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.

Symphony Preview: The Grand Tour

Music Director Stéphane Denève and the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra are off on their annual European concert tour on March 21st. But before they leave, they’re offering a one night only “bon voyage” concert of the music they’ll be playing on the tour on Thursday, March 16, at 7:30 pm.

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

It all starts with the lively and acerbic suite Sergei Prokofiev (1891 – 1953) created in 1924 from the score for his 1921 opera “L'amour des trois oranges” (“The Love for Three Oranges”).  Prokofiev wrote both the music and the libretto for the opera, which was commissioned by the Chicago Opera Association during the composer’s 1918 visit to the USA. He based it on the 1761 commedia dell’arte farce “L'amore delle tre melarance” by Carlo Gozzi (1720 – 1806) which was itself based on the fairy tale of the same name by 16th century Italian poet Giambattista Basile (1583 – 1632).

Prokofiev in New York, 1918
Photo by Bain News Service

“The story,” writes Benjamin Pesetsky in this week’s program notes, “is too silly to dwell on.” He’s right, so we won’t (although Wikipedia has a detailed synopsis for the curious). Let’s just say Prokofiev combined his ancient Italian sources with a jigger or two of sarcasm, a pinch of surrealism, shook the whole thing vigorously and served it over ice to an audience which found it somewhat baffling.

The suite is great fun, though, combining the composer’s quirky sense of humor, inventive orchestration, and rhythmic drive to create a colorful musical circus complete with acrobats, clowns, and strutting sorcerers. The third movement “March” was once quite well-known, having been appropriated as the theme for the CBS radio crime drama “The FBI in Peace and War,” which ran from 1944 through 1958. If you’re curious as to what that sounded like, the GSMC Classics podcast network offers all 88 episodes via Apple Podcasts. And probably via every other podcast platform as well.

Denève last conducted the suite with the band in 2007. Sadly, I missed that concert, so I’m looking forward to this one.

Up next is the popular Piano Concerto in A minor, op. 16, written in 1868 by Edvard Grieg (1843 – 1907). It was his first and only piano concerto. Indeed, it was his only completed concerto of any kind.

The interior of Grieg's hut at Troldhaugen

That’s because Grieg was fundamentally a miniaturist. He was at his best in short forms like his “Lyric Pieces” and other works for the piano. Longer works like his “Symphonic Dances,” the “Lyric Suite,” and his incidental music for Ibsen’s gargantuan drama “Peer Gynt” are, ultimately, little more than a collection of short pieces. It’s what he did, and he did it darned well.

It’s not surprising, then, that his piano concerto tends to sound a bit episodic. The episodes are all entrancing, though, and the concerto was an instant hit at its 1869 Copenhagen premiere by the Royal Danish Orchestra with Edmund Neupert as soloist. Neupert, to whom the concerto was dedicated, wrote to Grieg (who was unable to attend because of a scheduling conflict) describing the happy event:

The triumph I achieved was tremendous. Even as early as the cadenza in the first movement, the public broke into real storm. The three dangerous critics, [composer Niels] Gade, [pianist/composer Anton] Rubenstein, and [composer Emil] Hartmann, sat in the stalls and applauded with all their might. I am to send you greetings from Rubenstein and say that he is astounded to have heard a composition of such genius. (Cited in program notes by Robert C. Bagar and Louis Biancolli for the Philharmonic-Symphony Society of New York).

Our soloist this Thursday (and at every performance on the tour) will be Icelandic pianist Víkingur Ólafsson, who has earned praise for his recordings of everything from Bach to Philip Glass. He was the soloist the last time Denève and the SLSO presented the Grieg concerto in 2021. At the time I wrote that he made “a stunning impression…with a performance that blended nuance and poetry with virtuoso flair.”

Rachmaninoff in 1921
Public Domain, Wikimeida Commons

During the intermission that follows, you’ll have the opportunity to see why taking an orchestra on tour is just a major logistical effort the SLSO production team assembles large cargo trunks in the foyer. Immediately after this concert, large instruments will be packed into trunks and begin their journey to Europe on Friday.

