Symphony Review: Celebrating music in motion with the SLSO and St. Louis Dance Theatre

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.”

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 30^th 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.

Symphony Preview: The Light Fantastic

This Saturday and Sunday, January 10 and 11, Stéphane Denève leads the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra in what the web site describes as “a program that celebrates powerful partnerships between dance and music.” A good summary, that, given that three of the four works on the program are actual ballets and the fourth eventually became the basis for a ballet by Jerome Robbins, albeit over three decades later.

Dancer Sergio Camacho in
St. Louis Dance Theatre’s 
Way Out West. Photo courtesy of the SLSO.

The work in question was the Concerto in E-flat major, "Dumbarton Oaks," written by Igor Stravinsky (1882–1971) in 1937–38 on commission for Robert Woods Bliss and Mildred Barnes Bliss in celebration of their 30^th wedding anniversary. The first performance was in May, 1938, at a private concert at their 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.

As the composer recalled later:

I played Bach very regularly during the composition of the concerto, and I was greatly attracted to the Brandenburg Concertos. Whether or not the first theme of my first movement is a conscious borrowing from the third of the Brandenburg set, however, I do not know. What I can say is that Bach would most certainly have been delighted to loan it to me; to borrow in this way was exactly the sort of thing he liked to do.

No doubt, although I expect Bach would have found the astringent harmonies and constantly changing time signatures a bit weird.

The concerto follows the general format of its 18th-century inspiration, with two fast movements framing a slower Allegretto second movement. Themes are lobbed back and forth among the members of the small ensemble like the ball in a fast-paced game of tennis and there's even a very traditional fugue at the end of the first movement. The score directs all three movements to be played attacca (without pause), separated by only a series of more solemn chords to signal a break in the emotional tone.

The entire piece runs around 12 to 16 minutes. It's fun to hear but difficult to play and gives all the musicians a chance to test their mettle. The members of the SLSO passed that test with flying colors when the work was presented as part of its digital concert series in March and April 2021.

Up next is the suite Stravinsky prepared in 1922 from the score for his 1920 ballet Pulcinella. Commissioned by the eccentric entrepreneur Sergei Diaghilev, for whose Ballets Russes de Monte Carlo Stravinsky had composed his previous hits The Firebird and Le Sacre du Printemps, the ballet drew its visual inspiration from 17th-century Neapolitan commedia dell’arte characters in general and the titular character in particular.

Stravinsky’s score takes the form of a collection of sprightly pastiches on tunes by the short-lived (1710–1736) Italian Baroque composer Giovanni Battista Draghi (a.k.a. Giovanni Battista Pergolesi after his birthplace in Pergola). Later research would reveal that many of them were the result of historical misattributions, but since Stravinsky put his own personal stamp on all of them, it probably matters only to scholars these days. Stravinsky’s full score consists of 21 numbers, including several songs. The composer’s suite includes only eight of those numbers (and none of the songs), but they’re all winners.

The SLSO last performed the Pulcinella Suite in May 2021, but this weekend the experience will be very different. That’s because the orchestra has teamed up with St. Louis Dance Theatre and its Artistic Director Kirven Douthit-Boyd to create a new ballet based on the eight movements of the suite. In an article on the SLSO web site by Iain Shaw, Douthit-Boyd talks about his process in designing the ballet, which is inspired in part by Powell Hall’s origins as a vaudeville theatre.

“It’s kind of paying homage to that,” he said. The idea of a performance troupe coming through St. Louis gave him the impetus to start creating. “I’ve used each of the sections to highlight the dancers in different ways.”

In program notes for the 2021 performance, Denève said that Stravinsky “captures the spirit of several 18th-century composers and others in Pulcinella. He treats them with such respect, creating such tender and charming music.”

The second half of the concert is dedicated entirely to 20th-century French music for the ballet, beginning with the rarely heard score by Claude Debussy (1862–1918) for his 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.

In his 2018 book Debussy: a Painter in Sound, Stephen Walsh describes Debussy as a composer for whom visual elements were central to his music and who in his spare time was more likely to be found at the Louvre than the Opera. He was a close friend of painter Henry Lerolle and was very taken with the work of Edgar Degas and Pierre-Auguste Renoir.

This is important not just because Jeux is a ballet but also because the scenario is primarily a set of somewhat static images of two girls and a boy in tennis outfits flirting with each other while supposedly playing tennis. Sergei Daighliev first approached Debussy with the idea in June 1912. The choreographer would be the legendary Vasily Nijinsky who had just scored a major hit in Debussy’s Prélude d’après-midi d’un faune the month before.

The composer’s first response, in a telegram, was “Subject ballet Jeux idiotic, not interested,” but Diaghilev doubled the fee and the deal was done.

One the surface the scenario, such as it is, is as straightforward as it is banal. As described in Walsh’s book, the titular games take place in or near a tennis court. Léon Baskt’s set for the premiere was a densely tree-lined London square. The curtain rises on an empty stage. A ball bounces on to the stage followed by a young man leaping across the stage in a tennis outfit. Two young girls appear and a series of flirtations follows, first between the young man and each of the girls in turn, then among all three of them. It culminates in “a kiss of disturbingly ecstatic intensity” at which point another tennis ball bounces on to the stage “like a passing policeman” and the players flee. After that an airplane was supposed to crash land on the stage, but Debussy apparently made removing that one of the requirements of accepting the commission.

But, as Nijinsky later wrote in his diary, tennis was just a cover for a much older game. Jeux, he wrote, “is the life of which Diaghilev dreamed…he wanted to make love to two boys at the same time and wanted those boys to make love to him. In the ballet the two girls represent the two boys and the young man is Diaghilev. I changed the characters, as love between three men could not be represented on the stage.”

When Diaghilev talked to Debussy, though, it was about the way he wanted the music to reflect a particular style of dancing. He wanted all three dancers to spend a lot of time en point—that is, on their toes—to create a feeling of lightness and elegance. Debussy jokingly said that “I’ll have to find an orchestra ‘without feet’ for this music. I’m thinking of that orchestral color that seems lit from behind.”

That footless orchestra announces itself so softly in the opening bars of Jeux that the opening bars might have been hard to hear for the First Nighters. The dynamic doesn’t rise above piano until a sforzando and a few fortissimo bars mark the entrance of the  tennis ball at around rehearsal number 8 (bar 70 or so). For the rest of the ballet forte markings are rare until the flirtation becomes heavier in the last several minutes.

Jeux is familiar territory for Denève, who recorded it with the Royal Scottish National Orchestra as part of an all-Debussy two-disc set for Chandos in 2012. At the time he was Music Director of the orchestra—his first such appointment and a big step up for a young conductor. During his tenure, which ended in 2011, he led the RSNO at the 2006 Proms concerts in London, and for the orchestra's first ever appearance in France in 2007. He would go on to conduct the Stuttgart Radio Symphony Orchestra (among others) before taking charge of the SLSO in 2019.

