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 Review: "American Sounds" showcases musical and cultural diversity at the SLSO

This past Saturday, January 11^th, Opera Theatre’s Principal Conductor Daniela Candillari led the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra (SLSO) in a program consisting of “The School for Scandal Overture,” Op. 5, by Samuel Barber (1910–1981); the Symphony No. 9, Op. 95, “From the New World” by Antonín Dvořák (1841–1904); and the world premiere of the Accordion Concerto by contemporary American composer Nina Shekhar (b. 1995). As a powerful argument for the value of diversity, musical and otherwise, it was hard to beat.

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

Daniela Candillari
Photo courtesy of the SLSO

Written when Barber was still a student at the Curtis Institute in 1931, the “Overture” was intended not as a curtain raiser for a production of Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s 1777 comedy but rather as a stand-alone musical picture of the play’s themes. That made it an exemplary match for someone with Candillari’s extensive theatrical background. And, in fact, her reading strongly accented the emotional contrasts in Barber’s score, which ranges from the playful to the lushly romantic.

The strings and winds gave just the right pointillist punch to the spikey theme that surely represents the gossipy Sir Benjamin Backbite, while Cally Banham’s English horn warmly introduced the theme that reminds me of the May/December romance between Sir Peter and Lady Teazle. The Touhill’s concert hall doesn’t have a curtain, but this was nevertheless an excellent curtain raiser.

Shekhar’s concerto was up next. As Candillari told us from the podium Saturday night, this remarkable piece was the genesis of the entire program in that it’s the work of a young American composer (like Barber) that is strongly influenced by the music of a different culture (Bohemia, in Dvořák’s case). For Shekhar, a first-generation Indian American, that influence is the tradition of the musical form of the raga and the harmonium, a hand-pumped reed organ that is often used in Indian music. “I have always loved the accordion’s reedy timbre,” writes the composer, “particularly because it reminded me of the harmonium.”

Hanzhi Wang
Photo: Matt Dine

Given that Dvořák also wrote for the European harmonium (in his “Bagatelles,” Op. 47), that closes the circle.

The concerto opens with the unearthly sound of a wine glass stroked by wet fingers (the vérillon, the basis for Benjamin Franklin’s glass harmonica), backed up by bowed vibraphone. We hear the descending three-note motif (A-G-F) that will become the basis of the first half. This quickly becomes embedded in a musical mist reminiscent of Charles Ives’s “The Housatonic at Stockbridge.” Finally the accordion enters with elaborate riffs on the basic motif and everything slowly climbs one of several big orchestral summits before subsiding and finally going tacet to make way for a virtuoso cadenza for the accordion.

The music then shifts into a more anxious mood with a repeated motoric motif in the strings. The accordion picks it up, at which point it begins to sound not unlike the “train” sound so popular with blues harmonica players (not surprising, since both the accordion and harmonica produce their sound in essentially the same way). There’s another massive orchestral build that includes a variety of instrumental techniques (string harmonics, glissandi, tone clusters, etc.) once regarded as unconventional but that now seem to be part of every composer’s toolbox. It all fades away except for a sweet little duet for the accordion and viola (nicely done by Beth Guterman Chu), after which the concerto ends with accordion trills that slowly dwindle to silence.

Like many newer works for full, post-Wagner orchestra (80 players, more or less), the concerto makes major technical demands of the orchestra and conductor. Hats off to Candillari and the band for pulling this off with such assurance. The big climaxes still sounded, at least from my seat in the first floor boxes, like a Phil Spector “wall of sound” on steroids, so I can just imagine what a challenge it would be to both play and listen carefully in the orchestra.

A laurel wreath is also due soloist (and co-commissioner) Hanzhi Wang. Playing a high-end Pigini button accordion, she dazzled in the rapid solo passages and positively crooned in the more intimate moments. She and Shekhar worked closely on the development of the concerto so it’s perhaps not surprising that it fits her like a custom-tailored suit, but even so this was a stunning performance.

