Symphony Preview: Stereophonic sound and other enhancements.

Akiko Suwanzi
Photo: Kiyotaka Saito

This Friday and Saturday, March 21 and 22, Stéphane Denève returns to conduct the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra (SLSO) in a program titled Bernstein and Williams: Cinematic Visions. That would be Leonard and John, respectively. Therefore, I would like to open this preview with a song:

That number is from the 1957 film version of Cole Porter’s 1955 musical Silk Stockings, which was based on the 1939 non-musical movie Ninotchka. It goes to show that the Broadway/Hollywood barrier has never been all that impermeable.

The song pokes fun at what was, at the time, the cutting-edge technology of stereo sound in cinemas. It was but one of a number of technological changes in movies that included widescreen filming (CinemaScope and its successors) and enhanced color (Technicolor, Metrocolor, etc.). These days, when you can get surround sound and high definition color in your living room, this might all seem a bit quaint, but it was a big deal Back in the Day.

The evening begins and ends with music based on film scores. Kicking things off is the yearning, romantic theme John Williams (b. 1932) composed for the 1996 movie Seven Years in Tibet, featuring a solo cello line that’s deeply infused with Essence of Erhu. Yo-Yo Ma played that in the film soundtrack. This weekend Yo-Yo Ma will be played by the SLSO’s own Yin Xiong.

Up next is the US debut of the 2018 violin concerto Les Horizons Perdus (Lost Horizons) by contemporary French composer Guillaume Connesson (b. 1970). The concerto’s connection to the “Cinematic Visions” concept is a bit tangential since it was inspired by James Hilton’s 1933 novel Lost Horizon rather than Frank Capra’s classic 1937 film or (heaven forfend) the 1973 musical film. Its four movements capture the contrast between the tranquil utopia of Shangri-La and the hectic quotidian world. “More than the illustration of a fanciful narrative,” writes Connesson, “it is this division and radical opposition between the active life and the perfection of the inner life that constitute the basis of my work” (“Plus que d’illustrer une narration Romanesque, c’est ce déchirement et cette opposition radicale entre la vie active et l’absolu de la vie intérieure qui constituent la trame de mon oeuvre”).

The first movement, “Premier voyage,” is a cacophonous and aggressive depiction of that world, with brief lyrical moments reflecting the desire to find a bit of calm amidst the noise

“Shangri-La 1 – Deuxième voyage” (the linked second and third movements) consists of a brief glimpse of the tranquility of the utopian Shangri-La followed by an exuberant dance-cum-chase scene suggesting the brief departure from and return to the Himalayan paradise.

The start of that journey is where the novel ends, leaving it unclear as to whether the protagonist finds his way back to Shangri-La. Connesson leaves no doubt about it with the final movement, “Shangri-La 2” (hence the title change from singular to plural). It’s the mirror image of the first movement—a slow, meditative mix of the sublime and the nostalgic. “At the end,” writes the composer, “a new theme appears for muted violin, which sings with an infinite tenderness of rediscovered ties with childhood” ("À la fin, un nouveau thème apparaît au violon en sourdine, qui chante avec une infinie tendresse les liens retrouvés avec l’enfance").

Denève has expressed his admiration for Connesson’s music and has programmed several of his works in previous seasons. He conducted the Brussels Philharmonic in the world premiere performance with soloist Renaud Capuçon, so between him and this weekend’s soloist—Tchaikovsky Competition winner Akiko Suwanai—the music will be in good hands.

There’s an intermission between the sublime finale of Horizons Perdus and the raucous opening of An American Port of Call by Adolphus Hailstork (b. 1941). Inspired by Norfolk,Virginia—the city he calls home—the title of the work is both a tip of the hat to the suite Escales (Ports of Call) by Jacques Ibert and a portrait of, in the composer’s words, “a bustling American port city.”

But don’t take my word for it. Here’s what Hailstork himself has to say:

To me, An American Port of Call bears more than a passing resemblance to another orchestral work about a bustling port city (or at least an etching of one by Thomas Rowlandson): Portsmouth Point by William Walton (1902–1983). Here, in any case, is the celebrated American conductor JoAnn Faletta and the Virginia Symphony Orchestra delivering a slam-bang performance of An American Port of Call. Enjoy!