This evening concludes with the "Symphonic Dances" by Sergei Rachmaninoff (1873 – 1943). It’s a work I have found oddly compelling since I first heard it on a 1961 LP recording by the Philadelphia Orchestra under Eugene Ormandy, who conducted the work's first performance in 1941. I was immediately struck by the "late night" feel of the piece--and not just because of the chimes in the last movement. It was only later that I learned that Rachmaninoff had, in fact, originally titled the three sections "Noon," "Twilight," and "Midnight." The composer dropped the titles, preferring the let the music speak for itself, and it does so eloquently.

The work is filled with evidence of Rachmaninoff's genius as an orchestrator, with elaborate and complex string writing, inventive use of brasses and winds (including a short but poignant solo for alto sax), and an effective but never overwhelming use of the large percussion battery. This is dramatic music that is nevertheless steeped in autumnal melancholy. The final movement is a struggle between the “Dies Irae” and the “Resurrection” theme from Rachmaninoff’s 1915 “All-night Vigil” which, while emphatically resolved in favor of the latter, still seems to carry the sense of a life approaching its conclusion.

In the program notes for the SLSOs last performance of the work in 2019, Denève described it as “redeeming--it's a piece of hope. The ending is an Alleluia, a triumph over death. It was his last work, and maybe, because he composed this piece, he felt he could die."

The Essentials: Stéphane Denève conducts the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra and pianist Vikingur Ólafsson in a one-night-only preview of the program they will take on the orchestra's March European tour. The concert consists of Prokofiev's "The Love for Three Oranges" Suite, Grieg's Piano Concerto, and Rachmaninoff's "Symphonic Dances." The concert takes place on  Thursday, March 16, at 7:30 pm. Stephanie Childress will conduct the SLSO Youth Orchestra and Concerto Competition winner Ayan Amerin in the Allegro non troppo from the Violin Concerto in D major by Brahms and the Symphony No. 5 by Shostakovich on Sunday, March 19 at 3 pm. The regular concert season resumes in mid-April.

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

Symphony Review: Leonard Slatkin returns with an entertaining evening of music old and new

The evening air was crisp and so was the playing of the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra (SLSO last night (Saturday, October 12) as Conductor Laureate Leonard Slatkin led the band in an entertaining and expertly played program of music that spanned nearly 250 years.

Leonard Slatkin
Photo courtesy of the SLSO

The concert opened with a new version of a piece that Mr. Slatkin originally commissioned in 1996, his final year with the orchestra. As a kind of farewell present, he asked four composers who had been in residence at the SLSO during his tenure--Joseph Schwantner, Joan Tower, Donald Erb, and Claude Baker--to each create a different variation of the "Caprice No. 24" by Niccolò Paganini. Slatkin wrote one of his own as well and titled the result "Yet Another Set of Variations (on a Theme of Paganini)."

As Mr. Slatkin approached his 75th birthday he thought a revision might be in order. The new version has the same title as the original but it now has thirteen short movements by a dozen composers (including Mr. Slatkin) that's just under 20 tremendously entertaining minutes in length. The wide emotional range of the suite runs from the solemnity of Truman Harris's "Sarabande" (featuring the bassoon, Mr. Harris's instrument) and the drama of John Corigliano's "Apotheosis (:90)" (referring to the fact that each variation was supposed to run between 60 and 90 seconds) to the Spike Jones-ish comedy of Mr. Slatkin's "Introduction, Theme, and Variant (with apologies to S.R.)."

The latter makes fun of the most famous set of Paganini variations--the "Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini" by Sergei Rachmaninoff (i.e. "S.R") as does Mr. Slatkin's "Quodlibet and Finale," which references all the other composers involved and includes Kelly Karamanov playing the Rachmaninoff's famous 18th variation offstage from what sounded like on old upright piano.

Mostly, the work was about colorful orchestration, musical in-jokes, and a general sense of fun. Donald Erb's "Ave Atque Vale L.S." sounds like an intoxicated after-party. Film and television composer Daniel Slatkin (son of Leonard) covered an impressive number of musical movie memes in his "Paganini Goes to the Movies." And William Bolcom's "Presto scherzando" sounds like a soundtrack for Mr. Toad's Wild Ride.