Nina Shekhar and Daniela Caldilari

As to the concerto itself, I’ll admit to initially finding it fascinating and even, in the more meditative first half, mesmerizing. The technical skill involved in creating the work was impressive, but it somewhat wore out its welcome for me before its 23 minutes (or thereabouts) were up. I would expect to see this making the rounds of many of the major orchestras for a while, but I’m not so sure of its long-term survival.

Like the Barber overture, Dvořák’s “New World” is a work of marked dramatic contrasts and here, again, I think Candillari’s operatic experience came in handy. Her change of emphasis for each appearance of the first movement’s lyrical second theme made it a kind of musical punctuation mark that added clarity to the symphonic structure. The Largo second movement, with its familiar English horn solo (nicely done by Cally Banham), had a strong sense of melancholic longing. The Allegro con fuoco finale was especially commanding, with a wide emotional range and fine playing all around.

The SLSO has a pretty solid history with the Dvořák Ninth in recent years, with world class performances by Stephanie Childress in 2022 and former Music Director David Robertson in 2014 and 2017. Candillari kept that tradition alive Saturday night.

Next at the SLSO: Music Director Stéphane Denève conducts an all-Ravel program Friday at 7:30 pm and Sunday at 3:00 pm, January 17 and 19. Kirill Gerstein is the soloist in the Concerto in G and the Concerto for the Left Hand. The orchestra opens the program with the “Mother Goose Suite” and concludes with the ever-popular “Bolero.” Performances take place at the Touhill Performing Arts Center. The Friday concert will be recorded for rebroadcast on Saturday, January 18, on St. Louis Public Radio and Classical 107.3.

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

Symphony Preview: New worlds, new sounds

The regular concert season of the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra (SLSO)  resumes on this Friday and Saturday (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.  The fact that this program is accurately titled “American sounds” tells you a lot about our nation's musical diversity.

[Preview the music with my Spotify playlist.]

The concerts open with the “School for Scandal,” composed by Samuel Barber (1910–1981) at the ripe old age of 21 (and finally performed two years later), when the composer was still a student at the Curtis Institute. Along with his 1935 “Music for a Scene from Shelley,” the overture established his reputation as an exponent of music that was “distinctive and modern but not experimental.”

Samuel Barber, photographed by
Carl Van Vechten, 1944
Public Domain

If you’re not familiar with the 1777 Sheridan comedy that inspired the music, fear not; the overture is an entertaining mix of sprightly and romantic themes that’s perfectly capable of standing on its own. Barber described it as “a musical reflection of the play’s spirit,” which is a mix of social satire, romantic misfires, and mistaken identities typical of late 18^th-century British comedies. The Encyclopedia Britannica has a plot summary for those interested.

Next, it’s the world premiere of the Accordion Concerto by contemporary American composer Nina Shekhar (b. 1995). Commissioned for accordionist (and this weekend’s soloist) Hanzhi Wang by Young Concert Artists and The St. Louis Symphony Orchestra, the work runs around 23 minutes. “Writing this concerto,” says the composer, “was an exciting opportunity to learn more about this amazing instrument and allow its unique sound world and extensive technical capability to enrich my own musical vocabulary.”

To me, that vocabulary looks fairly rich already. Her official biography describes her as “a composer and multimedia artist who explores the intersection of identity, vulnerability, love, and laughter to create bold and intensely personal works.” A quick glance at her past projects reveals an artist with a wide range of interests and a willingness to embrace unorthodox techniques.

To pick just one example, her “Mad Libs,” commissioned by the Los Angeles Philharmonic Youth Orchestra, adapts the “fill in the blanks” format of the vintage party game of the same name. The performers were given short stories and musical settings that contain “blanks.”  The students then filled in the story blanks with words of their choosing and came up with sounds that represented those words. 