The program’s big finish (just before the closing credits, including several thousand digital animators) is the 1955 suite Leonard Bernstein (1918–1990) assembled from his score for the 1954 Oscar-winning crime drama about corrupt labor unions, On the Waterfront. The composer “initially resisted accepting the commission for the score,” writes musicologist William Runyan, due to his “deep antipathy for the director, Elia Kazan.” He was notably outraged at Kazan’s cooperation with Sen. Joseph McCarthy’s anti-leftist witch hunts and his participation in the infamous Hollywood Blacklist, which destroyed many careers and lives.

Not coincidentally, the script was written by Budd Schulberg and starred Lee J. Cobb—both of whom also collaborated with McCarthy.

Bernstein was also less than thrilled about the way his music was treated in the editing process—which is probably why On the Waterfront was his first and last soundtrack.

“And so the composer sits by,” Bernstein wrote in a May 30, 1954, article for the New York Times, “protesting as he can, but ultimately accepting, be it with a heavy heart, the inevitable loss of a good part of the score. Everyone tries to comfort him. ‘You can always use it in a suite.’ Cold comfort. It is good for the picture, he repeats numbly to himself: it is good for the picture.”

The suite has, in any case, been critically praised for the way in which it weaves together themes from the original score into a twenty-minute distillation of the original story. As critic Mark Swed wrote in the Los Angeles Times, Bernstein “wrenched his atmospheric themes into something far grander, a symphonic suite.” Listen to the composer’s own performance with the New York Philharmonic and see if you don’t agree.

And, of course, the full playlist for the concert is available on Spotify.

The Essentials: Stéphane Denève conducts the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra, along with soloists Yin Xiong (cello) and Akiko Suwanai (violin) in music by John Williams, Guillaume Connesson, Adolphus Hailstork, and Leonard Bernstein. Performances are Friday at 10:30 am and Saturday at 7:30 pm, March 21 and 22, at the Touhill Performing Arts Center. The Saturday evening performance will be broadcast live on St. Louis Public Radio and Classic 107.3 and will be available for streaming late the following week at the SLSO web site

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 Preview: Big D

"The Germans," observed the great violinist Joseph Joachim, "have four violin concertos. The greatest, most uncompromising, is Beethoven's." This weekend (Saturday and Sunday, January 24 and 26) James Ehnes joins the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra and Music Director Stéphane Denève for the Violin Concerto in D major, Op. 61, by Ludwig van Beethoven (1770–1827) along with another uncompromising essay in D major, the Symphony No. 1 by Gustav Mahler (1860–1911).

[Preview the music with my Spotify playlist.]

The following comments are adapted from my own writing on both works over the last fifteen years.

Like many of the great 19th century composers, Beethoven wrote only one concerto for the violin, but it’s prime stuff. He was, unfortunately, so tardy in completing it that the soloist at the work's 1806 premiere, Franz Clement (for whom Beethoven had written the piece) had no time to rehearse and might have even been obliged sight read the thorny solo part.

The premiere took place on December 23, 1806, at the Theater an der Wien as part of what Brockway and Weinstock (in the 1967 edition of  "Men of Music") call, with classic understatement, "a singular program":

[The concerto's] first movement was a feature of the opening half of the entertainment, and the second and third movement were given during the second half. Intervening was, among other compositions, a sonata by Franz Clement, played on one string of a violin held upside down.

"Beethoven Letronne" by Blasius Höfel
Licensed under Public Domain
via Wikimedia Common

Needless to say, this sort of cheesy showbiz was not the way the composer intended his work to be performed. Not surprisingly, it was poorly received and didn't begin to enter the standard repertoire until nearly two decades after Beethoven’s death. And that was likely because it was championed by Joachim, who first played it in 1844 (at the age of 12) at a concert in London with Felix Mendelssohn at the podium. Joachim also wrote cadenzas for the work that are still frequently performed.

Now the concerto is recognized as a masterful blend of solo showpiece and symphonic statement, with a substantial first movement that accounts for over half of the concerto's 45-minute running time, a mostly serene second, and a cheerfully flashy third.

