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Showing posts with label rimski-korsakov. Show all posts
Showing posts with label rimski-korsakov. Show all posts
Who: The St. Louis Symphony Orchestra What: Music You Know When: Friday, November 21, 2014 Where: Powell Symphony Hall, St. Louis
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The title of Friday's St. Louis Symphony concert said it all: "Music you Know." Presented by The Whittaker Foundation, the evening probably was, for the many of those in attendance, something of a reunion with old friends.
Like many such reunions, it was a relatively informal gathering. Many of the audience members were dressed more casually than is usually the case and drinks were allowed in the auditorium. Traditional concert etiquette was relaxed—applauding between movements was OK, and conductor David Robertson even brushed off the almost comic outbreak of coughing that marred a particularly impassioned performance of "Ase's Death" (from Grieg's "Peer Gynt" suite) with a few witty asides.
Printed program notes were minimal as well. SLSO blogger Eddie Silva provided a page of "fun facts" about the popular pieces on the bill, but most of the information about the music came from Mr. Robertson's spoken commentary. Mr. Robertson is an engaging speaker, but in this case most of his remarks ran far too long, so it sometimes felt as though he were simply killing time. Extensive stage resets after each piece also tended to slow down the overall pace of the evening. Normally, SLSO concerts flow more smoothly.
Dana Edson Myers
Still, the essentials were in place. Performances of concert standards like the Mussorgsky/Rimsky-Korsakov "Night on Bald Mountain" and Tchaikovsky's "Marche Slave" were wonderfully precise, crisp, and passionate. The selections from the "Peer Gynt" incidental music had a lovely transparency and grace. There were a few moments of sloppiness in the excerpts from Copland's "Rodeo" ballet (including an uncharacteristic lapse by Concertmaster David Halen) but on the whole the orchestra did justice to this quintessentially American classic.
The two works for violin and orchestra came off well. Dana Edson Myers, of the orchestra's first violin section, gave a deeply felt "Meditation" from Jules Massenet's "Thais" and Becky Boyer Hall (of the second violins) burned up the stage with the world premiere of "Beinn na Caillich (Hill of the Old Woman), Fantasia for a Fiddler" by the SLSO violist Christian Woehr. Based in part on the traditional Scots song "Over the Sea to Skye," the piece vividly depicts the wild Scottish seacoast (complete with wind machine) and comes to a flashy virtuosic finish.
Becky Boyer Hall
"Music you Know" was clearly pitched primarily to people who don't attend the symphony on a regular basis, presumably in hopes of enticing them to attend regular season concerts. That weekend's Saturday and Sunday concerts, with Mahler's "Das Lied von der Erde," got a particularly hard sell. I hope it worked. With over 2200 people in attendance, the hall was nearly full. I'd love to see that kind of turnout on a regular basis.
Next at Powell Hall: Mr. Robertson conducts an all-American program featuring the original jazz band version of Gershwin's "Rhapsody in Blue," Bernstein's "Symphonic Dances from West Side Story," and two local premieres: "Hell's Angels" by Michael Daugherty and "Try" by Andrew Norman. Kirill Gerstein is soloist for both the Norman and Gershwin works, while nearly all of the SLSO bassoon section is featured in "Hell's Angels." Performances are Friday and Saturday at 8 p.m. and Sunday at 3 p.m., November 28-30. For more information, visit the symphony web site.
This weekend at Powell Hall it's a classic example of musical storytelling, a cocky, nose-thumbing piano concerto by a musical wise guy in his 20s, and a bit of orchestral delirium.
The storytelling comes from the pen of Nikolay Rimski-Korsakov (1844-1908), one of the great Russian romantic masters and a genius at orchestration. He aggressively promoted Russian nationalism in his music, emphasizing folk and Middle Eastern/Oriental influences. All of those elements on on display in his 1888 symphonic suite Scheherazade, inspired by episodes in the One Thousand and One Nights (a.k.a. The Arabian Nights). It's almost certainly his most popular work and a favorite of audiences around the world.