Nina Shekhar
Photo: Shervin Laniez

Closer to home, her “Turn Your Feet Around” (2021), written for the new music group Alarm Will Sound and the Mizzou International Composers Festival (where the group is the ensemble in residence), deconstructs Gloria Estefan’s “Get on Your Feet.” Check out the video and don’t let yourself be fooled by the unexpected uses of silence.

Closing the concerts is the Symphony No. 9 in E minor, op. 95, (“From the New World”) by Antonín Dvořák. The Czech master wrote it during a visit to America in the early 1890s, and while he never explicitly quotes any American folk material, there's still something about this music that strongly suggests America. From the flute theme in the first movement that seems to echo "Swing Low, Sweet Chariot," to the second movement Largo that has (at least for me) always evoked the majestic solitude of the plains (Dvořák said he wrote it after reading Longfellow's "Hiawatha"), to the "bluesy" flatted seventh chords of the finale, Dvořák "New World" symphony just shouts "USA"—even if it does so with a strong Czech accent.

Some critics have complained about the symphony's structural weaknesses and its episodic nature.  In an essay published posthumously in "The Symphony" (Penguin Books, 1967), English composer/conductor Julius Harrison noted that the work "has come in for considerable criticism as being mainly a succession of enchanting and virile tunes…presided over or helped out by a strongly rhythmic phrase bundled into each movement whenever Dvořák found himself wondering how best to proceed."

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

I beg to differ. As conductor Joshua Wallerstein pointed out in the episode of his “Sticky Notes” podcast dedicated to the Ninth, that “strongly rhythmic phrase” is not just something tossed in whenever Dvorak wasn’t sure what to do. In combination with the pentatonic scale on which it’s based, it is in fact the tiny acorn from which the mighty oak of the symphony grows. It's embedded in every single melodic idea (starting with the main theme of the first movement) and is the major unifying factor of the symphony. “[T]his piece is not only a heavily traditional symphony,” observes Wallerstein, “it’s practically through composed from its very first notes.”

Dvořák gets more respect than he used to these days. As a long-time fan of his music, I’m happy to see that.

P.S. This week’s playlist doesn’t have the Shekhar concerto since but it does have fine recordings of the Barber and Dvořák, both by the SLSO conducted by Leonard Slatkin.

The Essentials: Daniela Candillari conducts the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra Friday at 10:30 am and Saturday at 7:30 pm, January 10 and 11. The program consists of Samuel Barber’s “The School for Scandal” Overture, the world premiere of Nina Shekhar’s Accordion Concerto with soloist Hanzhi Wang, and the Symphony No. 9 in E minor, Op. 95 (“From the New World”). Performances take place at the Touhill Performing Arts Center on the University of Missouri St. Louis campus. The Saturday concert will be broadcast live on St. Louis Public Radio and Classic 107.3

UPDATE Friday, January 10th: Due to the cancellation of the Friday morning concert, a second performance has been added on Saturday the 11th at 10:30 am. Details at the SLSO web site.. Check the web site for details.

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

Symphony Preview: Sous le ciel de Paris

This weekend (November 15 and 16) Stéphane Denève conducts the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra in the second of two programs devoted almost entirely to the music of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756–1791). It’s all Mozart all the time—except for the 12 minutes or so that will be Anna Clyne (b. 1980).

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

An English-born composer now residing in the USA, Clyne’s name is one that should be familiar to SLSO regulars. The orchestra has played a number of her works over the last decade or so, usually to appreciative (and well-deserved) applause. In fact, the Clyne work we’ll hear this weekend was the first of her compositions that the SLSO played.

That work is “Within Her Arms” for string orchestra. Written as an elegy for the death of the Clyne’s mother in 2008, the piece is (as I wrote back then) a kind of memory play. Its somewhat mysterious music, which at times seems to harken back to Vaughn Williams or even Thomas Tallis, rises from a whisper to a roar before finally fading away, slowly, into nothingness. “The rest,” as Hamlet says, “is silence.”

