1764 And All That

Bernard Labadie

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Who: The St. Louis Symphony conducted by Bernard Labadie with soloists Philip Ross (oboe), Andrew Gott (bassoon), Kristin Ahlstrom (violin), and Melissa Brooks (cello)
What: Music of Rameau, Haydn, and Mozart
When: February 21-23, 2014
Where: Powell Symphony Hall

[Find out more about the music with the symphony program notes and my Symphony Preview article.]

Unless you've been holed up on the dark side of the moon lately, you've probably noticed that 2014 is the 250th anniversary of the founding of St. Louis. As a glance at the STL250 web site clearly shows, local celebrations of the event are popping up all over. This weekend the St. Louis Symphony is doing its part with a program that includes works composed between 1763 and 1792, including a Haydn symphony that's almost exactly the same age as our fair city.

Under the expert baton of early music specialist Bernard Labadie, the concerts show just how much variety there can be in a relatively small span of time.

Rameau

The concerts open with a lively suite of dances from Jean-Philippe Rameau's 1763 tragédie en musique "Les Boréades". Rameau was in the final year of his long and productive life when he wrote it (he died in 1764 at the age of 81), so he never saw it performed. No surprise there. What is surprising, as Mr. Labadie points out in his fascinating pre-concert remarks, is that due in part to legal issues over the performance rights, nobody else got to see it either for well over two centuries. Happily, the issues were resolved a decade ago, allowing audiences to enjoy Rameau's tuneful and inventive score.

The suite got a crisp and polished reading from Mr. Labadie and the orchestra. The fanciful "Gavottes pour les heures" was especially fun, with Andrea Kaplan and Ann Choomack on piccolo joining Andrew Cuneo and Henry Skolnick on bassoon (the latter at the very top of their registers) to perfectly conjure up whirling clockwork. The suite is short—two of the dances listed in the program were cut, presumably because of the length of the concert overall—but nicely chosen and thoroughly entertaining.

Up next was Haydn's "Sinfonia concertante in B-flat major," Hob. I:105. A Classical-era revision of the Baroque concerto grosso, works in the sinfonia concertante mold featured an ensemble of solo players with orchestra instead of the single soloist that would later characterize the concerto form. In this case it's a solo quartet: violin, cello, oboe, and bassoon.

Haydn portrait by
Thomas Hardy (1757-c. 1805)

It's the "newest" piece on the program, dating from 1792 and written for the composer's first trip to London, where he was embraced with open arms and open purses as well. A contemporary review raved about it, saying that it "combined with all the excellencies of music" and was "was profound, airy, affecting, and original." That's as good a description as any of this consistently engaging work, with its clear and concise structure (it clocks in at 22 minutes) and Haydn's characteristic good humor.

That good humor is especially apparent in the final movement, in which the violin has to restate the main theme three times before the orchestra "gets it." Symphony annotator Paul Schiavo sees it as a humorous portrayal of a music lesson, although to me it sounded more like an operatic recitative followed by an aria. Either way, the violin and cello get in the last word, with short flourishes at the very tops of their registers just before the final chords.

The solo quartet consists entirely members of the home team: Acting Co-Principal oboe Philip Ross, Associate Principal bassoon Andrew Gott, Associate Principal Second Violin Kirstin Ahlstrom, and Associate Principal cello Melissa Brooks. It's always good to see the local folks in the spotlight, especially when they play with such seemingly effortless grace. Their sound was perfectly balanced, both within the solo group and against the orchestra.

The second half of the concert features symphonies by the two giants of the Classical period, Haydn and Mozart. We begin with Haydn's 1764 "Symphony No. 22 in E-flat major." It's nicknamed "The Philosopher" for any number of reasons, depending on whom you ask. In his post-intermission commentary, Mr. Labadie opined that it refers to the way the dialog between the horns and English horns (the darker-toned cousins of the oboe) in the stately first movement imitates the Socratic "question and answer" style of teaching. To me, the entire movement has always conjured up the image of a thoughtful academic carefully laying out a mathematical proof or explaining a complex philosophical issue. Your mileage may vary.