Finally, we have the Suite No. 2 from Bacchus et Ariane, op. 43 by Albert Roussel (1869–1937).  A relatively solitary and independent figure, probably due to the loss of his parents and grandparents before he turned ten, Roussel was influenced by both Impressionism and Neo-classicism. He absorbed those trends into his own personal style, which Nicolle Labelle (in Grove Online) describes as “harmonically spiced and rhythmically vigorous.”

Although not one of France’s better known musical sons, Roussel is a favorite of Denève, who recorded all of his symphonies with the RSNO for Naxos back in 2010. 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 of Ariadne (Ariane in French), the spurned lover of the ungrateful Theseus, abandoned on the isle of Naxos, is about to throw herself into the sea when the god Bacchus intervenes. “Shall we dance,” he asks (anticipating Rodgers and Hammerstein by millennia). She accepts, the bacchantes join in, and (in the words of the noted musicologist Nicolas Slonimsky), “the ballet ends in a triumph of Ariadne as the consort of the god of wine.”

I’ll drink to that.

The Essentials: the regular concert series resumes as Stéphane Denève conducts the SLSO in music by Stravinsky, Debussy, and Albert Roussel. The orchestra will accompany St. Louis Dance Theatre and choreographer Kirven Douthit-Boyd in an “adventurous collaboration to imagine Stravinsky’s Pulcinella Suite in an entirely new way. Also on the program are Stravinsky’s Dumbarton Oaks Concerto, Debussy’s ballet Jeux, and the Suite No. 2 from Roussel’s ballet Bacchus et Ariane. Performances are Saturday at 7:30 pm and Sunday at 3 pm, January 10 and 11, in Powell Symphony 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 7, from 8 to 10 pm as well as via on-demand streaming beginning on Thursday, January 8.

Symphony Review: Old Friends on New Year's Eve

Few things are more pleasurable than welcoming in the new year with old friends, both material and musical. That’s what we did on Wednesday,  December 31, at the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra’s annual New Year’s Eve Celebration, with Music Director Stéphane Denève at the podium. The experience more than lived up to expectations.

Stéphane Denève and the SLSO

The 2025 NYE concert was the first one to be presented in the newly renovated Powell Hall. The mood in the sold-out house was as bubbly as the Cava at the bar. And the music was comfortably familiar.

Certainly the opening work—the overture to Leonard Bernstein’s 1956 operetta Candide—needed no introduction. It was a favorite of former Music Director David Robertson, Denève made it part of the SLSO’s European tour program in 2023, and former Assistant Conductor Stephanie Childress used it to kick off her NYE program that same year. The piece is a certified rouser with (to quote a George M. Cohan lyric) “plenty of biff and bang,” including some showy stuff for the horns. A tip of the topper to Associate Principal Thomas Jöstlein and the rest of the section for their fine work and to the rest of the band for their flawless playing.

Being a work by an American composer based on a novel by a Frenchman (Voltaire), the Candide overture neatly set the tone for a lively night of Franco-American music making. Up next were five movements from the two suites George Bizet assembled from his incidental music for the 1869 melodrama L’Arlésienne (The Girl from Arles) by Alphonse Daudet. Léon Carvalho commissioned Bizet to compose the music for an 1872 production of the work in hopes that it would be “a powerful attraction” that would “soften somewhat the cruelty of the play.” Audience response to it was unenthusiastic but Bizet’s suites (which premiered later that same year) were a hit and have remained so ever since.

Denève chose some of the more tuneful and lively selections for the suites, starting with the dramatic Carillion (Suite No. 1, 4^th movement), in which the horns evoke the tolling of church bells. The quiet opening and unusually slow tempo of the following Adagietto (1, 3)  provided a marked contrast with both the Carillion and the cheerfully rustic Minuetto (1, 2) that came next. The trio section of the Minuetto featured some nice work by Nathan Nabb on alto saxophone and the flutes under Principal Andrea Kaplan as did the Minuet (2, 3), in which they were joined by harpist Megan Stout. The Farandole (4,3) with its insistent percussion and quotes from the Provençal Christmas carol “La Marcha dei reis,” brought it all to a blazing conclusion, for which kudos are owed to the brass and percussion section.

Rounding out the first half was, in Denève’s words, “musical Champagne,” in the consumption of which “no moderation is necessary.” He was speaking of the set of ten of the 24 numbers from the ballet Gaîté Parisienne (literally Parisian Gaiety, although I think Parisian Playfulness might capture the spirit better). The popular 1938 ballet uses music by Jacques Offenbach (1819–1880) arranged by composer/conductor by Manuel Rosenthal (1904–2003).  Denève rearranged the order of the numbers a bit to make the entire 20 minutes flow better, which as you can hear in the attached playlist (for which I used Rosenthal’s own 1999 recording, despite his slow tempos), worked quite well. The concluding Vivo, based on the Galop (a.k.a. “The Can-Can”) from Act II of Offenbach’s satirical Orphée aux enfers (Orpheus in the Underworld), sent everyone off to refill their drinks in a properly upbeat frame of mind.

Katie Mahan. Photo courtesy of the SLSO

The second half of the concert was devoted entirely to music of George Gershwin: the Rhapsody in Blue and An American in Paris in the same arrangements Denève used for the 2021 NYE concerts. I had some thoughts about those particular orchestrations back then, so I won’t repeat it all here. It’s enough to say that while I personally prefer the Ferde Grofé and Gershwin originals, Denève, the orchestra, and soloist Katie Mahan did such a spectacular job with them that I was happy to toast their success with a glass of genuine bubbly.

Mahan’s name was new to me, and I must say I was mightily impressed by her ability to put her own stamp on Gershwin’s music without, as far as I could tell, changing a single note of it. She has earned praise for her Gershwin performances and recordings (her orchestral debut was the challenging Concerto in F) and I can see why. Hers was very personal and emotionally powerful Rhapsody, backed up by stellar performances from Denève and the orchestra. 

Those opening solos by Associate Principal Clarinet Robert Walker and Principal Trumpet Steven Franklin were particularly slinky. Gershwin was delighted with the famous original solo by Ross Gorman of the Paul Whiteman band and Walker did an excellent job of reproducing it.

Mahan’s encore was a positively luxurious reading of Debussy’s Clair de lune from the 1905 Suite bergamasque. You can hear her 2019 recording of Clair de lune as part of her all-Debussy album for KM Classic.

As for An American in Paris, Denève and the orchestra sounded just as splendid this time around as they did back in 2021. Denève’s interpretation was as elegant as it was then, nicely emphasizing Gershwin’s mid-1920’s harmonies. It’s a reminder that the composer was, in his own words, writing “in typical French style, in the manner of Debussy and The Six.” It was a memorable musical send-off for a difficult year.

And, yes, everybody stood to applaud and stayed standing to sing “Auld Lang Syne” at the end.