There is, interestingly, a rarely heard alternate version of the Violin Concerto. As Michael Rodman writes at Allmusic.com, Beethoven later made a transcription of the concerto for piano and orchestra. He added a long cadenza for the soloist that included the tympani and published it as Op. 61a

The revised concerto was first performed in Vienna in 1807, but despite the occasional high-profile recording like the one Peter Serkin did with Seiji Ozawa and the New Philharmonia in the late 1960s, it remains, as the reviewer of that release notes at Classics Today, "a curio."

Mahler’s Symphony No. 1, first performed in 1889, closes the program in spectacular fashion. Clocking in at just under an hour, the First is probably the most economical of Mahler’s symphonies. It’s also, to paraphrase Anna Russell, a kind of Mahler vitamin pill, combining all the composer’s characteristic gestures in one compact work.

Mahler circa 1889
By E. Bieber - Kohut, Adolph (1900)
Public Domain

It’s all here: the vivid invocation of the natural world, the heaven-storming despair, the macabre humor, the jocular impressions of village bands and sounds that would later be labeled “klezmer,” and  a wildly triumphant finale with a full complement of brass—including an expanded horn section—standing and gloriously blazing away. The subtitle “Titan” that’s often applied to this work may have originally referred to a novel of the same title by Jean-Paul Richter, but I think it’s simply an apt description of this music. Its impact is Titanic in every sense of the word.

As music depicting a journey from darkness to the light, the Mahler First feels very welcome at a time when geopolitical darkness seems to be closing in on us. Its hushed, expectant opening, its birdcalls, and what Chicago Symphony Orchestra program annotator Phillip Huscher calls "the gentle hum of the universe, tuned to A-natural and scattered over seven octaves"—all these things bring to mind a world emerging from darkness into light.

Speaking of that opening sequence: if it sounds familiar that’s because it's remarkably close to the little sequence that underscores the words "Space: the final frontier" in the theme of the classic TV show Star Trek. If you doubt me, take a few minutes to view CBC Radio 2 host Tom Allen's tongue-in-cheek video documentary on the lineage of that theme; it's fascinating stuff. 

And since both ST:TOS and Mahler’s First are fundamentally optimistic, that seems only right.

The Essentials: Stéphane Denève conducts the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra and soloist James Ehnes in Beethoven’s Violin Concerto and Mahler’s Symphony No. 1. Performances are Saturday at 7:30 pm and Sunday at 3 pm, January 25 and 26, at the Stifel Theatre downtown.

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

Symphony Preview: Reveling in Ravel

This weekend (January 17 and 19) St. Louis Symphony Orchestra Music Director Stéphane Denève returns for a program devoted entirely to a composer I love almost as much as he does: Maurice Ravel (1875–1937). Like Ravel, Denève has studied at the Paris Conservatoire. Unlike the composer (who was expelled), our MD graduated with honors and has gone on to make a name for himself as an exponent of French music in general and Ravel in particular.

[Preview the music with my Spotify playlist.]

I have written extensively about all four of the works on this weekend’s program over the past decade or thereabouts. This week’s preview is based on that earlier material.

Ma mère l'oye
New York City Ballet

The concerts will open with the “Ma mère l'oye (Mother Goose) Suite”, based on a two-piano suite originally written for Mimie and Jean, the two children of Ravel's friend Cipa Godebski, an expatriate Polish artist, and his wife Ida. The kids were supposed to give the work its first performance at the Société Musicale Indépéndantes in 1910, but stage fright got the better of them and two other youngsters got the opportunity.

The work proved popular enough to merit an orchestration in 1911 and later even a full-length ballet, but it's the former that we'll hear this weekend. Inspired by the fairy stories of Charles Perrault as well as anonymous folk sources, the five movements make up a veritable musical toy box brimming with auditory delights.

Denève’s first appearance with the SLSO following his appointment as MD included a transcendent performance of the suite. This is a true showpiece for the orchestra, with lots of opportunities for solo and small ensemble work. I look forward to hearing it in the drier acoustics of the Touhill.

Next, we’ll have both of Ravel’s two piano concertos, beginning with the Concerto in G, written mostly between 1929 and 1932. For the composer, it represented an attempt to improve his own less than stellar skill as a pianist.