Anna Clyne
Photo by Christina Kernohan courtesy of the SLSO

“Within Her Arms” is the only work on the program that’s missing from the SLSO’s Spotify playlist. Which is a bit surprising since there’s quite a splendid performance of it there by the adventurous chamber orchestra The Knights. When you listen to the SLSO’s playlist, just pause it and play “Within Her Arms” right before Mozart’s Symphony No. 31 (“Paris”) for the full effect.

The concerts open with Mozart’s Symphony No. 1 in E-flat major, K. 16, penned when Mozart was eight years old and known primarily as a piano prodigy. It’s a modest and charming three-movement piece that sounds more like work of Johann Christian Bach (1735–1782) than Mozart. Still the somewhat enigmatic second movement does include, according to the anonymous program annotator for the Kamuela Philharmonic Society Orchestra, “a four-note motif that also appears in several later Mozart compositions, including his Symphony No. 33, and the finale of his Jupiter Symphony.” And it does end with a jolly little Presto.

Up next is the more substantial Piano Concerto No. 20 in D minor, K. 466. It was, I believe, last presented by the SLSO in 2017, at which time I described it as engrossing, menacing, and filled with the kind of high drama that audiences would come to love so much in the ensuing decades of the 19th century. Beethoven, for one, loved this concerto, performing it often and composing two cadenzas for it, Mozart's own having been lost to history. It is, in fact, sufficiently "modern" for its time that Viennese audiences might have been put off by it, had it not been the work of a man who was at the peak of popularity.

Mozart, age 6
Painter unknown

The soloist this weekend will be the talented young (born in 1990) pianist Behzod Abduraimov. I last saw him in 2018 when he played the Grieg Concerto with Gemma New on the podium. At the time, I praised the ideal mix of technical flash and sensitivity in his performance. Which bodes well for this weekend.

Next, it’s the overture to Mozart’s early opera “Mitridate, re di Ponto” (“Mithridates, King of Pontus”), which is filled with engaging tunes that belie the work’s tragic finale. First performed at the Teatro Regio Ducale in Milan, it was something of a hit despite the fact that the composer was only 14. Mozart’s more mature operas have overshadowed it since then and revivals are rare.

The concerts will close with the Symphony No. 31 in D Major, K.297 (300a) ("Paris") composed in the City of Light in June, 1778. Mozart and his ailing mother Anna Maria had arrived there after a concert tour in search of additional professional opportunities, but the pickings were slim, and the pair soon found themselves in debt. The arrival of a commission for a new symphony from Jean LeGros, the director of the high-profile Concert Spirituel, was therefore a welcome development.

The audience at the symphony's June 18th public premiere was enthusiastic, if Mozart's account is accurate. The work was interrupted by applause several times (both between and within movements) and the composer was ebullient. "I was so happy," he wrote to his father, "that as soon as the symphony was over, I went off to the Palais Royal, where I had a large ice, said the Rosary as I had vowed to do—and went home.”

His joy was short-lived. Although Anna Maria was at first invigorated by the weather and the attentions of old friends like the tenor Anton Raaff and horn player Franz Joseph Heina and his wife, even small outings tired her out. A day at the Jardin du Luxembourg with the Heinas on the 10^th left her exhausted and her health began to worsen.

Behzod Abduraimov
Photo: Evgeny Eutykhov courtesy of the SLSO

As Mozart scholar and conductor Jane Glover relates in “Mozart’s Women” (Harper-Collins, 2006), by June 26th the situation was grave enough that Mozart “was told that she should make her final confession, which she did on the 30^th. At 10:21 on the evening of 3 July, with a nurse and Heina and her beloved Wolfgang beside her, Anna Maria died.” She was only 58.