Upcoming: the regular concert series resumes as Stéphane Denève conducts the SLSO in music by Stravinsky, Debussy, and Albert Roussel. The orchestra will accompany St. Louis Dance Theatre and choreographer Kirven Douthit-Boyd in an “adventurous collaboration to imagine Stravinsky’s Pulcinella Suite in an entirely new way. Also on the program are Stravinsky’s Dumbarton Oaks Concerto, Debussy’s ballet Jeux, and the Suite No. 2 from Roussel’s ballet Bacchus et Ariane. Performances are Saturday at 7:30 pm and Sunday at 3 pm, January 10 and 11, in Powell Symphony 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 7, from 8 to 10 pm.

Symphony Preview: Sleepers, awake!

“What’s so funny,” asked songwriter Nick Lowe in 1974, ”‘bout peace, love and understanding?” Good question, that. These days, it seems, it’s not so much “funny” as anti-American. And, of course, “woke.”

How is this relevant to the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra (SLSO) concerts former Assistant Conductor Gemma New (now Principal Conductor of the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra) will lead this Saturday and Sunday (March 1 and 2)? Simple: it’s relevant because the featured work is the Symphony No. 9 in D minor, Op. 125 (Choral) by Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827)—music that, in its advocacy of universal human fellowship, is about as “woke” as a 200-year-old piece can get.

[Note: at this point I’m going to quote—ahem—liberally from the article I wrote in 2020 for the SLSOs last performance of the Ninth. It’s still very relevant, trust me.]

The symphony’s commitment to inclusivity is clear from the first verse of Friedrich Schiller's poem "An die Freude" ("Ode to Joy"), which Beethoven uses in modified form as the text for the final movement:

Freude, schöner Götterfunken,
Tochter aus Elysium,
Wir betreten feuertrunken,
Himmlische, dein Heiligtum!
Deine Zauber binden wieder
Was die Mode streng geteilt;
Alle Menschen werden Brüder
Wo dein sanfter Flügel weilt.

Which, in a singable English translation, becomes:

Joy, thou source of light immortal,
Daughter of Elysium!
Touched with fire, to the portal,
Of thy radiant shrine, we come.
Your sweet magic, frees all others,
Held in custom's rigid rings,
All men on earth become brothers,
In the haven of your wings.

It's hard to justify warfare, apartheid, oligarchy, and other core ideas of the far right with those sentiments. Ditto autocratic rule, which is not surprising, given that Beethoven was "a staunch republican and in both his letters and conversation spoke frequently of the importance of liberty."

Bernstein at the Berlin Wall.
Photo by Andreas Meyer-Schwickerath

The late Leonard Bernstein certainly understood that. In December 23, 1989, he led an orchestra of musicians from New York, London, Paris, Leningrad, and both East and West Germany in a performance of the Ninth in Berlin to celebrate the lifting of regulations governing travel between East and West Berlin—a change which marked the beginning of the end of the infamous Berlin Wall. To drive the point home, he changed the word "freude" ("joy") to "freiheit" ("freedom"), making it literally an "Ode to Freedom."

Maybe it’s time to revisit that change. Especially since it has often been speculated that “Freiheit” was the word Schiller originally planned to use anyway. “The thought lies near,“ wrote Alexander Wheelock Thayer in Volume III of his Life of Ludwig van Beethoven, “that it was the early form of the poem, when it was still an ‘Ode to Freedom’ (not ‘to Joy’), which first aroused enthusiastic admiration for it in Beethoven’s mind.” Maybe it’s time for a performance at Lincoln Center?

Let me conclude with nine interesting (I hope) facts about Beethoven's Ninth:

1. By the time the Ninth had its premiere, Beethoven was already completely deaf. He never heard a note of his last major work live.
2. Nevertheless, Beethoven "had absolute pitch, so he could imagine the sounds and the harmony in his mind without hearing them on an instrument."
3. Beethoven spent at least three decades trying to set Schiller's poem to music. As an article on the Ninth in the Encyclopedia Britannica notes, the composer started working on a musical setting of the poem as early as the 1790s and, once he finally decided to include it in his symphony, he "considered and rejected more than 200 different versions of the 'Ode to Joy' theme alone."
4. The music (but not the words) of Beethoven's setting of the "Ode to Joy" was adopted by the Council of Europe as its anthem in 1972 and as the official anthem of the EU in 1985.
5. That last fact might explain why, on July 2, 2019, members of Nigel Farge's Brexit party attending the European Parliament in Strasbourg petulantly turned their backs on a performance of the EU anthem.
6. All audio CDs are 12 cm in diameter because that was the size necessary to accommodate a complete performance of the Ninth which usually runs between 65 and 74 minutes.
7. The instruments used by contemporary orchestras are, in many cases, very different from those used in Beethoven's day, so most contemporary performances sound very different from what the audience would have heard at the 1824 premiere. Roger Norrington's 1987 recording with the London Classical Players (a personal favorite of mine) was the first one to use reproductions of period instruments. At 62 minutes, it's also one of the shortest.
8. The finale of the Ninth makes huge demands on the chorus. You can hear that most clearly in Wilhelm Furtwängler's 1951 Bayreuth Festival recording (another of my favorites, even if it comes from a completely different universe than Norrignton's). At 74 minutes, it's one of the longest.
9. Bottom line: the Ninth is great enough to have inspired wildly different interpretations from both critics and performers. As Nicholas Cook wrote in his book "Beethoven: Symphony No. 9" (cited in an excellent article by Tom Service at The Guardian): "Of all the works in the mainstream repertory of Western music, the Ninth Symphony seems the most like a construction of mirrors, reflecting and refracting the values, hopes, and fears of those who seek to understand and explain it ... From its first performance [in Vienna in 1824] up to the present day, the Ninth Symphony has inspired diametrically opposed interpretations."

Kevin Puts. Photo by David White.

Sharing the bill with the Beethoven Ninth back in 2020 was the “Silent Night Elegy” by St. Louis-born composer Kevin Puts. His music will keep company with Beethoven’s again this weekend as the concerts open with the St. Louis premiere of his “Hymn to the Sun,” commissioned by the Sun Valley Summer Symphony in 2008. In his program notes, Puts cites the “ancient Egyptian appeal to the deific sun” as the inspiration for the piece:

“I imagined a wild, sacred dance to call forth the sun and all its powers, and then the sudden and magnificent rising on the horizon. The image of the sun’s rays binding all the lands is particularly moving to me in the context of today’s tense global climate.”

“Hymn to the Sun” isn’t available on Spotify, so it’s not part of my playlist, but you can watch a 2017 video by the Detroit Youth Symphony Orchestra that makes it abundantly clear how accurate the composer’s description is. Puts wrote it as a “curtain raiser” and to my ears it more than meets the requirements for that category.