Ravel, as Washington University's Hugh Macdonald wrote in program notes for the Los Angeles Philharmonic (link no longer available) was not a virtuoso at the keyboard. “In his public appearances as a concert pianist,” notes Mr. Macdonald, “he had preferred to play easier pieces…. But rather than write a piece within his own capacity, he decided to write a concerto of proper difficulty and simply acquire the technique to play it.” Thus began the long and difficult nativity of the Concerto in G.

That process began as early as 1911 according to Macdonald. That was when Ravel, who had been born in the Basque town of Ciboure, sketched out a “Basque Concerto” based on themes from that region of France.  The project was scrapped, but the second movement would live again—this time with a jazzier flavor—as the notoriously difficult Adagio assai movement of the G major concerto.

Maurice Ravel birthday party, New York City, March 8, 1928
L-R: Oscar Fried, conductor; Eva Gauthier, singer;
Ravel at piano; Manoah Leide-Tedesco, composer-conductor;
and composer George Gershwin

Unfortunately, Ravel’s health was declining, resulting in memory problems and difficulty concentrating. So when it came time for the French premiere of the concerto in January 1932 the solo role went to Marguerite Long, who taught piano at the Paris Conservatoire between 1906 and 1940. And even she found it a challenge.

“It is a difficult work,” she observed in the posthumously published Au Piano avec Maurice Ravel, “especially in respect of the second movement where one has no respite.”

Part of the delay in composing the Concerto in G was the result of the composer setting it aside to work on his Concerto for the Left Hand. Ravel wrote it during 1929 and 1930 for pianist Paul Wittgenstein (the older brother of the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein), who was just at the beginning of what looked like a successful career when World War I broke out. Called up for military service, Wittgenstein was shot in the right elbow during the Battle of Galicia. He was captured by the Russians and sent to a POW camp in Siberia where the injury to his arm proved to be so severe that amputation was necessary.

For the vast majority of pianists, that would be a career-ending event, but Wittgenstein refused to give up. The camp had no piano so, as Dakota White relates at the World War I Centennial web site, Wittgenstein drew the outline of a keyboard on a wooden crate and used it to practice during his confinement. After the war, he was able to use his family's wealth and social connections to commission works for the left hand from leading composers of the day, including Ravel.

Wittgenstein gave the work its premiere on January 5th, 1932, with Robert Heger conducting the Vienna Symphony Orchestra and recorded it in 1937 with the Concertgebouw Orchestra under Bruno Walter. You can hear that performance on YouTube . It’s still worth listening to, despite the dated mono sound.

There's a nocturnal feel to the concerto. There’s a dark bitonal introduction featuring the contrabassoon, flashy cadenzas for the soloist, and a central march/scherzo which, like the Adagio assai in the G major concerto, shows the composer’s fascination with jazz. It feels like Ravel is inviting us to a dance in the graveyard—a celebration of renewed life in the shadow of the massive death of the "war to end all wars." Ravel served as an ambulance driver in the cataclysm, and I think the horrors he saw influenced many of his post-war works, including this one.

The soloist for both of these very demanding concertos is a frequent visitor to our town, Kirill Gerstein. I last saw him here in October, 2022, when he gave us a disciplined and grandly romantic Concerto No. 2 by Rachmaninoff with Hannu Lintu (another familiar face) at the podium. In addition to his frequent guest appearances with the SLSO, he recorded a Gershwin album with the band for Myrios in 2018, which I would highly recommend. His performances, in my experience, are often a singular mix of strong technique and interpretive creativity.

Ida Rubenstien, 1922
Public Domain

The concerts close with one of the most popular orchestral works ever written and certainly the best-known thing Maurice Ravel ever produced: “Bolero.” Composed originally on commission for the dancer Ida Rubinstein, “Bolero” was first performed by her at the Paris Opéra on 22 November 1928 with choreography by Bronislava Nijinska and designs by Alexandre Benois.

The scenario, as printed in that first program, describes a wild night in a Spanish tavern that gets wilder when a female dancer leaps on to a table as "her steps become more and more animated." The late New York Times music critic Louis Biancolli (quoted in the 1962 edition of Julian Seaman's "Great Orchestral Music: A Treasury of Program Notes") goes into greater detail, describing an increasingly erotic bacchanal, which ends (as the key changes to C major) in a knife-wielding brawl.