You won’t hear any of the mental anguish Mozart must have felt as he watched his mother’s health deteriorate, though, in this vigorous and graceful three-movement work. Instead, you hear the Parisian sunshine and revel in the composer’s use of what the BBC’s Tom Service calls “the biggest orchestra Mozart had used in a symphonic context.” Service’s article includes an excellent analysis of the piece, in fact, and I highly recommend it as a bit of pre-concert reading.

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

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

Symphony Preview: Come together

It’s quite a mixed bag this weekend (October 18 and 19) as guest conductor David Danzmayr makes his third appearance with the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra since his notable local debut in 2021. During its relatively brief span (around ninety minutes, including intermission), the band will play works from the 18^th, 19^th, 20^th, and 21^st centuries from England, France, Scotland, and Germany.

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

Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, 1905
By Adam Cuerden
Public Domain

The concerts open with the “Ballade” in A minor, Op. 33, by British composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor (1875–1912). Composed in 1897 just after Coleridge-Taylor left the Royal College of Music, the work was commissioned by the Three Choirs Festival, where it met with considerable success. Coleridge-Taylor went on to become a celebrated composer, conductor, and teacher—a career tragically cut short by his death from pneumonia at the age of 37.

The son of Daniel Hugh Taylor, a doctor from Sierra Leone, and Alice Hare Martin, an Englishwoman, Coleridge-Taylor (as Stephen Banfield and Jeremy Dibble write in Grove Online) “saw it as his mission in life to help establish the dignity of the black man.” The black American poet Paul Lawrence Dunbar was an especially strong influence in this regard, helping the composer become more aware of his heritage. That led to works such as “African Romances (1897),” the “African Suite” (1898), and “Toussaint l'ouverture (1901),” described as “a musical illustration of the 18th-century slave who led the liberation of Haiti.”

All that was still to come, though, when he wrote the “Ballade.” The title might suggest something soft and dreamy, but the music itself is dramatic and exceptionally attractive. The opening theme, marked Allegro energico, ma non troppo presto, is played by the strings over agitated trills in the woodwinds. It gets developed and expanded a bit before giving way to the contrasting second theme, moderato ma con passione. Both themes get a fairly conventional sonata form treatment, complete with abbreviated development and recapitulation sections, before winding up with a slam-bang coda (Piu presto. Con fuoco.).

On the whole, the “Ballade” is a bit reminiscent of Grieg’s Symphony No. 1 from 1863, although since Grieg suppressed it, I don’t think it’s likely that Coleridge-Taylor would have been familiar with that work. “Ballade” should get things off to a rousing start, in any event.

Saint-Saëns in 1900
By Petit, Pierre (1831-1909)
Photographer Restored by
Adam Cuerden

Next, it’s time for the program’s Big Work, the Piano Concerto No. 2 in G minor, Op. 22, by Camille Saint-Saëns (1835–1921). It’s the most popular of Saint-Saëns's five piano concertos, and when you listen to the recording by Pascal Rogé and the Royal Philharmonic under Charles Dutoit on the SLSO Spotify playlist you’ll understand why.

Like the Coleridge-Taylor “Ballade,” the concerto starts big and bold, Andante sostenuto, with a flashy solo keyboard fantasia of the sort that Bach might have written followed by an equally dramatic entrance by the full orchestra. The second movement, Allo scherzando, trips along merrily and sparkles like Champagne. The Presto tarantella finale provides a real workout for the soloist. Done well, the concerto is always a crowd pleaser and likely to induce standing ovations.

This week's soloist, Conrad Tao, played the Second Concerto here in 2014, with Conductor Laureate Leonard Slatkin at the podium.  Back then I called his performance “a model of power and delicacy.”  At the time, Tao was only 20 and just getting started on what has proven to be a spectacular career as a pianist and composer, so it will be interesting to see whether or not that intervening decade has changed his approach to this work. Oh yeah: he’s also a fellow Midwesterner, born in Urbana, Illinois in 1994.