The mood turns more solemn with the next work—another St. Louis premiere. It’s the Fantasia and Fugue in C minor, BWV 537, by J.S. Bach (1685–1750) in a 1921 orchestration by Sir Edward Elgar (1857–1934). As orchestral transcriptions of Bach’s organ works go, I’d say it’s quite a decent one.

Elgar circa age 60, from
The Musical Quarterly,
Vol. 3, No. 2 (April 1917)

I’ve provided an excellent 1980 recording of the Bach original by the legendary Marie-Claire Alain as the first item in my playlist, followed immediately by Elgar’s orchestration performed by our own Conductor Laureate Leonard Slatkin and the BBC Philharmonic. Listen to them back to back and I think you’ll agree that Elgar did a masterful job of translating Bach into the idiom of early 20th-century orchestra.

The final moments of both the Fantasia and the Fugue employ the full resources of the post-Wagner orchestra with spectacular results. We’re talking over 80 musicians, including five horns, three trumpets, three trombones, tuba, two harpists, and seven percussionists. Even for the Stifel stage, that’s quite party.

The Essentials: Gemma New conducts the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra and vocal soloists Susanna Phillips (soprano), Sasha Cooke (mezzo-soprano), Jamez McCorkle (tenor), and Nathan Berg, bass-baritone in the Symphony No. 9 by Beethoven. Also on the program are two St. Louis premieres: “Hymn to the Sun” by Kevin Puts and the Fantasia and Fugue in C minor, BWV 537, by Bach (arr. Elgar). Performances are Saturday at 7:30 pm and Sunday at 3 pm, March 1 and 2, at the Stifel Theatre, downtown.

The Saturday performance will not be broadcast live, but at 7:30 pm that night St. Louis Public Radio will play a recording of the February 8, 2020 Beethoven Ninth with Stéphane Denève conducting. At the time, I called that the best damn Beethoven Ninth that I have ever heard. If you’re not going to be at Stifel that night, I recommend tuning in.

Symphony Review: Afkham and Ashkar are a Dynamic Duo with the SLSO

David Afkham. Photo by Gisela Schenker courtesy of the SLSO

It’s always intriguing to see what happens when a guest conductor makes his debut with the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra. German-born conductor David Afkham’s first appearance with the orchestra last Sunday (February 23) was quite a striking one, with dynamic performances of Mozart, Brahms, and contemporary (b. 1985) Finnish composer Outi Tarkiainen.

[Find out more about the music with my symphony preview.]

This weekend marked the second appearance of Tarkiainen’s music on an SLSO program (the first was her 2019 “Midnight Sun Variations” in 2021), and I was struck with the similarity between that work and the one we’ll hear this weekend, her 2021 “The Ring of Fire and Love” from 2021. Both works begin and end quietly with the orchestra’s highest voices playing against the lowest, both build to a blow-your-hair-back sonic explosion, and both conclude almost (but not quite) as they began.

Both were also heavily influenced by the experience of Tarkiainen giving birth to her first child and both have a strongly visual aspect for the composer, who is synesthetic—someone who literally sees music as colors. In this respect, she’s in some august company, including Scriabin, Rimski-Korsakov, and Gully Foyle in Alfred Bester’s science fiction classic “The Stars My Destination” (which, BTW, now looks eerily prescient).

Those superficial similarities aside though, “The Ring of Fire and Love” feels like a much bigger and more cinematic work. In a BBC interview, the composer described “Midnight Sun Variations” as being mostly about “the colors of the northern sky during the summer…but also about the opening of a woman’s body to accommodate a new life.” As Tarkiainen writes on her web site, “The Ring of Fire and Love” extends the scope to include the geological and astronomical “Rings of Fire” as well as birth experience:

Outi Tarkiainen. Photo by Saara Salmi
courtesy of the SLSO

“The Ring of Fire is a volcanic belt that surrounds the Pacific Ocean and in which most of the world’s earthquakes occur. It is also the term referring to the bright ring of sunlight around the moon at the height of a solar eclipse... Yet, the same expression is also used to describe what a woman feels when, as she gives birth, the baby’s head passes through her pelvis. That moment is the most dangerous in the baby’s life, its little skull being subjected to enormous pressure, preparing it for life in a way unlike any other. The Ring of Fire and Love is a work for orchestra about this earth-shattering, creative, cataclysmic moment they travel through together.”

“Cataclysmic,” as it happens, is a pretty good way to describe the experience of seeing “The Ring of Fire and Love” live. The delicate passages for harp, celesta, and muted trumpet that make up most of the second half of the work were nicely done by Megan Stout, Peter Henderson, and Steven Franklin, respectively. The combination of shrieking high woodwinds and ominous, growling percussion that open the piece conjure images of something big and dramatic—a promise kept by the massive orchestral blowout at almost exactly the halfway point.

The piece was a major attention grabber. Vast quantities of congratulations are due to all concerned.

Piano Concerto No. 24 in C minor, K.491 by W.A. Mozart (1756–1791), while lacking the HD flash of “The Ring of Fire and Love,” is still a strikingly dark and dramatic work. First performed in 1786 in Vienna, it’s scored for what was, for Mozart’s time, a pretty large orchestra, including woodwinds, horns, and tympani. The long, dramatic opening movement would have felt like cutting-edge stuff at the time and is widely viewed as one of his greatest piano concertos. Beethoven and Brahms were both big fans.

Soloist Saleem Ashkar was a perfect choice for this material. When he made his debut here with the Mendelssohn Concerto No. 2, I noted the impressive combination of technical skill and terpsichorean lightness in his playing—both of which were evident on Sunday. His cadenzas (Mozart didn’t provide any) had a Beethoven-esque feel to them that might be out of place in an earlier Mozart concerto but felt exactly right here. Afkham’s direction did not stint on the darkness that pervades the concerto, especially in that first movement, but it also brought out the tenderness in the in second movement. Yes, there moments in that movement where the drama returns, but overall it felt almost like a cradle song.

Saleem Ashkar, photo courtesy of the SLSO

The concert concluded with the Symphony No. 1, Op. 68, by Johannes Brahms (1833–1897). Like the Mozart concerto, it’s in C minor and like “The Ring of Fire and Love” it begins on a portentous note with strings Un poco sostenuto over the steady tread of the tympani. Like many composers of his time, Brahms composed in the looming shadow of Beethoven (“You have no idea what it's like to hear the footsteps of a giant like that behind you,” he once said), and I tend to hear those footsteps in that introduction. Certainly Afkham’s reading had plenty of ominous weight, offering an effective contrast with the propulsive Allegro that followed.

The Andante sostenuto second movement featured meltingly lovely solos from Principal Oboe Jelena Dirks and Principal Clarinet Scott Andrews as well as a duet between Concertmaster David Halen and Principal Horn Roger Kaza. The Un poco Allegretto e grazioso third movement was graceful and easygoing with good stuff from the clarinets (Andrews and Tzuying Huang). Afkham seemed particularly caught up in the lively Trio section, but then so was I.