"Yet Another Set of Variations (on a Theme of Paganini)" also sounds like a wild ride for the musicians, who are inundated with what were clearly virtuoso passages. Needless to say, the members of the SLSO pulled it off with their customary assurance.

Jelena Dirks
Photo courtesy of SLSO

Speaking of assurance, SLSO Principal Oboe Jelena Dirks displayed plenty of that in a graceful rendition of Mozart's one and only Oboe Concerto that honored what program annotator David Garrett accurately calls the "galant manner" of the piece. And she did it with sparkling precision and a good sense of what Donald Francis Tovey (as cited by Mr. Garrett) saw as the operatic underpinnings of the concerto. The "Adagio non troppo" second movement, for example, could easily be a little love song from one of Mozart's comic operas, and the "Rondo: Allegretto" finale actually quotes a tune from "The Abduction from the Seraglio." Ms. Dirks's oboe sweetly sang the former and skipped cheerfully through the latter.

As a bonus (and something of a reference to the work that opened the concert), Ms. Dirks finished each movement with a cadenza written by a different composer. So we had John de Lancie (long-time Principal Oboe of the Philadelphia Orchestra) for the first movement, English oboist Melinda Maxwell for the second, and John Mack (also a former Principal Oboe with the Philadelphians) for the third.

The concert concluded with a glorious, wide-screen, hi-def performance of Richard Strauss's colorful and rousing tribute to himself, "Ein Heldenleben" ("A Hero's Life"). Maestro Slatkin gave it a sweepingly romantic interpretation that did not neglect the fine details of Strauss's inventive use of the orchestra. Richard Freed once observed that "Ein Heldenleben" "represented in its time a new level in the exploitation of the resources of the modern orchestra, and it remains an outstanding landmark in that respect," and you could certainly hear all of that in this utterly compelling performance.

Richard Strauss in 1898
By Fritz Erler (died 1940)
Private collection, Public Domain
commons.wikimedia.org

And the SLSO musicians played flawlessly. Big laurel wreathes are especially due to the horns and the massive brass section as a whole, which sounded great, even in the softest passages. It helped that Mr. Slatkin had the brass section spread out across the entire width of the stage, just in front of the percussion, which made it easier to hear the individual sections, even during the rock concert--level din of the "Hero's Battlefield" section.

Concertmaster David Halen had what is essentially the star turn in "The Hero's Companion" section. It's a loving tribute to Strauss's wife, soprano Pauline de Ahna, in which the violin plays the role of Ms. de Ahna, and an emotionally varied one it surely is. In a letter to Romain Rolland (cited by Mr. Freed), the composer described her musical character as "very complex, a trifle perverse, a trifle coquettish, never the same, changing from minute to minute." Mr. Halen neatly captured the character's many moods.

Principal English Horn Cally Banham also had a lovely moment in the transition to the final section, "The Hero's Retreat from the World and Fulfillment," but ultimately the entire orchestra performed heroically under Mr. Slatkin's skilled direction. I'm a sucker for Strauss, granted, but this was nevertheless a well-balanced and unfailingly arresting performance.

Next at Powell Hall: Stéphane Denève returns to lead the orchestra and violin soloist Karen Gomyo in Prokofiev's Violin Concerto No. 1. The program also includes a suite from Poulenc's ballet "Les Biches," and Rachmaninoff's "Symphonic Dances." Performances are Friday and Saturday at 8 pm, and Sunday at 3 pm October 18-20 at Powell Symphony Hall in Grand Center.

Symphony Preview: French connections

Maurice Ravel in 1925

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This weekend's St. Louis Symphony Orchestra concerts (on Friday and Saturday, February 2 and 3) mark the first appearance here by conductor Stéphane Denève since his appointment as the orchestra's 13th music director last July. Appropriately enough, it's an all-French program that mixes the familiar with less the well-known and just a splash of the new--rather like the 2018-19 program, details of which were released earlier this week.