As well it should be. This is music that conjures up striking images: the imperious Sultan, the sensual Scheherazade, Sinbad's ship, the stormy sea, the festival at Baghdad—it's a veritable widescreen extravaganza. There are also plenty of solo passages that will give individual members of the orchestra a chance to show off. Concertmaster David Halen has an especially prominent role to play as the voice of Scheherazade. It's tremendously entertaining stuff when done well.
Stewart Goodyear Photo: Victor Avila
Also tremendously entertaining is the Piano Concerto No. 1 for piano, trumpet, and strings Op. 35, written by the 27-year-old Dimitri Shostakovich (1906-1975) in 1933 and first performed by him with the Leningrad Philharmonic in October of that year. It's written for a small orchestra (strings plus that one very prominent trumpet) and manages to combine elements of both the Baroque and Classical periods with sounds that would not be out of place in the score of a silent film comedy. “Shostakovich wrote this when he was in his late 20s," notes Principal Trumpet Karin Bliznik (who will be playing the trumpet part his weekend) in the symphony program book. "He used to play piano accompaniment to silent movies. You can imagine some Charlie Chaplin or Keystone Kops slapstick for this piece.”
Thomas Adès
The concert opens with local premiere of three dance episodes from the 1995 chamber opera Powder Her Face by British composer Thomas Adès (1971- ). The opera is based on the life of Margaret Campbell, Duchess of Argyll (1912-1993) , whose elegant and fashionable life took a bizarre turn after a near-fatal fall down an elevator shaft in 1943. She emerged from the ordeal with no sense of smell or taste and a voracious sexual appetite—a great deal of which was on display in the notorious 1963 divorce trial that ended her marriage to Ian Douglas Campbell, 11th Duke of Argyll. A lavish lifestyle and bad investments eventually led to a penniless death but (to quote a Tom Lehrer lyric about a very different historical figure) "the body that reached her embalmer / was one that had known how to live."
I've never seen the opera (which includes, according to a review of the original production by Alex Ross was pretty explicit stuff) or heard these selections, so I'll take the lazy way out and quote the description from Paul Schiavo's program notes: "Dance rhythms inform each of the three movements that comprise this work. First comes an overture suggesting tango, foxtrot, and other steps being attempted in an inebriated state, with interjections of mocking laughter. The ensuing waltz has a music-box delicacy about it. But its mechanism seems flawed, the rhythms continually twitching or hiccupping or otherwise going awry. Similar rhythmic dislocations mark the finale, where Adès’s superimposition of figures moving at different speeds seems at once playful and disturbing in a fever-dream sort of way."
It does sound like good company for the Shostakovich, doesn't it?
Performances are Friday and Saturday, October 25 and 26, at 8 PM at Powell Hall. The orchestra will be conducted by Peter Oundjian with Stewart Goodyear at the piano. For more information: stlsymphony.org.
Who: Pianist Stephen Hough and The St. Louis Symphony Orchestra conducted by Hans Graf What: Music of Rimski-Korsakov, Shostakovich, and Rachmaninoff
Where: Powell Symphony Hall, St. Louis
When: April 27, 2012
Pianist Stephen Hough has both tremendous power and a delicate touch. Hans Graf is a conductor who, while he maintains a disciplined presence on the podium, can nevertheless be passionate and lyrical. Put them together and you have a killer beginning to the two-week “Rach Fest" at the Powell Hall.
Friday morning’s program featured compelling performances of Rachmaninoff’s “Piano Concerto No. 1” (in the 1917 revision) and Shostakovich’s dark and acerbic “Symphony No. 1”, as well as the local premiere of Rimski-Korsakov’s colorful “Skazka” (“Fairy Tale”). It was, to say the least, a tremendous success and was warmly received by a larger than usual audience.
It has been almost exactly a year since the multi-talented Mr. Hough (he’s a composer and writer on music and theology as well as a virtuoso pianist) graced the stage at Powell Hall. Last time it was a knockout reading of Tchaikovsky’s “Piano Concerto No. 2”. This time around his Rachmaninoff First was at least as impressive. Mr. Hough has done the Rach First with the symphony before—in February of 2007 under Maestro Robertson. At that time I noted that he “played with the ease and confidence that are the hallmarks of solid keyboard technique” and see no reason to change that assessment now.