A brief pause, and then we were into the stormy opening of the final movement with its titanic struggle between darkness and light and its famous main theme (which later became the theme of the hymn “Refuge”). The horn section were really in their element here, rich and warm in the main theme and simply blazing in the C major finale.

I had planned to finish this with a few words about Afkham’s podium style and the expressive use of his left hand, but upon visiting the conductor’s web site I discovered that the Chicago Tribune had beaten me to the punch:

“Afkham was a model of physical grace and musical purpose on the podium. His left hand traced broad arcs of sound while his right hand articulated beats and phrases with the utmost clarity and precision. Every interpretative choice was well-motivated and grounded in an ability to maintain orchestral control that was exacting, yet never rigid.”

I couldn’t have said it better myself.

Next from the SLSO: On Friday February 28 at 7:30 pm, Grammy Award-winning vocalist Donald Lawrence joins the SLSO, the IN UNISON Chorus, and vocal soloists for “Lift Every Voice,” the annual Black History Month celebration. Kevin McBeth conducts. Then on Saturday at 7:30 pm and Sunday at 3 pm, former SLSO Resident Conductor Gemma New conducts the orchestra and vocal soloists for Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9 along with “Hymn to the Sun” by Kevin Puts and Elgar’s orchestration of J.S. Bach’s Fantasia and Fugue in C minor, BWV 537. All three performances take place at the Stifel Theatre downtown.

Symphony Preview: 'Tis the season, part 5: Ring in the New

The St. Louis Symphony Orchestra’s (SLSO) holiday programming concludes Tuesday, December 31, at 7:30 pm with the annual “New Year’s Eve Celebration” concert. This year the figure on the podium will be a familiar one—former SLSO Assistant Conductor Stephanie Childress. She conducted the NYE concert in 2022 as well, at which time I wrote that she had  “won the audience over from the very start with a cheerful and unassuming stage presence.” It’s reasonable to expect more of the same this time around.

[Preview the music with my Spotify playlist.]

Daniela Candillari
Photo courtesy of the SLSO

One thing will be very different this New Year’s Eve, though. In the past, details of the program have always been kept secret until concert time. This year the theme is “dance music from around the world” and the program is available at the SLSO web site. We’ve been told to expect “a few surprises along the way,” but here’s a quick look at the official list.

Antonín Dvořák (1841 – 1904):  Slavonic Dance No. 1. Dvořák wrote two sets of Slavonic Dances (Op. 46 in 1878 and Op. 72 in 1886) as pieces for two pianos. They were so popular he was obliged to orchestrate them—and those versions proved even more popular. Dance No. 1, in C major, is a certified rouser of a furiant, a lively dance in alternating 2/4 and 3/4 time.

Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky (1840 – 1893):  Overture from “The Nutcracker”. The popular 1892 ballet is one of those works that is inescapable at this time of year. While the ballet is not generally regarded as one of the composer’s best, the suite that he assembled from it prior to the premiere has become a concert staple. The “Miniature Overture,” with its emphasis on the orchestra’s higher voices, neatly sets up a fairy tale atmosphere.

Anna Clyne (b. 1980): “Masquerade” for Orchestra. Composed for and premiered at the 2013 Last Night at the Proms. “Masquerade” is a short, wildly energetic romp for large orchestra. As Clyne writes at her publisher’s web site, it was inspired by “the original mid-18th century promenade concerts held in London’s pleasure gardens… where people from all walks of life mingled to enjoy a wide array of music…Combined with costumes, masked guises and elaborate settings, masquerades created an exciting, yet controlled, sense of occasion and celebration. It is this that I wish to evoke.” And, in fact, there’s an effervescent exuberance to the piece that’s a perfect fit for New Year’s Eve.

Joseph Turrin: Fandango. This 2000 commission for the New Mexico Wind Symphony is scored for solo trumpet, trombone, and concert band. “This six-minute piece,” writes the composer, “explores the rhythmic, melodic and syncopated elements of the Spanish fandango dance form (A lively dance in triple time for two dancers).” Principal Trumpet Steven Franklin and Principal Trombone Jonathan Randazzo will have the featured roles Tuesday night.

Samuel Coleridge-Taylor (1875 – 1912)  “Valse de la Reine” (“The Queen’s Waltz”) from “Four Characteristic Waltzes,” Op. 22. Although his music is rarely heard these days, the British-born Coleridge-Taylor was, in his time, a celebrated composer, conductor, and teacher. Unlike his more famous works, such as his three cantatas based on Longfellow’s “The Song of Hiawatha,” the “Characteristic Waltzes” are charming little “salon” pieces of the sort you might hear genteel young ladies playing at the pianoforte—not profound, but definitely “ear worms.”

William Walton (1902 – 1983): Crown Imperial. Composed for the coronation of King George VI in 1937, “Crown Imperial” is very much in the rousing patriotic tradition of, say, Elgar’s “Pomp and Circumstance” marches. Walton’s inspiration for the title comes from a speech in Shakespeare’s “Henry V” describing the trappings of kingship, including

the balm, the sceptre and the ball,
The sword, the mace, the crown imperial,
The intertissued robe of gold and pearl

Camille Saint-Saëns (1835 – 1921): "Danse Baccanale” from “Samson et Dalila” The composer was a dedicated world traveler who took inspiration from the places he visited. It’s hard to know how much of his 1874 trip to Algiers wound up in the lush exoticism of the Act III Temple of Dagon orgy scene from his 1876 opera, but it certainly packs a great dramatic punch, especially in the ecstatic coda.

Leonard Bernstein (1918 – 1990): "Lonely Town” from “Three Dance Episodes from On the Town.” The first and last movements from the composer’s first stage hit are brash and pure Broadway, albeit with some sophisticated harmonies and polyrhythms that weren't typical of the Great White Way back then. The “Lonely Town” second movement, on the other hand, sets a more elegiac and wistful mood, with muted trumpet over clarinets and strings.

Johann Strauss, Jr. (1825 – 1899): “Frühlingsstimmen” (“Voices of Spring”). It wouldn’t be New Year’s Eve without at least one Strauss waltz. This one was written with an optional coloratura vocal line and while I’m not sure which version we’ll hear on Tuesday (there’s no soprano soloist listed, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t a surprise guest star in the wings), I couldn’t resist including the vocal version in the play list, especially since the singer is the celebrated Kathleen Battle (b. 1948) and the recording is from the 1987 New Year’s Eve concert in Vienna. Prosit!

José Serebrier (b. 1938): Selections from the  “Carmen Symphony in Twelve Scenes.” Since I have no idea which selections will be on the program (although I’ll be amazed if it doesn’t conclude with the “Gypsy Dance”), I have included all twelve in my play list. This 2004 suite is more properly a collection of orchestral excerpts from Bizet’s opera than a symphony, although it does follow the arc of the plot. Serebrier makes minimal changes in Bizet’s original score, although he has assigned the original vocal lines to instruments in the same ranges. Carmen’s famous “Habanera,” for example, is sung by the alto sax and Escamillo’s “Toreador” is assigned to the trombone.