Maurice Ravel (1875-1937) is heavily favored, contributing three of the five works we'll hear this weekend. As someone who has always been a great admirer of Ravel's work in general and his orchestrations in particular, I view that as a very good thing.

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. They 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 kids 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.

The suite opens with the brief, tranquil Pavane de la Belle au bois dormant (Pavane of the Sleeping Beauty) with its placid flute melody. Next is Petit Poucet (Tom Thumb), who gets lost in a forest of wandering strings while chirping birds in the woodwinds and violins eat his breadcrumbs. Laideronnette, Impératrice des pagodes (Laideronnette, Empress of the Pagodas) is a brilliant exercise in pentatonic Chinoiserie complete with tam-tam, cymbals, and xylophone.

Les Entretiens de la Belle et de la Bête (Conversations of Beauty and the Beast) is one of the most charming inspirations, with the serene Beauty on clarinet answered by the growling Beast on contrabassoon. The final Le Jardin féerique (The Enchanted Garden) is a long, romantic build to a shimmering finale that is quintessential Ravel.

Francis Poulenc in 1922
Photo by Joseph Rosmand

This is a true showpiece for the orchestra, with lots of opportunities for solo and small ensemble work.

Up next is the exuberant Concerto in D minor for Two Pianos and Orchestra by Francis Poulenc (1889-1963), first performed in 1932 by the composer himself and Jacques Février as soloists with Désiré Defauw conducting the La Scala Orchestra. Like so much of Poulenc's orchestral works, the concerto is chockablock with appealing musical ideas, including what Roger Dettmer at AllMusic.com describes as "bits of once-popular chansons (like croutons in salad)" to complement Poulenc's own themes.

There's a bit of Javanese gamelan-inspired music at the end of the first movement (Poulenc had heard some at the Paris Colonial Exhibition a year earlier), a Mozartian second movement that slowly morphs into a major romantic climax, and a final Rondo that Mr. Dettmer describes so picturesquely that I find myself obliged to quote him in full:

Returning to the mood of the first movement, the Allegro molto finale begins with percussive flourishes before it takes off like an Alfa-Romeo in a Grand prix through the avenues and allées of day-and-night Paris, past marching bands and music halls. There is, however, an interlude lyrique et romantique when the Alfa stops for a bedroom tryst, where perfume and perspiration mix with the smoke from Gauloises, after which the race resumes, even more racily.

If that doesn't make you want to hear Christina and Michelle Naughton perform the concerto this weekend, I don't know what will.

Guillaume Connesson
Photo by Fanny Houillon

The second half of this weekend's program opens with the St. Louis premiere of Flammenschrift, written in 2012 by Guillaume Connesson (b. 1970). Written in response to a commission for a Beethoven-related work from the conductor Daniele Gatti and the Orchestre national de France, Flammenschrift uses the same orchestration as Beethoven's Fifth Symphony but also, if Connesson's other works are any indication, a very contemporary harmonic palette and a flair for orchestral color that Ravel would probably approve of. Here's the composer himself describing the piece (by way of René Spencer Saller's program notes for the SLSO):

Flammenschrift, or "fire-letter," is a word that Goethe used in his poem "Marienbad Elegy." I wished to compose a "Furies' tune" that draws a psychological portrait of Beethoven and, more generally, pays homage to the music of Germany. For Beethoven, I portray an angry, seething, impetuous man, whose interior violence shows through in numerous pages of his music. In his works, Beethoven constantly celebrated the fraternity of man, but he was often harsh with his loved ones and domestic servants. My desired musical portrait originates in this paradox. This misanthropic Beethoven-seen walking down the street looking disheveled, with his misshapen hat, this loner cursed by destiny but sanctified by genius-has always fascinated me: he constructed a very significant image of the artist in the 19th-century imagination that endures to the present day.

This weekend's concerts will conclude with Ravel's La Valse, a work that began in 1911 with the title Wein (Vienna). And, in fact, a bit of it shows up in a piece from that same year that will be played immediately before La Valse at these concerts, the Valses nobles et sentimentales. Before it could be completed, however, World War I (in which the composer served as an ambulance driver) intervened, and by the time La Valse was submitted to (and foolishly rejected by) Diaghilev for the Ballets Russes in 1919, it had become something far more profound.

