts. Western free reed instruments began to appear in the late 18th century as musicians and scientists discovered the sheng and the Japanese version, the sho. Familiar Western examples include the harmonica, accordion, concertina, and melodica.

Like the harmonica, the sheng is a mouth organ. It consists of a large number of wooden pipes of different lengths that rest in sockets in a wooden wind chest (originally a gourd) to which a mouthpiece is attached. The sheng player can produce sound both by inhaling and exhaling. The pipes have finger holes that, in modern versions, are opened and closed with keys like those on Western woodwind instruments.

Wu Wei. Photo courtesy of the SLSO

The sheng played by Wu Wei looks like a collection of different-sized clarinets, complete with metal keys, stuffed into a wooden ball with the top cut off.  In the video of his 2021 performance with the Lahti Symphony Orchestra, he’s a highly energetic and engaged soloist who draws an impressive variety of sounds from the instrument. Like Flounce, Teoton features rapid-fire exchanges of short phrases between the soloist and the orchestra (especially the winds), but there are also long, elaborate cadenzas (improvised, as in the Good Old Days) that give the soloist a chance to test their mettle.

Having watched  and listened to the work with a synchronized display of the score, my reaction was that Teoton, like Flounce, felt aggressively “modernist” in a way that is very different from most of the new works that Music Director Stéphane  Denève has programmed for the orchestra. It’s also more ambitious with a wider emotional range.

Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 4—last heard in Powell Hall in November 2017  when John Storgårds was on the podium—is my favorite. He began writing it during a winter of discontent (to paraphrase Shakespeare) in 1876–77. "Since we last met," he wrote to his friend Klimenko, "I am very much changed—especially mentally…. If the conditions of my life were different, if my desire to create were not balked at every step.... I might write something really decent."

His disastrous attempt at marriage in 1877 to a former student, Antonina Miliukova didn't help matters any. He was gay, she didn't get it, and the entire business collapsed after only a few months. Still, by the beginning of 1878, all that Sturm und Drang had in fact resulted in the creation of "something really decent."

Critics were, at first, baffled by symphony’s unusual structure, especially the length of the first movement. James Huneker, in Mezzotints in Modern  Music (1899), described it as “loosely put together.” Still, it went on to become appreciated by audiences and critics alike. In his chapter on Tchaikovsky in The Symphony (1966, Robert Simpson, ed.), musicologist Hans Keller went so far as to describe the Fourth as “the greatest—and its first movement is the most complex and innovatory of the [first] four.”

The composer poured all of his hope and despair into this most compact and dramatically expressive of all his symphonies. From the commanding "fate"motif first intoned by the brasses at the beginning to the nearly hysterical triumph of the finale, this is a piece that grabs you by the lapels and doesn't let go until the end. I've loved this work from the first time I heard it in a recording by Sir John Barbirolli and the Halle Orchestra on my parents' old console stereo some fifty years ago. I think you will as well.

The SLSO’s official playlist for the concert includes recordings of both Flounce and the Tchaikovsky Fourth, with the latter performed by the SLSO under Leonard Slatkin in a 1991 RCA Read Seal. For Teoeon, though, you’ll have to use the YouTube links, above.

The Essentials:  Guest conductor Dima Slobodeniouk and sheng virtuoso Wu Wei make their local debuts with Jukka Tiensuu’s Teoton (Concerto for Sheng and Orchestra). The program includes Flounce by Lotta Wennäkoski and the Symphony No. 4 by Tchaikovsky. Performances are Saturday and Sunday, January 24th and 25th, at Powell Hall.

The Saturday concert will be broadcast live on St. Louis Public Radio and on Classic 107.3. Classic 107.3 is also where you can hear Tom Sudholt and yours truly host the Symphony Preview episode about the concert on Wednesday, January 21st, from 8 to 10 pm as well as via on-demand streaming beginning on Thursday, January 22nd.