Sex and violence always sell, I guess. There are many more fascinating facts to be had about "Boléro," including its sexual subtext. Actor/writer Albert Brooks had some fun with that aspect of the work on his subversively brilliant 1975 LP "A Star is Bought." The original is out of print, sad to say, but the whole thing is available on YouTube.

The Essentials: Stéphane Denève conducts the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra and pianist Kirill Gerstein in an all-Ravel program Friday at 7:30 pm and Sunday at 3:00 pm, January 17 and 19, in auditorium at the Touhill Center on the University of Missouri–St. Louis campus. The Friday performance will be broadcast Saturday, January 18, at 7:30 pm on St. Louis Public Radio and Classic 107.3 and will also be available for a limited time at the SLSO web site.

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

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 Preview: 'Tis the season, part 1

The St. Louis Symphony Orchestra’s regular concert season traditionally goes on hiatus during December, but that doesn’t mean the orchestra and chorus aren’t kept busy. Far from it, as a quick survey of the coming month’s concerts clearly demonstrates. Let’s take a glance at what’s happening just this week.

Amanda Stewart and Steven Franklin
Photo courtesy of the SLSPO

The festive mood begins on Thursday, December 5, at 7:30 pm as Steven Franklin (Principal Trumpet) and Amanda Stewart (Associate Principal Trombone) curate a program of “Fanfares and Festivals” as part of the “Live at the Sheldon” concert series. Along with eight of their fellow SLSO brass players plus Alan Stewart on percussion, they’ll treat you to five centuries of music for brass and percussion. The oldest music on the program is suite from “The Danserye,” a 1551 collection of 60 toe-tappers by Renaissance composer and publisher Tylman Susato (c. 1510/15–after 1570). The newest is the world premiere of a low brass quintet by Franklin.

The evening promises to deliver a wide variety of sounds as well, from the reverential (Francis Poulenc’s “Four Short Prayers of St. Francis of Assisi”) to the rousing (the selections from Susato’s “The Danserye”). The SLSO has a very solid brass section. This should be a great opportunity to hear them in action in the much-admired Sheldon Concert Hall.

On Friday and Saturday, December 6 and 7, the action moves to the E. Desmond Lee Concert Hall at Washington University’s 560 Music Center for “A Baroque Christmas.” Guest conductor Patrick Dupre Quigley leads the SLSO in music of Bach, Telemann, Corelli, and Vivaldi. Associate Principal viola Alejandro Valdepeñas is the featured soloist in Telemann’s Viola Concerto in G major, while Ann Choomack takes the virtual spotlight in Vivaldi’s Piccolo Concerto in C major, RV 443.

Alejandro Valdepeñas and Ann Choomack
Photo courtesy of the SLSO

Bach is well represented with Sinfonia from the second of the six cantatas that make up his “Christmas Oratorio” along with the Sonata from his appropriately titled Cantata BWV 31, “Der Himmel lacht! Die Erde jubilieret” (Heaven laughs! Earth exults) and the lively Orchestral Suite No. 3 (BWV 1068).

That last one was written for Prince Leopold of Anhalt-Cöthen, Bach’s employer from 1717 to 1723. The Prince was fond of dance music, so the suite was also likely a hit with the him. It’s being an appealing collection of dances preceded by a short "French overture" (the name referring to the form's origins in the ballets of Jean Baptiste Lully) with its characteristic majestic opening followed by a lively main section. Bach's mastery of counterpoint gives the music a bit of weight, but even so, the terpsichorean roots of this work are as obvious as they are delightful.

Those roots are especially apparent in the last two movements, the sprightly "Bourée" and "Gigue." The former was a dance that was especially popular at the court of Louis XIV of France, eventually morphing into a classical ballet step known as the pas de bourèe.

Arcangelo Corelli’s contribution is his justifiably popular Concerto grosso in G minor, Op. 6 No. 8. It’s known as the “Christmas Concerto” because the first page of the score bears the inscription “Fatto per la notte di Natale” (“made for the night of Christmas”). Although the twelve concerti grossi of the composer’s Op. 6 weren’t published until after his death, No. 8 was composed in 1690 and played that Christmas for Corelli’s patron and friend Cardinal Pietro Ottoboni.

Celtic Woman
Photo courtesy of the SLSO

Check out my Spotify playlist to listen to the complete "Baroque Christmas"  program in advance.