Stéphane Denève
Photo by Jessica Griffin

"At the close of World War I," writes Carl E. Schorske in Fin-De-Siecle Vienna: Politics and Culture, "Maurice Ravel recorded in La valse the violent death of the nineteenth-century world. The waltz, long the symbol of gay Vienna, became in the composer's hand a frantic danse macabre. Ravel wrote: 'I feel this work a kind of apotheosis of the Viennese waltz, observed Ravel, "linked in my mind with the impression of a fantastic whirl of destiny'".

That about sums it up. I can't hear it without envisioning a huge, ornate machine spinning faster and faster until it hurls itself to pieces-as the complex structure of 19th-century Europe did in the so-called "war to end all wars". The piece is, needless to say, brilliantly orchestrated, and its crashing finale is thrilling-but also a bit unnerving. It reminds me of the old joke about the problem with history being that every time it repeats itself, the price goes up.

To circle back to the Valses nobles et sentimentales, the title (usually translated as "Noble and sentimental waltzes," although "romantic" might be more a better translation than "sentimental") was intended by Ravel as an homage to a set of piano pieces Shubert had written nearly a century earlier: the Valses sentimentales from 1823 and the Valses nobles from 1826. Indeed, Ravel claimed that he was "intent on writing a set of Schubertian waltzes." Personally, I don't see how anyone could mistake the bracing, elegant, and brilliantly orchestrated set of seven short waltzes and an epilogue as anything but pure Ravel.

The Essentials: Music Director Designate Stéphane Dèneve conducts the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra and duo pianists Christina and Michelle Naughton on Friday at 10:30 am and Saturday at 8 pm, February 2 and 3. The concerts take place at Powell Symphony Hall, 718 North Grand in Grand Center. For more information: stlsymphony.org.

Symphony Preview: Hit and Miss

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Unless you've sung in a choir or played in a concert band, you probably know Gustav Holst (1874-1934) only as the composer of his popular orchestral suite The Planets, Op. 32, a performance of which concludes the St. Louis Symphony's regular season this weekend, May 6-8, 2016. Singers will probably know Holst's many choral works, and recovering band geeks like yours truly are likely to be familiar with his two suites from 1909 and 1911, or his Hammersmith: Prelude and Scherzo from 1930. For everybody else, it's The Planets.

Gustav Holst in 1921
Photo: Herbert Lambert

Written between 1914 and 1916, The Planets was an immediate hit and made the previously unknown Holst something of a celebrity. This was not, as it turned out, a welcome development for the rather shy and retiring composer. Indeed, like many composers who became known for a single work, Holst eventually came to actively dislike his Greatest Hit. "Holst never wrote another piece like The Planets again," writes Kenric Taylor at gustavholst.info. "He hated its popularity. When people would ask for his autograph, he gave them a typed sheet of paper that stated that he didn't give out autographs."

If you've never heard The Planets before, you're in for a treat. I remember my delight the first time I heard this wonderfully cinematic seven-movement suite performed by the Vienna Philharmonic under Herbert von Karajan on a 1961 London Records disc. Back then my stereo wasn't much to brag about and the recording itself was a bit murky, but even so, from the first aggressive measures of "Mars, the Bringer of War"--an alarmingly mechanistic march in 5/4 time--I was hooked.

Inspired by the mythological and astrological aspects of the planets, the seven movements turn the heavenly bodies into characters and provide musical portraits of each one. "Mars" is all futile violence and dissonant brass. "Venus, the Bringer of Peace" floats in on a gentle horn solo, wafted along by flutes and strings. "Mercury, the Winged Messenger" zips along its triplets tossed around by the harp, strings, woodwinds, and celesta. And so it goes. Pluto hadn't been discovered yet and earth, of course, doesn't count in astrology, hence the seven movements instead of nine.

