The St. Louis Symphony Orchestra concert last Saturday night (January 10) was the third collaboration between Music Director Stéphane Denève and local dancer/choreographer Kervin Douthit-Boyd, the Artistic Director of St. Louis Dance Theatre (STLDT). Formerly the Big Muddy Dance Company, STLDT has been widely praised here and has forged strong relationships with not only the SLSO but many other performing arts organizations, enabling them to pursue their mission to “constantly strive to invigorate life through dance.”
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| St. Louis Dance Theatre. Photo courtesy of the SLSO |
Given the unquestionable success of the first two partnerships in 2021 and 2024, I came to this one with high expectations. To say the least, I was not disappointed. From both a musical and terpsichorean standpoint, this was a dazzling evening that more than lived up to the promise of “a program that celebrates powerful partnerships between dance and music.”
Titled “Music and Motion,” the concert consisted of three of actual ballet scores and a fourth that eventually became the basis for a ballet by Jerome Robbins, albeit over three decades later. It was the second of the three works that served as the basis for the collaboration with STLDT, so let’s begin there.
In 1920, Igor Stravinsky (1882–1971) was approached by the eccentric entrepreneur Sergei Diaghilev with the idea of Pulcinella, a one-act ballet based on 17th-century Neapolitan commedia dell’arte characters. There would be costumes by Pablo Picasso, choreography by Léonide Massine, and music by the short-lived (1710–1736) Italian Baroque composer Giovanni Battista Draghi (a.k.a. Giovanni Battista Pergolesi after his birthplace in Pergola) as arranged by Stravinsky. Most of the music turned out to be misattributed, but that doesn’t detract from its appeal.
Initially unimpressed with the idea, Stravinsky eventually came to embrace it. In 1922 the composer created a suite of eight of the ballet’s original 21 numbers. It’s that version of the score that is most often performed these days, and it was that version that was impeccably played and danced Saturday night.
Allow me to set the scene. The stage was covered with a gray, dancer-friendly mat. The chamber orchestra (around 30 players) was placed far upstage left, leaving a good two-thirds of the stage clear for the 17-member corps de ballet. Led by Demetrius Lee as a kind of MC, dancers flowed on and off the stage combining in pas de deux, pas de trois, pas de quatre, ensembles, and the occasional solo. Lee’s tongue-in-cheek star turn in the Vivo movement, with its cartoonish trombone solos, was but one of many memorable moments.
Costuming suggested a mix of 17th and 21st century styles, with the men in sleeveless red tunics and the women in long glittering gowns. Douthit-Boyd’s choreography was a similar mélange, mostly classical ballet with a dash of modern dance. As executed with lithe, athletic grace by the dancers, it was the perfect match for Stravinsky’s witty, piquant transformations of the original Baroque dances.
The decision to choreograph a concert suite rather than a scenario-driven ballet proved to be a wise one. Freed from the necessity to prepare and rehearse the kind of precise, measure-by-measure synchronization that would be demanded by a conventional narrative ballet, Douthit-Boyd was able to give his dancers steps that creatively reflected the spirit of the music.
Stravinsky’s score is filled with solo opportunities, every one of which got the virtuosity it deserved. That includes, but is not limited to, Concertmaster David Halen in multiple movements, Principal Oboe Jelena Dirks in the Serenata, Principal Trumpet Steven Franklin in the Toccata, Associate Principal Horn Thomas Jöstlein and flautist Olivia Staton in the Gavotta, and Principal Trombone Jonathan Randazzo in the Vivo. And even with my attention divided between the dancers and the orchestra, I was still able to appreciate Denève’s tempo and dynamics choices.
Individual orchestra members were even more in the spotlight in the opening work, Stravinsky’s Concerto in E flat (“Dumbarton Oaks”). Composed in 1937–38 on commission for Robert Woods Bliss and Mildred Barnes Bliss in celebration of their 30th wedding anniversary, the concerto was premiered in May, 1938, at a private concert at the Bliss’s Dumbarton Oaks estate in the Georgetown neighborhood of Washington, D.C. It’s a bright and cheerful work, heavily influenced by the Bach Brandenburg Concertos, especially the Concerto No. 3.
The last SLSO performance of the concerto was to have taken place November 13 and 14, 2020 with Denève at the podium. Those concerts were cancelled due to the pandemic but were recorded and released on video (no longer available, alas) the following spring. Because the piece is scored for only 16 musicians, it demands prodigious playing from all concerned, and the that’s exactly what it got in both that video and in Saturday’s live performance. Even the most rhythmically tricky passages were clear under Denève’s direction.