Serebrier is best known as a conductor rather than a composer (although his catalog of compositions is sizeable), so I have included his own recording of the work with the Orquestra Simfonica de Barcelona i Nacional de Catalunya in my playlist.

It’s likely that there will be additions to the program on Tuesday night, probably including an “Auld Lang Syne” sing-along, but we’ll have to wait until then to find out.

The regular concert season resumes on January 10 and 11 as Opera Theatre’s Principal Conductor Daniela Candillari leads the orchestra in music by Dvořák and Samuel Barber, along with the world premiere of the Accordion Concerto by composer and multi-instrumentalist Nina Shekhar with Hanzhi Wang as the soloist. Check out the SLSO web site for details.

This article originally appeared at 88.1 KDHX, where Chuck Lavazzi is the senior performing arts critic.

Symphony Preview: 'Tis the season, part 4: Year of the Dragon

Special St. Louis Symphony Orchestra (SLSO) holiday programming continues this weekend (Saturday and Sunday, December 28 and 29)

Scott Terrell
Photo courtesy of the SLSO

Saturday at 7 pm and Sunday at 2 pm, Scott Terrell conducts the SLSO in “How to Train Your Dragon in Concert.” The orchestra will play John Powell’s Oscar®-nominated score for the 2010 DreamWorks animated film while the movie plays in HD on the big screen at the Stifel Center. Based on the 2003 novel of the same name by British author Cressida Cowell, “How to Train Your Dragon” spawned two additional full-length animated films, five shorts and, coming next year, a live-action remake of the original.

Powell’s composing credits include popular animated films such as “Shrek,” “Kung-Fu Panda,” and “Chicken Run.” His sources of inspiration for the epic sound of “How to Train Your Dragon” include Celtic folk music and the massive sound canvases of Jean Sibelius and other Scandinavian composers. Powell is a prolific music producer as well. His company, 5 Cat Studios, specializes in soundtrack music and classical and contemporary concert works.

John Powell
johnpowellmusic.com

Terrell, who has conducted the SLSO in the past, is an educator as well as a performer. He holds the Virginia Martin Howard Chair at the Louisiana State University School of Music, where he is Associate Professor of Orchestral Studies. He’s also active in the world of opera, having conducted for Kentucky Opera, Hong Kong Opera, and Arizona Opera. Earlier in his career, Terrell was chosen as a fellowship conductor for the inaugural season of the American Academy of Conducting at the Aspen Music Festival, where he participated in classes with, among many others, former SLSO Music Directors David Robertson and Leonard Slatkin.

Finally, a few works about the author of the original novel would seem to be in order, since writers whose works become the basis for major movies sometimes fade into the background, the experience of J.K. Rowling notwithstanding.

To begin with, let’s give the author her full title: the Hon. Cressida Cowell, MBE (Most Excellent Order of the British Empire), FRSL (Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature). She’s an ambassador for the National Literacy Trust and the Reading Agency, a Trustee of World Book Day, and a founder patron of the Children’s Media Foundation. Born Cressida Hare in 1966 in London, Cowell is the daughter of Michael Hare, 2^nd Viscount Blakenham and the niece-in-law of U.S. Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer. Her husband, Simon Cowell, is the former director and interim CEO of the International Save the Children Alliance.

Cressida Cowell
www.cressidacowell.co.uk

She spent her summers on the islands of the Inner Hebrides, just off the west coast of Scotland, and it was there that her talents as a writer and artist became apparent. Recalling that aspect of her childhood in a New York Times article in 2000, she writes:

The island had no roads or electricity—just a storm-blown, windy wilderness of sea birds and heather. My family and I would be dropped off like castaways on the island by a local boatman for the summer holidays and picked up again weeks later. While we were staying on the island, we had no way of contacting the outside world.

Because there wasn’t any electricity, the house was lit by candlelight. Without a telephone or a television, I spent a lot of time drawing and writing stories. In the evenings, my father told me and my siblings tales of the Vikings who invaded the island 1,200 years before, of the quarrelsome ancient British tribes who fought one another, and of dragons who were supposed to live in the caves in the cliffs of the island.

The rest, as the cliché goes, is history—and a prolific literary career. In addition to her dozen “How to Train Your Dragon” books, her publications include the series “The Wizards” (five books), “Treetop Twins Adventures” (twelve), “Treetop Twins Wilderness Adventures (another dozen), “Tiny Detectives” (thirteen), “Emily Brown” (five), and fourteen other “one of” books. As of the current Wikipedia article, anyway. The bottom line is that she is a force majeure in children’s lit with multiple projects running simultaneously.

Cowell is also an environmentalist who is concerned that too few children today have the opportunity to explore the natural world. “What might that mean,” she asks, “for their future creativity and their relationship to the natural world? As we face the threat of the climate crisis and the slow destruction of habitats around the world, we must give children the opportunity to interact with nature in a ‘wild’ way, so that they learn to preserve the natural world around us.”

Granted, those ideas aren’t central to this weekend’s film, but it’s worth having them in the back of your mind as you marvel at the imaginative animation and luxuriate in the exciting score.

SLSO holiday concerts conclude on Tuesday, December 31, with the annual New Year’s Eve Celebration. More on that in my next preview.

Symphony Review: Mostly Mozart fortnight finishes on a high note

Last Friday and Saturday (November 15^th and 16^th) it was all Mozart (almost) all the time, as Music Director Stéphane Denève led the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra in two symphonies, an opera overture, and a piano concerto by Mozart, along with contemporary composer Anna Clyne’s “Within Her Arms” from 2008. I attended the Friday night concert and loved every minute.

It all began with Mozart’s Symphony No. 1 in E-flat major, K. 16, penned when Mozart was eight years old and known primarily as a piano prodigy. It’s a modest little bagatelle with a strangely mysterious second movement. The six-measure phrase in the bass line suggests someone cautiously tiptoeing in the shadows and wouldn’t leave my mind for days afterward.

Stéphane Denève
Photo: Dilip Vishwanat, courtesy of the SLSO

It's trivial stuff, but it was played with the same loving attention that Denève and company gave the weightier pieces on the program. And it is, after all, pretty impressive even for a prodigy and even if he did (probably) have some help from his dad.

Next Behzod Abduraimov joined the band for the Piano Concerto No. 20 in D minor, K. 466. It’s full of drama for two movements and then bursts into a cheerfully vigorous finale. Friday night Abduraimov delivered the same combination of technical assurance and wide emotional range that so impressed me in his Grieg concerto back in 2018. He used the Beethoven cadenzas for the first and last movements (Beethoven loved the concerto and played it often) and played them with authority.