Here, as in the rest of the program, Mr. Labadie drew fine performances from the orchestra, with tempi that felt historically right. The dialog between horns Thomas Jöstlein and Anna Spina and English horns Cally Banham and Michelle Duskey was right on the money and the third movement Menuetto had a "folk dance" feel that was, I expect, very much what Haydn had in mind.

Detail of Mozart portrait by
Johann Nepomuk della Croce
(1736-1819)

The final work on the program—Mozart's "Symphony No. 39 in E-flat major," K. 543—is the first of a set of three that the composer dashed off in a burst of creativity in the summer of 1788. It gets less attention than the other two, much as a normal human being would be less noticed standing next to a pair of NFL linebackers, but that doesn't make it any less a great composition, neatly melding Baroque counterpoint with Classical clarity.

Mr. Labadie conducted without a score, so it's obviously a work he knows intimately. He gave it a lean, energetic reading that made the most of the work's drama (especially in the Andante con moto second movement) without tipping over into exaggeration. The little Alpine waltz of the Menuetto: Allegretto third movement was most charming as well, lovingly rendered by Scott Andrews and Tim Zavadil on clarinets and answered by Andrea Kaplan on flute.

The concerts repeat today (Saturday) at 8 PM and Sunday at 3 PM, February 22 and 23. The Saturday concert will be broadcast on St. Louis Public Radio 90.7 and HD 1.

Next on the schedule: On Wednesday, February 26, at 7:30 PM David Robertson conducts members of the orchestra in a program of music by Steve Reich in a Pulitzer Series concert at the Pulitzer Center for the Arts, 3716 Washington. Then Juanjo Mena conducts the orchestra with piano soloist Benedetto Lupo in a program of music by Ginastera, Rachmaninoff, and Elgar on Friday and Saturday at 8 PM and Sunday at 3 PM, February 28 – March 2, at Powell Symphony Hall, 718 North Grand. For more information: stlsymphony.org.

Symphonic downsizing

Bernard Labadie

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When guest conductor Bernard Labadie takes the podium this weekend, he'll be leading a noticeably downsized St. Louis Symphony Orchestra. But never fear; nobody has been sacked. It's just that he's conducting a program of music written between 1763 and 1792, back when both orchestras and the halls in which they played were substantially smaller than they are now.

Although only three decades separate the earliest work on the program (a suite from Jean-Philippe Rameau's 1763 opera "Les Boréades") from the latest one (Haydn's 1792 "Sinfonia concertante in B-flat major," Hob. I:105), the difference in style is striking. Rameau had a very long and productive life (he died just short of what would have been his 81st birthday in September of 1764) and continued composing in the Baroque style long after it was seen as outdated and unfashionable. The developments in symphonic style heard in the Haydn and Mozart works on this weekend's program largely passed him by. Nevertheless, he remained popular and prosperous right to the end.

Kirstin Ahlstrom

Given that it was written the year before he died, it won't surprise you to learn that Rameau never saw "Les Boréades" performed. What is a little surprising is that nobody who was alive at the time ever saw it performed either. For reasons which are not entirely clear, the first fully staged performance didn't occur until July 1982, at the Aix-en-Provence Festival with early music champion John Eliot Gardiner conducting. The piece is technically a tragédie en musique, which means it's based on a mythological subject and includes a lot of dances. You'll hear eight of them this weekend, including a fanciful "Gavottes pour les heures" in which, as Paul Schiavo writes in his program notes, the composer has the "piccolos whirring over a rhythmically steady accompaniment to imitate the workings of a clock."

Philip Ross

The Haydn "Sinfonia concertante" is next. It dates from a time when the form of the solo concerto was not as well established as it would later become, so works for multiple solo instruments and orchestra were common. Haydn wrote his for the first of his two visits to London, a city that embraced him both artistically and financially (“I made four thousand guilders this evening,” wrote Haydn after the 1795 premiere of his 104th symphony).

It was apparently dashed off quickly, possibly in response to a bit of rivalry. "Londoners had become accustomed to the sinfonia concertante due to the energy of Johann Christian Bach," wrote Scott Fogelsong in the San Francisco Examiner in 2009, "whose many examples stand as some of the finest of the genre. Thus Haydn tossed his hat into the ring with his Sinfonia concertante in B-flat for violin, cello, oboe, and bassoon... His own student Pleyel had been making waves in the London concert scene during the same season, and quite possibly Haydn's work was a direct response to Pleyel's popular works. One gets a sense of Haydn grinning slightly and murmuring OK, hotshot, let the old man show you how it's done."