To close out a very musical week, the Irish vocal/instrumental group Celtic Woman brings their “White Christmas Symphony Tour” to the Stifel Center on Sunday, December 8, at 7:00 pm. Lloyd Butler conducts the SLSO in an evening that “combines centuries of Irish musical tradition with the thrill of a full symphonic orchestra, highlighting the artistry of the internationally recognized quartet.”

The group was created in 2004 years ago as a “one off” for a concert in Dublin that was such a hit that it immediately sparked an American tour and an international following. Two decades later, the group’s catalog of CDs, DVDs, and even jewelry is impressive and the popularity of their concerts shows no signs of waning.

But wait—there’s more! And I’ll tell you all about it in next week’s preview. Stay tuned.

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

Symphony Preview: There and back again

Guest conductor Cristian Măcelaru and the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra have a quick trip through time and space this weekend (Friday and Sunday, October 4 and 6), with music that zaps you from 19th century Bohemia to 20th and 21st century South America and then back again. Don’t worry, it won’t make you dizzy—although the music might be intoxicating.

Anton and Anna Dvořák in London, 1886
en.wikipedia.org

This week, I’m going to try something different with the symphony preview. I have been doing these for years and thought I’d change the format a bit and make it more concise. Let me know what you think by leaving a comment on the version of this that appears on my blog.

The concert opens with the “Carnival” concert overture, Op. 92, by Antonín  Dvořák (1841–1904). The composer originally intended it to be the second of three overtures with the blanket title “Nature, Life, and Love” but his publisher persuaded him to issue the three works separately. So the first movement, “Nature,” became “In Nature’s Realm” (Op. 91), “Life” became “Carnival,” and “Love” became “Othello” (Op. 93).  Even with their separate titles, though, the three overtures share a common “nature” theme that shows up at the beginning of “In Nature’s Realm” and in the middle of “Carnival.”

Listen to The Academy of St. Martin in the Fields under Neville Marriner. The “nature” theme shows up at 4:20 in this recording.

Next, it’s off to Peru by way of the USA for the “Concertino Cusqueño” by Gabriela Lena Frank (b. 1972), a contemporary North American composer with whose Peruvian/Chinese mother left her with a lifelong fascination with the music of Peru (among other locales). Founder of the Gabriela Lena Frank Creative Academy of Music, and a graduate of my alma mater, Rice University, Frank was Appointed Composer-in-Residence with the Philadelphia Orchestra in 2019, who first performed the “Concertino” in 2012. In her program notes, the composer writes that the work was “written to celebrate the fine players of the Philadelphia Orchestra on the eve of Yannick Nézet-Ségun’s inaugural season as Music Director, [and] finds inspiration in two unlikely bedfellows: Peruvian culture and British composer Benjamin Britten.”

Gabriela Lena Frank
Photo by Mariah Tauger

The former is represented musically by the first few notes of “Ccollanan María,” a religious song from Cusco, the original capital of the Inca empire, Tawantinsuyu. Britten is represented by the tympani motif from the opening of his Violin Concerto. Those two brief ideas get tossed around quite a bit in this brief (11 minutes) piece that prominently features the first-chair string players.

Watch a 2019 performance by the Thailand Philharmonic under Jeffrey Mayer on YouTube. The link starts at the 1:15 mark so you’re spared the spoken introduction. You can also see a 2004 setting by Frank of “Ccollanan María” by the chorus Sacred and Profane on YouTube. Neither of these was available on Spotify.

Up next is a work making its third appearance with the SLSO in recent years, the "Variaciones concertantes," op. 23, by the Argentine composer Alberto Ginastera (1916–1983). It takes the conventional theme and variations form and combines it with a concept that emerged mainly in the 20th century, the "concerto for orchestra"—a work in which each section of the ensemble gets an opportunity to take the spotlight.

Ginastera wrote the “Variaciones” in 1953, at a time when he was out of favor with the fascist Péron regime, losing his steady gig as director of the music conservatory of National University of La Plata. He made ends meet by scoring film and composing commissioned works like the “Variaciones.”  It was written for the Asociación Amigos de la Música in Buenos Aires, where Igor Markevitch conducted the premiere in June 1953.