Originally written while Rachmaninoff was a student at the Moscow Conservatory, the concerto was later revised substantially on the eve of the Russian Revolution in 1917, and it's not hard to hear the faint echoes of that turbulence in the sweep and drama of this remarkably concise and vigorous work. Mr. Hough has the chops to give full vent to that drama, cruising through all the flashy writing in the opening and closing movements, but he was equally convincing in the nocturnal yearning of the Andante. Mr. Graf matched him with a soulful reading that made effective use of rubato at key moments without ever losing the concerto’s sense of momentum. His tempo for the finale was brisk, but the symphony musicians handled it with ease.
Friday morning Mr. Hough acknowledged his well-deserved standing ovation with a delightful encore: his own mashup of the Russian song “Leningrad Nights” (known here in the West as both “Midnight in Moscow” and “Moscow Nights”) with motifs from Rachmaninoff’s “Piano Concerto No. 2”. It reminded me of the clever Piano Puzzlers that Bruce Adolphe provides for PRI’s “Performance Today” radio broadcast and was much appreciated.
Much as I love Rachmaninoff, the most interesting thing about these concerts to me was the presence of the rarely heard Shostakovich symphony and the even rarer Rimski-Korsakov.
Written as a Leningrad Conservatory graduation piece and first performed in 1926 (when the composer was only 19), Shostakovich’s First Symphony is a remarkable study in contrasts, with chamber music-style solo passages cheek by jowl with the full-tilt bombast of the composer’s more popular works. There are wonderful moments, for example, for the principal oboe, bassoon, flute, clarinet, and cello as well as piano part that calls to mind Stravinsky’s “Petrushka”—a piece that was very likely in the composer’s mind at the time. Perky melodies reminiscent of the stuff Shostakovich probably heard during his work as a cinema pianist pop up in the first and second movement, standing in stark juxtaposition to the brooding and sporadically anguished gloom of the third, while the final Allegro molto wraps everything up in a classic flourish of brass and percussion which manages to sound both triumphant and sarcastic at the same time.
With so many “concerto for orchestra” solo passages, the Shostakovich First is rife with opportunities for individual players to shine—which is exactly what they did Friday morning. Mr. Graf’s interpretation was, I thought, very transparent to the music, allowing Shostakovich to come through pretty much unfiltered. It was tremendously exciting stuff.
This was my first opportunity to see Mr. Graf perform live, by the way. His style, it seemed to me, was marked by equal parts of precision, warmth, and good humor. His podium presence is not overly demonstrative, but I was nevertheless left with the sense that he takes great joy in the music he conducts. That appeared to communicate itself to both the musicians and the audience.
Like the Shostakovich, Rimski-Korsakov’s brief tone poem “Skazka” (“Fairy Tale”) is also filled with lovely solo passages, particularly for clarinet, flute, oboe, and violin. Its episodic structure suggests an underlying narrative related to the work’s literary inspirations—Russian folk tales and Pushkin’s Ruslan and Lyudmila—but the composer declined to be specific, allowing the listener’s mind to conjure up whatever exotic images the colorful music suggests.
Mr. Graf’s performance made the most of the music’s many contrasting moods and the symphony musicians responded with their usual fine playing. The solo passages were beautifully realized, even if the flute had to briefly contend with cell phone accompaniment at one point.
Which brings me to the only negative aspect of Friday morning’s concert: the clueless conduct of some audience members. It’s bad enough that Mr. Graf was obliged to hold the opening downbeat for a minute or two while waiting from some folks on the house floor to stop yakking. What was really rather embarrassing was the applause that broke out during the transition between the third and fourth movements of the Shostakovich. Concert etiquette says you don’t start applauding until the conductor lowers his baton. For many composers (like, say, Shostakovich) silence is an element of composition. Conductors usually respect that. So should audiences.
Next at Powell Hall: The Rach Fest concludes May 4-6 with the “Piano Concerto No. 1” (Friday at 8 PM) and “Piano Concerto No. 3” (Saturday at 8 and Sunday at 3). Stephen Hough is at the keyboard again with Peter Oundjian at the podium. The program for all three concerts includes Glinka’s Ruslan and Lyudmila Overture and Beethoven’s “Symphony No. 5”. For more information you may call 314-534-1700 or visit stlsymphony.org.