The concerto asks a lot of the solo wind players—flute, clarinet, and bassoon—if only because they are solo parts and therefore more visible. Those roles were filled expertly by (respectively) Olivia Staton, Associate Principal Clarinet Robert Walker, and Principal Bassoon Andrew Cuneo.
The second half of the concert belonged entirely to the French, beginning with the rarely heard score (the last SLSO performance was 20 years ago, and then only at Carnegie Hall) by Claude Debussy (1862–1918) for his rarely seen 1913 ballet Jeux. It would prove to be one of his last orchestral works as the cancer that would kill him in 1918 began to tax his strength.
Audiences at the premiere were apparently baffled by the banality of the scenario, involving a game of tennis by a man and two women that eventually turns into an impassioned flirtation. Said flirtation is quickly (and inexplicably) abandoned when a tennis ball bounces onto the court from offstage. At that point, says the score, “surprised and frightened, they [the dancers] leap away and disappear into the depths of the nocturnal park” (“surpris et effrayés, ils se sauvent en bondissant, et disparaissent dans les profondeurs du parc nocturne”). After that an airplane was supposed to crash land on the stage, but Debussy made removing that event one of the requirements for accepting the commission.
There’s more to the piece, as discussed in my preview article. Rather than repeat it here I’ll refer you there.
What many audience members and critics found truly odd, though, was Debussy’s score. As Stephen Walsh wrote in his 2018 book Debussy: a Painter in Sound,
Debussy’s prevailing technique, which would so impress avant garde composers half a century later, is to distribute tiny gestures round the orchestra like fragments of overheard conversation or like simulacra of the unspoken, barely expressed, only half-recognised passions that fleetingly develop between the three dancers. Every detail is touched in with a fine brush. Snatches of decorative arabesque melody flit from instrument to instrument.
Just to add to the bafflement, Jeux features frequent changes in tempo, time signature, and key. The result is music that often feels weightless and unsettled. “Analysing it,” wrote the BBC’s Christopher Dingle, “is like trying to capture wisps of mist.”
Narrative ballet scores, in my experience, can be a challenge for the audience without some guidance as to what would be happening on stage. This is especially true with a piece as elliptical as Jeux. Debussy’s score is filled with brief descriptions of the action, and I think projecting at least some of them during the performance would have gone a long way towards leaving the audience more engaged and less bemused.
That said, this was a well-paced performance with first rate work by the musicians. The opening whole-tone chords by the woodwinds, for example, has just the right sense of dissonance without sounding out of tune, which nicely set expectations for the evanescent music that followed. Although the orchestra is large (just under 100 musicians), dynamic markings in the score generally hang around the neighborhood of piano, with forte markings appearing rarely until the flirtation becomes heavier in the last several minutes. That’s tricky to manage, especially in a live environment where real silence is hard to come by, and there were times Saturday night when the levels felt a bit compressed.
Still, very nicely done overall, and with just the right sense of wit, especially in those final pages when, after a brief silence, an ascending three-note figure brings everything to an abrupt end.
Bringing the evening to a rousing conclusion was the Suite No. 2 from Bacchus et Ariane, op. 43 by Albert Roussel (1869–1937). Although not one of France’s better known musical sons, Roussel is a favorite of Denève. His performance of Roussel’s Symphony No. 3 with the SLSO in 2020 was enough to convince me that his admiration for the composer is fully justified. Composed in the same year as that symphony, the music for Bacchus et Ariane has a strong rhythmic drive and an appropriately Bacchanalian climax.
In this version of the story, Ariadne (Ariane in French), abandoned on the isle of Naxos by the ingrate Theseus, is about to throw herself into the sea when the god Bacchus intervenes. They dance, the bacchantes join in, and Ariane is crowned as the consort of Bacchus.
I missed seeing this when Denève and the orchestra last presented it in 2007, so it was a pleasure to see it now. A despairing violin solo (beautifully done by Halen) in the prelude sets the bleak scene as Ariane is abandoned. She awakens and, molto agitato, tries to fling herself in the Adriatic—only to fall into the arms of Bacchus. From there on the mood is by turns playful, seductive, and finally, wildly abandoned. It’s exotically colorful music and got an appropriately sensuous, Technicolor performance from Denève and the orchestra. The concluding Bacchanale and Coronation of Ariane sizzled with energy and brought the audience to its collective feet. Laurel wreaths are due to all concerned.
Upcoming: 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 24 and 25 at Powell Hall.
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