The second half of the program begins at the other end of the sonic spectrum from the big, outgoing romanticism of Coleridge-Taylor and Saint-Saëns. Scottish composer Sir James MacMillan (b. 1953) wrote his evanescent orchestral miniature “One” in 2012 for the 20^th anniversary of The Britten Sinfonia, an innovative chamber ensemble the aim of which was “pushing the boundaries of what a chamber orchestra can do.” It’s dedicated to the Sinfonia’s then-Artistic Director David Butcher (now CEO of the legendary Hallé Orchestra).

Sir James MacMillan
Photo courtesy of the SLSO

Best known for "Veni, Veni, Emmanuel," his 1992 percussion concerto closely identified with the celebrated deaf percussionist Evelyn Glennie, MacMillan is solidly opposed to the academic abstraction that often made audiences react to the phrase “contemporary music” the way Dracula reacted to garlic. Specifically, MacMillan disdains composers who are “deeply suspicious of any significant move towards tonality, any hint of pulse that is actually discernible, and any music which communicates successfully with a non-specialist audience.”

There is certainly nothing dry or obscure in “One,” which evokes a universe of ethereal beauty with impressively minimal resources. The title refers, I believe, to the fact that MacMillan’s orchestration creates the illusion of single voices engaging in a kind of bucolic “call and response” over a vast outdoor space. In reality, each “voice” consists of multiple instruments playing together. “I pluribus unum” (“from many, one”), if you will. The Celtic-inspired melody starts, stops, then starts again with different instrumental combinations.

“One” concludes with the melody played pianissimo at the very top of their registers by the flutes and violins, then rapidly descending through the orchestra to land in bassoons and basses playing at the bottom of theirs. There’s a last one-measure rest followed by a brief section marked tutti: misterioso that includes flutter-tongued clarinets and trumpets along with ad lib pizzicatos in the violins (“Not together. Each player to enter in rapid succession, starting with section principal”). “One” ends with an ambiguously dissonant pianissimo chord from the full ensemble.

My description hardly does it justice, but fortunately you can hear an authoritative 2014 performance by the Britten Sinfonia conducted by the composer in the SLSO playlist. If you read music, you can watch that same recording synchronized with the score on YouTube.

Finally, it’s back to the familiar with the Symphony No. 5 (“Reformation”) by Felix Mendelssohn (1809–1847). The symphony’s nickname (which came from the composer’s sister Fanny) refers to the fact that it was originally intended for a celebration of the 300th anniversary of the presentation of the Augsburg Confession to Holy Roman Emperor Charles V. The document is a cornerstone of the Lutheran faith, and the celebration in Berlin on June 25th, 1830, was a Very Big Deal, backed up by the Prussian King Frederick William III. Having a new symphony played as part of the festivities would have been a major coup for the 21-year-old composer.

Portrait of Mendelssohn by
James Warren Childe, 1839
en.wikipedia.org

Mendelssohn started work on the symphony in January of 1830 but was sidetracked by a case of measles—a serious business in those days before vaccines. The composer made a full recovery, but not in time to submit the work for the big event. He finally conducted the premiere in Berlin in 1832, but reviews were unenthusiastic and the composer himself ultimately turned against it, declaring the only one of his compositions he “would most like to see burnt.”

History’s verdict has been a bit kinder. “Happily for us,” writes the anonymous program annotator at the Los Angeles Philharmonic, “the ‘Reformation’ Symphony has survived, and it can give great satisfaction as a four-movement symphony with or without its references to the great events it was intended to celebrate.”  It might not be quite as popular as the “Italian” or “Scotch” symphonies, but it probably deserves to be. It has much to offer, as you can hear in the excellent recording by John Eliot Gardiner and the London Symphony on the SLSO playlist.