Denève was so completely in synch with Abduraimov all the way that they might as well have been two minds with a single thought—or at least with a unified vision of the music. Denève was especially attentive to Mozart’s drama; the abrupt change from piano (p) to forte (f) at measure 15 of the first movement struck like a thunderbolt. It was quite a remarkable performance all the way around, with a wider emotional compass than I have heard in some recordings.

Abduraimov got the expected standing ovation. What was less expected was his encore choice: the third of Liszt’s six Paganini Etudes, S. 141, nicknamed “La Campanella” (“The Handbell”) because of the way the demanding right-hand part imitates the sound of a small bell. The selection of such a challenging piece was gutsy after a work as demanding as the Mozart concerto, but the glittering quality of the performance left no doubt about the wisdom of that decision.

After intermission it was back to Mozart’s youth with the overture to his  opera seria “Mitridate, re di Ponto” (“Mithridates, King of Pontus”), which he composed at the ripe old age of 14. It’s essentially a short suite of three tunes from the opera, the second of which had some notable playing by flautists Hannah Hammel and Associate Principal Jennifer Nitchman. It’s lightweight stuff that contrasted strongly with the more emotionally intense “Within Her Arms.”

In pre-concert remarks, Denève explained his choice of the Clyne work by noting that while Mozart was in Paris writing the final piece on the program— the Symphony No. 31 in D Major, K.297 (“Paris”)—his mother was dying. The symphony was premiered on June 18^th, 1778, and on July 3^rd Anna Maria Mozart breathed her last. You don’t hear any of Mozart’s grief in the symphony, so Denève chose to acknowledge that absence with Clyne’s work, written as an elegy for the death of her mother in 2008.

Scored for fifteen strings (six violins and three each of violas, cellos, and basses) “Within Her Arms” is somewhat mysterious music. The main theme has the feel of a British folk tune, but the body of the work summons up a haunting sense of aural space that reminded me of Vaughn Williams’s “Fantasia on a Theme of Thomas Tallis.” It rises from a whisper to a roar before finally fading away, slowly, into nothingness.

For this performance, Denève had the musicians gathered into a semicircle with the violins and violas in front, standing. That made it easier to hear the way in which Clyne plays with the physical space on the stage, bouncing fragments of the melody among the players to create that sense of a kind of sonic cathedral. It’s a complex, layered work that demands (and got) superb playing by an ensemble of (mostly) principal and associate principal members of the SLSO strings.

The “Paris” symphony brought the evening to a happy conclusion. Mozart knew that Parisian audiences liked big, noisy works with (in the words of George M. Cohan) “plenty of biff and bang” and, since he was hoping for steady work in the City of Light, he happily gave it to them. Written for the largest orchestra he had ever used (including, for the first time, clarinets) and with liberal use of devices like the coup d’archet (unison string playing) beloved of the French, K. 297 aimed to please. And it did.

This is music of dignity, grace, and spirit. It got a crackling, energetic reading from Denève and the orchestra. The Allegro assai first movement was appropriately noble. The Andante second movement was elegant and even a bit cheeky at times (the little grace notes in the violins felt like the musical equivalent of a wink). And the Allegro finale, with its scurrying eighth notes in the second violins, dashed along at a brisk and bracing pace.

This pair of concerts were Maestro Denève’s last appearances this year with the orchestra, but if you missed them take heart: through December 17^th you can listen to a live recording of the Saturday night performance at the SLSO website. Even if you managed to catch this one live, it is worth listening to again. Abduraimov played a different encore on Saturday (Rachmaninoff’s Prelude No. 5 in G major), but otherwise the program is the same.

Regular season concerts continue this weekend (November 22 and 24) at the Touhill as Jonathan Heyward conducts the SLSO and piano soloist Yeol Eum Son in William Grant Still’s “Threnody: In Memory of Jean Sibelius,” Prokofiev’s Piano Concerto No. 2, and Sibelius’s Symphony No. 5. A recording of the Friday morning concert will air on Saturday, November 23, at 7:30 pm on St. Louis Public Radio and Classic 107.3.

This article originally appeared at 88.1 KDHX, where Chuck Lavazzi is the senior performing arts critic.

Symphony Review: An optimistic universe in Mozart's "Requiem"

“The universe is optimistic.” Thus spake Music Director Stéphane Denève at the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra this past Saturday (November 9). The inspiration for that declaration, he said, was the fact that the final chord in the score of Mozart’s “Requiem” (the major work on the program) is ambiguous. It could be either major or minor, but the overtones suggest the former.

[Find out more about the music with my symphony preview.]

I see the Universe as being indifferent myself, but I can hear what he means in the music, especially in a performance as good as the one I witnessed Saturday night.

Erin Freeman
Photo courtesy of the SLSO

Under the direction of its new director Erin Freemen the SLSO Chorus sang with a mix of power and clarity that was a joy to hear. The latter was especially apparent in, for example, the contrapuntal sections of the “Kyrie” and “Sanctus,” in which the individual lines were lucidly delineated. Newly installed baffles behind the singers might have helped project their sound a bit more effectively than in the past, but that was just icing on the proverbial cake. This was and is a splendid group of singers of whom Freeman is clearly proud.

Mozart’s “Requiem,” like Verdi’s (which the SLSO performed back in April), is unabashedly theatrical but not in the same way. Verdi was all about heaven-storming drama while Mozart was more interested in consolation here on earth. That’s not to say that he neglected the drama entirely—the “Dies Irae” and “Rex Tremendae” can be pretty intimidating. But Mozart—and his pupil Franz Xaver Süssmayr (1766–1803), who completed the “Requiem” after Mozart’s death—tempered the cataclysmic with the comforting.

That means that a good “Requiem” must bring us the tenderness along with the terror, and Denève’s performance certainly did that. His uncanny knack for highlighting interesting details and finding nuances that aren’t always apparent in the work stood him in good stead here. When Mozart and Süssmayr called for drama, it was there, but so was the compassion. This was a finely tuned reading that got equally fine playing from the orchestra.

Dashon Burton
Photo by Hunter Hart

Kudos are also due to the soloists, both individually and as members of the quartet.  Bass-baritone Dashon Burton and tenor Josh Lovell made a strong impression in the “Tuba mirum” duet with trombonist Jonathan Reycraft, although Burton seemed to falter a bit on the cadenza. Soprano Joélle Harvey and mezzo Kelly O’Connor displayed the deepest connection with both the audience and the text. All four were extremely moving in the heartfelt “Benedictus.”

The evening opened with Mozart’s 1788 Adagio and Fugue in C minor, K. 546, for strings. This is a stark and emotionally charged work consisting of a newly composed Adagio followed by an arrangement of the Fugue in C minor, K. 426, for two pianos from 1783. It was a genuine showpiece for the rich, full-bodied sound of the SLSO strings. Articulation was clean and the lines of the fugue were clearly laid out.