Listen to the Norwegian Radio Orchestra under Miguel Harth-Bedoya on Spotify.

Alberto Ginastera
en.wikipedia.org

Finally it’s back to old Bohemia for the work that marked Dvořák’s emergence as an independent symphonic voice, the Symphony No. 6 in D major, Op. 60. “Every bar of this work shows him at the height of his maturity,” wrote Alec Robertson in his 1943 biography of the composer. “The village boy can move amongst the greats of the symphonic world with ease and assurance. He speaks their tongue, albeit with his own accent.”

Too true. This is music that speaks for itself. It brims over with bucolic charm and optimism, and if there’s more than a hint of Brahms’s D major symphony in the last movement, so what? It’s still 100% Dvořák. I defy anyone to emerge from a performance of this piece without a smile. “The only way we can eradicate darkness is by bringing light,” notes Măcelaru.

Amen to that.

Listen to the 1995 London Symphony Orchestra recording under Istvan Kertesz on my Spotify playlist.

The Essentials: Cristian Măcelaru leads the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra in Dvořák’s “Carnival” Overture and Symphony No. 6, along with Gabriela Lena Frank’s “Concertino Cusqueño” and Alberto Ginastera’s the "Variaciones concertantes.” Performances are Friday at 10:30 am and Sunday at 2 pm, October 4 and 6, at the Touhill Center on the University of Missouri–St. Louis campus. The Friday morning performance will be broadcast Saturday night (October 5) 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: The big chill

A chilly wind blows through St. Louis this weekend as temperatures drop back to something more closely approximating the norm for late April. By sheer coincidence the musical equivalent of a brisk northern breeze blows through the Touhill Center, as well, as frequent guest John Stogårds steps up to the podium of the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra (SLSO) to conduct concerts dominated by his fellow Finn Jean Sibelius (1865–1957) and Danish composer Per Nørgård (b. 1932).

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

Sibelius in 1913
By Daniel Nyblin (1856–1923) 
Public Domain, 

It may be a bit of a cliché, but for me the music of Sibelius conjures up images of pines, snow, and brisk northern winds. You can hear that in the Sibelius works that open and close the program which are, respectively, “Rakastava (The Lover)” and the Symphony No. 7.  That same feeling is present in the work that precedes the Sibelius Seventh, Nørgård’s 2007 composition “Lysning (Glade)” for strings and percussion, albeit with a more contemporary harmonic palette.

Sibelius was notoriously self-critical, often revising works and even destroying those he deemed inferior. His Symphony No. 8, for example, was never completed and was eventually burned by the composer. “Rakastava” didn’t suffer that dire fate, but the original four-movement 1894 version, for unaccompanied male chorus, was never published. The composer produced a version for men's chorus and string orchestra in that same year, and for mixed choir in 1898, but none of them really caught on.

Finally, in 1912, he recycled “Rakastava” into a three-movement work for strings and percussion (tympani and triangle) and this time it was a hit. The work “captivated audiences” and is now “regarded as a minor masterpiece.” But don’t take my word for it. Listen to the recording by Sir Colin Davis and the London Symphony Orchestra on the SLSO’s Spotify playlist and I think you’ll agree. The romantic yearning of the first movement (“The Lover”) has an unsettled feel that’s accentuated by the occasional interruptions for the melodic flow by an agitated motif in the lower strings and tympani. The brief second movement (“The Path of the Beloved”) is an ethereal scherzo reminiscent of Mendelssohn. And the sense of melancholy in the final movement (“Good Night!... Farewell!”) becomes tragic about halfway through before setting into quiet resignation.

It’s emotionally complex music with just an occasional frisson of the cold north wind.

Per Nørgård
Photo courtesy of the SLSO

Nørgård’s “Glade,” which opens the second half of the evening, feels a bit bleak, as well, but not consistently. There is, rather, a mix of light and shade of the sort you might encounter in a forest clearing. “There is a balance between the number of darker and lighter sections,” writes the composer, “as each ‘light’ section presents the same material as the ‘dark’ section before it—but heard from different instrumental colorings and nuances.” The unresolved feeling of the final moments of the work makes it a perfect companion for the Sibelius Symphony No. 7 that follows it and concludes the concert.