Ralph Vaughan Williams
in 1922

Holst actually got two hits out of The Planets, as it happens. The big, noble second theme from "Jupiter, the Bringer of Jollity" proved to be so popular that Holst later used it as a setting for Cecil Spring-Rice's poem "I Vow to Thee My Country." That version of the tune became a kind of second national anthem in England, along the lines of "America the Beautiful" over here.

Opening the concert will be a pair of works that are likely to be much less familiar: Ralph Vaughan Williams's Flos campi (Flower of the Field) from 1925 and Alban Berg's Fünf Orchesterlieder nach Ansichtskarten-Texten von Peter Altenberg (Five Orchestral Songs to Picture-Postcard Texts by Peter Altenberg), Op. 4 (a.k.a the Altenberg Lieder), from 1912. Both have been performed by the SLSO only once--the former in 1975 under Leonard Slatkin and the latter in 1966 with Eleazar de Carvalho at the podium--and neither one has exactly been on the "Top 40" with orchestras elsewhere.

In the case of the Vaughan Williams, it's partly a matter of the forces involved. In addition to the orchestra, Flos campi is scored for solo viola and mixed chorus--an unusual enough pairing to make programming it problematic. And the piece itself is a bit of an oddity in the composer's output. Cast in six movements and played without pause, it's a series of reflections on texts from one of the most openly sensual bits of the Bible, the Song of Solomon. By turns lyrical, sensuous, pastoral, and even cinematic, it's quirky stuff. Composer Phillip Cooke has called it "one of the silliest, most baffling and (in some parts) most un-Vaughan Williams piece that RVW ever wrote; it is part pastoral elegy, part crazy pagan party." But he then goes on to confess, "I love it."

The score is dedicated to the noted English violist Lionel Tertis and was, in fact, first performed with Tertis as the soloist in 1925 with Sir Henry Wood at the podium. Like Tertis, Vaughan Williams dearly loved the rich, dark sound of the viola and loved writing for it. Discussing the origins of Flos campi, Vaughan Williams's wife Ursula noted that "The viola with its capability of warmth and its glowing quality was the instrument he knew best."

Alban Berg

A different kind of darkness figures prominently in the Berg song cycle, which takes as its text the elliptical and eccentric poems of Peter Altenberg (real name: Richard Engländer). Engländer/Altenberg was an odd duck. "He is reputed to have spent most of his adult waking hours in coffeehouses," writes James Guida in a profile of the poet in The New Yorker, "and the sleeping ones in a hotel that was little more than a brothel. As for writing, his chosen medium was a feuilleton-style prose poem of anywhere from a sentence to a few pages in length, and he did wonders with it." He sent some of those little poems to his friends on postcards, and it's five of those that Berg set to intense and cryptically passionate music.

Like all of Berg's music, the Altenberg Lieder cram a lot of information into a very small amount of time--ten to twelve minutes in most performances. "Each of the songs is symmetrically conceived," writes Alexander Carpenter at allmusic.com, "that is, each begins and ends with similar, if not identical, harmonic or motivic gestures. The songs make considerable use of canon, passacaglia, and variation form." It was all apparently too much for the Viennese audience at the work's 1913 premiere, who booed and hooted like the Paris audiences at the first performance of Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring that same year.

Alas, Berg lacked Stravinsky's massive ego and talent for self-promotion, so instead of turning the audience reaction to his advantage, he retreated from composing songs entirely, choosing instead to concentrate on his orchestral works and his celebrated operas Wozzeck and Lulu. He might have achieved even greater things, but when the Nazis came to power he was denounced as a composer of entartete music ("degenerate music") and then had the misfortune to die in 1935 at the age of fifty from an infected insect bite. Such is the impact of dumb luck on human affairs.

The Essentials: David Robertson conducts the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra and Chorus along with soloists Christine Brewer, soprano, and Kathleen Mattis, viola, on Friday and Saturday at 8 p.m. and Sunday at 3 p.m., May 6-8. The program consists of Vaughan William's Flos Campi, Berg's Altenberg Lieder, and Holst's The Planets. Performances take place at Powell Symphony Hall, 718 North Grand.