Somber as the mood was at that point, it became a bit darker with the next work, the "Vier Präludien und ernste Gesänge" ("Four Preludes and Serious Songs") by Detlev Glanert (b. 1960). Published in 2005, the work is an arrangement/expansion for baritone and orchestra of the last thing Brahms wrote, the Op. 121 "Four Serious Songs."  The songs are pure Brahms, but the preludes that separate them are a mix of the two composers. It’s not difficult to hear the transitions, but even so they are handled tastefully and complement rather than detract from the original songs.

The texts, adapted from the Lutheran Bible but stripped of any explicitly religious content, are meditations on death as sometimes bitter, sometimes comforting, and always inevitable. It’s not until the final song, “Wenn ich mit Meschen und mit Engleszugen redete” (“If I could speak with the tongues of men and of angels”), that the tone becomes consoling. Based on I Corinthians 13, it delivers a message that some alleged Christians these days are ignoring: “And now these three remain: faith, hope, and love; but the greatest of these is love.”

This was all beautifully sung by Burton. He captured the mood of each song, from authoritative to soothing, with emotional honesty and vocal power. The orchestra did justice to Glanert’s demanding preludes, and Denève brought it all together in a poignant interpretation that included a long moment of silence at the end—a perfect choice.

The SLSO’s Mozart celebration concludes this weekend (Friday and Saturday, November 15 and 16, at 7:30 pm) with Mozart’s Symphony No. 1 in E-flat major, Symphony No. 31 (“Paris”), and Piano Concerto No. 20 in D minor, K. 466. Behzod Abduraimov will be the soloist. Performances take place at the Touhill Performing Arts Center at the University of Missouri–St. Louis. Saturday’s concert will be broadcast live on St. Louis Public Radio and Classic 107.3.

This article originally appeared at 88.1 KDHX, where Chuck Lavazzi is the senior performing arts critic.

Symphony Preview: Distant drums

In Act I, scene 1 of Shakespeare’s comedy “Much Ado About Nothing,” Leonato, the Governor of Messina, plays down his niece Beatrice’s insulting description of Benedick, saying that there is “a kind of merry war betwixt Signior Benedick and her. They never meet but there’s a skirmish of wit between them.”

[Preview the music with the SLSO's Spotify playlist.]

You can hear that wit in the opening measures of the work that opens the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra concerts this Friday and Saturday (March 22 and 23) as Music Director Stéphane Denève leads the band in a performance of the overture to Hector Berlioz's 1862 operatic treatment of “Much Ado About Nothing,” "Béatrice et Bénedict.” The short, playful opening theme immediately calls to mind the thrust and parry of the verbal duel that invariably begins when Beatrice and Benedick meet.

Berlioz in 1832
Painting by Émile Signol

Berlioz wrote the libretto himself (even though he neither spoke nor read English all that well), considerably condensing the original "battle of the sexes" comedy in the process. Huge swathes of plot were axed, along with great comic characters like Constable Dogberry to create what the composer called “a caprice written with a point of a needle.” Written just after the monumental “Les Troyens,” the opera had great success at its Baden-Baden premiere as well as in Weimar a few months later. There was no French performance until 1890, though, and "Béatrice et Bénedict.” has never really made it into the standard repertoire.

The overture has fared better in concert halls. It gets high marks for the skill with which Berlioz uses themes from his score to create a kind of vitamin pill version of the opera, with all the comedic and dramatic ingredients combined into a single eight-minute tone poem. “Though drawn from no less than six different arias or ensembles,” writes Michel Austin at The Hector Berlioz website, “the music is seamlessly fused by Berlioz into a coherent symphonic whole, much as Weber had done in his overtures to Der Freischütz, Euryanthe, and Oberon."

Julia Wolfe
Photo: Peter Serling

Up next is the local premiere of “Pretty” by contemporary American composer Julia Wolfe (b. 1958). A co-commission by the SLSO, Berlin Philharmonic (where the world premiere took place last June), Houston Symphony, and the Philadelphia Orchestra, the work’s title is frankly ironic. One might even say that it’s at war with the actual music which, based on the brief excerpts I’ve heard at the Berlin Philharmonic’s Digital Concert Hall, is a high-energy jamboree that’s anything but “pretty” in the conventional sense.

“The word ‘pretty’ has had a complicated relationship to women,” writes the composer on her website.  “It implies an attractiveness without any rough edges, without strength or power…My Pretty is a raucous celebration – embracing the grit of fiddling, the relentlessness of work rhythms, and inspired by the distortion and reverberation of rock and roll.”

War pops up once again as the backdrop for the work that concludes this weekend's concerts, Beethoven's Piano Concerto No. 5 in E-flat major, op. 73 (“Emperor”). Indeed, the concerto was composed under the cloud of war and occupation.

When Beethoven was writing the concerto in 1809, Vienna was not so much the fabled “City of Dreams” as a metropolis of nightmares. The French laid siege to it with shelling so fierce that at one point the composer took refuge in his brother's house and covered his head with pillows to escape the din. The royal family—including Beethoven's friend and patron Archduke Rudolf—fled, along with many of the notable families with whom the composer had become close.

Left alone and, once the French occupation began, in difficult financial circumstances due to rapid inflation, Beethoven had little else to do but compose. The fifth concerto is probably the most famous work to emerge from this difficult period, although the Op. 81a piano sonata (“Les Adieux”) is probably a close second. Both were dedicated to Rudolph.

Beethoven
As if you didn't know.

Much has been written about the Concerto No. 5 and, in fact, the program notes this week (based on earlier notes by Paul Schiavo and Yvonne Frindle) provide quite a good map of the composer’s stunning musical landscape. The magisterial first movement, the wistful second, and the jolly concluding rondo all show Beethoven at his best.

The soloist this weekend is Tom Borrow (b. 2000), a 2024 Artist-In-Residence with the São Paulo Symphony Orchestra and winner of the Terence Judd-Hallé Orchestra Award 2023. His big professional break came in 2019, when he was called in at the last minute (the last 36 hours, to be precise) to replace Khatia Buniatishvili in a series of twelve concerts with the Israel Philharmonic. "Tom Borrow is already a star,” wrote Yossi Schiffman of the Israel Broadcasting Corporation, “and we will all surely hear more about him."

I was unable to locate anything by Borrow on Spotify but he does appear in several videos on YouTube, including the second and third movements of Ravel’s Piano Concerto in G major from that legendary 2019 concert.

The Essentials: Stéphane Denève conducts the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra and soloist Tom Borrow in the Piano Concerto No. 5 (“Emperor”) by Beethoven, along with the overture to "Béatrice et Bénedict” by Berlioz and the local premiere of “Pretty” by Julia Wolfe. Performances are Friday at 10:30 am and Saturday at 7:30 pm at the Touhill Performing Arts Center on the UMSL campus. The Saturday concert will be broadcast live on St. Louis Public Radio and Classic 107.3 and will be available for streaming for a limited time afterward at the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra site.

This article originally appeared at 88.1 KDHX, where Chuck Lavazzi is the senior performing arts critic.