Sibelius completed his seventh and final symphony in 1924 after considerable labor and revisions. This brief (around 22 minutes) one-movement work is, as conductor Joshua Weilerstein writes, “a piece that is barely a symphony at all, and yet carries symphonic logic throughout.” Indeed, at its premiere (with Sibelius conducting) it was billed as “Fantasia Sinfonica” (“Symphonic Fantasy”) No. 1. It wasn’t until a year later that the composer decided that it was, in fact, an actual symphony—and one of which he was proud. “A great success,” he wrote after the first performance. “There is no denying it: my new work is one of the best. Tone and ‘colour’ both powerful.”

A lot of ink and pixels have been spilled in analyses of the Sibelius Seventh over the past century, with much argument about what its actual form might be, what it really means, and other questions that are such great fodder for academic papers and blog posts. Weilerstein’s “Sticky Notes” episode on the work has the advantage of being clear and filled with musical illustrations. I recommend it.

Issues of structure and other musical nuts and bolts aside, though, the ultimate question for the listener is: what does it sound like and how does it feel? To me it sounds and feels mercurial, constantly shifting emotions, defying expectations, and ultimately ambiguous. Now it’s lamenting, now it’s breaking into a little folk dance, now it’s triumphant, and now it’s…over. And it’s not all that clear what actually happened.

Sir Simon Rattle, who conducts the performance in the SLSO playlist, says the Symphony No. 7 ends with an existential scream while Weilerstein says “it is a cosmic ending, almost like the launch of the note C into outer space.” I say it just…stops. And leaves us to decide what happens after that. Grey skies and whistling winds will probably figure into it somehow.

Beethoven in 1803
Painted by Christian Horneman

That said, the concert won’t be all stormy weather. The first half concludes with the Piano Concerto No. 2 in B-flat major, Op. 19, by Ludwig van Beethoven (1771–1827), a work with a sunny outlook and strong echoes of Mozart, and especially in the finale, Haydn. Written before but published after the Concerto No. 1, it marks the beginning of Beethoven's dual careers as pianist and composer of concerti for his instrument of choice.

Outside of that finale, Haydn is mostly hiding in this work, though. It's ultimately all Beethoven. That's particularly obvious in the dramatic cadenza, written around 14 years after the concerto.

The last time the SLSO performed the Second Concerto, the ebullient Nicholas McGegan with conducted with South Korean (b. 1994) virtuoso Seong-Jin Cho at the keyboard. This time the soloist will be the remarkable Marie-Ange Nguci (b. 1998), whose biography is impressive, to say the least.

Clearly a prodigy, the Franco-Albanian pianist was only 13 when she won her first competition, the 2011 Lagny-sur-Marne International Piano Competition. That same year she was accepted into Nicholas Angelich’s class at the Paris Conservatoire. Today, she holds degrees in Musicology, Musical Analysis, and Music Pedagogy (Paris Sorbonne, Paris Conservatoire), an MBA in Cultural Management, and a performance diploma in ondes martenot (essentially a Theremin with a keyboard; Messiaen famously used it in his 1949 “Turangalîla-Symphonie”).

Oh, yeah: she’s also studying conducting at Vienna’s University of Music and Performing Arts.

“En Miror” (“In the mirror”), her 2017 debut album on the Mirare label, consists of piano music by composers known for their skills as organists and improvisers: César Franck, J.S. Bach, Camille Saint-Saëns, and Thierry Escaich. And her busy concert schedule includes appearances with the Orchestre Symphonique de Montréal, Rotterdam Philharmonic Orchestra, Orchestra della Svizzera Italiana, Minnesota Orchestra, Detroit Symphony Orchestra, and Macao Symphony Orchestra. It’s impressive, one must admit.

The Essentials: John Storgårds conducts the orchestra and soloist Marie-Ange Nguci in Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 2. The concert also includes the Symphony No. 7 and “Rakastava (The Lover)” by Sibelius along with “Lysning (Glade)” by contemporary Danish composer Per Nørgård. Performances take place Friday at 10:30 am, Saturday at 7:30 pm, and Sunday at 3 pm, April 19 through 21, at the Touhill Performing Arts Center on the University of Missouri-St. Louis campus. The Saturday evening concert will be broadcast live on St. Louis Public Radio and Classic 107.3.