Andrew Gott

And show them he did. The piece was a hit. "A new concertante from HAYDN combined with all the excellencies of music," enthused the Morning Herald the next day; "it was profound, airy, affecting, and original, and the performance was in unison with the merit of the composition. SALOMON particularly exerted himself on this occasion, in doing justice to the music of his friend HAYDN." The soloists playing those "excellencies" this weekend are all members of the home team: Acting Co-Principal oboe Philip Ross, Associate Principal bassoon Andrew Gott, Associate Principal Second Violin Kirstin Ahlstrom, and Associate Principal cello Melissa Brooks. It's always good to see the local folks in the spotlight.

Melissa Brooks

The second half of the concert features symphonies by the two giants of the Classical period, Haydn and Mozart. We begin with Haydn's "Symphony No. 22 in E-flat major," nicknamed "The Philosopher" possibly because of what the late Harold Truscott described as "the quizzical, semi-ponderous opening Adagio." The name first appears on a 1790 manuscript copy of the score found in Modena, according to Wikipedia, although we don't know who is responsible for it. To me, that opening movement has always conjured up the image of a thoughtful academic carefully laying out a mathematical proof or explaining a complex philosophical issue, so the sobriquet seems right.

Opening a symphony with an Adagio instead of a conventional fast movement with a slow introduction, by the way, was regarded as quite a novel idea when the piece was composed in 1764. "Nobody up to that time had thought of starting a symphony with a noble slow movement," writes Mark Elder in The Guardian, "nor had anybody ever thought of the extraordinary sound that the symphony begins with: a chorale played by two horns and two cor anglais against an incessant pattern of notes in the strings. It all gives this movement a strange, unexpected beauty."

The final work on the program—Mozart's "Symphony No. 39 in E-flat major," K. 543—is the first of a set of three that the composer dashed off in the summer of 1788. Nobody is really certain of the source of what Arthur V. Berger (in a New York City Symphony program note) called the "sudden efflorescence of inspiration" that produced Mozart's last and, in the estimation of many writers, greatest symphonies, but the results speak (or rather sing) for themselves.

K. 543 gets less attention than the other two, much as a normal human being would be less noticed standing next to a pair of NFL linebackers, but that doesn't make it any less a great composition. "This symphony," writes musicologist Andrew Firmer, "is...a prime example of the composer 's genius that he is not only able to conjure up melodies, but weave them with apparent contradictions that seem to connect with impossible ease." Those contradictions include Mozart's assimilation of the contrapuntal techniques he got from the music of Bach and Handel. "It was this synthesis of 'learned' style with the clean clarity of classicism," writes Brian Robins at allmusic.com, "that caused so much trouble for Mozart's contemporaries, to whom his late style became increasingly 'difficult.'" Today, with over two centuries of hindsight, it's clear that this "difficult" music is both ingeniously complex and wonderfully clear.

Labadie with Les Violons du Roy

Finally, a few words about guest conductor Bernard Labadie. The founder of early music ensembles Les Violons du Roy and La Chapelle de Québec, Labadie is widely regarded as a leading interpreter of music of the 17th and 18th centuries. Reviewing a concert by the former group at London's Barbican Center, the Telegraph called him "[A] fine instinctive musician. He moulds the phrases, plucks out all-important details in the texture and radiates an infectious joy in the music.” So we'll be hearing and expert's take on our Rameau, Haydn and Mozart.

The essentials: Bernard Labadie conducts the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra in a suite from Rameau's "Les Boréades," Haydn's "Sinfonia concertante in B-flat major" and "Symphony No. 22 in E-flat major," and Mozart's "Symphony No. 39" in the same key. Performances are Friday at 10:30 AM (a Krispy Kreme coffee concert, with free doughnuts), Saturday at 8 PM, and Sunday at 3 PM, February 21-23, at Powell Hall in Grand Center. For more information: stlsymphony.org. The Saturday concert will be broadcast live on St. Louis Public Radio at 90.7 FM, HD 1, and streaming from the station web site. But, of course, it 's best heard live.