The Essentials: David Danzmayr conducts the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra and pianist Conrad Tao in Samuel Coleridge-Taylor’s “Ballade,” Saint-Saëns’s Piano Concerto No. 2, James MacMillan’s “One,” and Mendelssohn’s Symphony No. 5 (“Reformation”). Performances are Friday and Saturday at 7:30 pm, October 18 and 19, at the Touhill Performing Arts Center on the University of Missouri–St. Louis campus. The Saturday night performance will be broadcast live on St. Louis Public Radio and Classic 107.3 and will be available afterwards for streaming on the SLSO web site

Symphony Review: The SLSO honors musical nomads in the season opener

“A wandering minstrel I,” sings Nanki-Poo as he introduces himself in “The Mikado”; “A thing of shreds and patches.”

You wouldn’t call the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra “a thing of shreds and patches,” but with Music Director Stéphane Denève at the podium for the opening concert of the season last Sunday they were certainly doing some musical wandering. Certainly the first half of the program paid considerable homage to those famous wanderers, the Roma, with concert standards inspired by Hungarian folk tunes and the “Nomad Concerto” by Mason Bates.

Stéphane Denève
Photo: Dilip Vishwanat

Which is rather appropriate for an orchestra that will continue to lead a nomadic existence until the renovation of Powell Hall is completed next fall.

Things got off to an energetic start with a rousing performance of the “Rákóczi March”, a.k.a. the “Marche hongroise” from Part I of  the 1846 opera/oratorio hybrid “La damnation de Faust” (“The Damnation of Faust”) by Hector Berlioz (1803–1869). It’s the sort of orchestral showpiece that never fails to get an enthusiastic response—which it did.

Up next was another favorite, a set of the “Hungarian Dances by Johannes Brahms (1833–1897). Originally composed for piano duet and published in four sets between 1869 and 1880, the dances were orchestrated by various composers, including Brahms. Denève selected the three that the composer orchestrated (Nos. 1, 3, and 10) and played them attacca—i.e., without pause.

It was a smart choice, highlighting the contrast between the energetic first and tenth dances (marked Allegro molto and Presto, respectively) and the more introspective third (Allegretto). The result was a kind of “mini suite” that showed off both the composer’s orchestration and the virtuosity of the band. I was very taken with the flutes (including Ebonee Thomas, who seemed to be holding down the currently vacant Principal position for this concert) in the Dance No. 1, and the playful oboes and bassoons (under Associate Principals Phil Ross and Andy Gott, respectively) were a delight in Dance No. 3.  

Denève gave the dances the “full Roma” treatment, with just the right touches of rubato evoking the music’s folk origins.

The first half concluded with the “Nomad Concerto” by Mason Bates (b. 1977), composed for and premiered in January 2024 by this weekend’s soloist, violinist Gil Shaham. “Envisioned to showcase the legendary Old World sound of Gil Shaham,” writes Bates at his web site, “the concerto is informed by a diverse range of traveling cultures from Eastern Europe to the Middle East.”

Gil Shaham
Photo: Chris Lee

Running just under 30 minutes, the four-movement concerto is, as promised, an ideal virtuoso vehicle for Shaham. The last time I saw him with SLSO in January 2017 I praised his singing tone and the obvious joy of his playing. That’s still true, but this time I was also impressed by the versatility he displayed in delivering the wide range of sounds Bates has written for him. In the first movement (“Song of the balloon man”) his was wistfully Chaplinesque. He and the orchestra exchanged rapid-fire motifs in the brief “Magician at the bazaar” in a way that summoned up visions of flash paper going off all over the string section.  The third movement (“Desert vision: oasis) used the orchestra’s lower voices to suggest an arid expanse of wilderness, with the violin offering brief relief in the form of a yearning  version of the Jewish folk tune “Ani Ma’amin” (“I believe”).

Shaham and the band really cut loose, though, in the concluding movement, “Le jazz manouche.” Inspired by the sound of the legendary 1930s–1940s jazz combo Quintette du Hot Club de France—especially guitarist Django Reinhardt and violinist Stéphane Grappelli—the score has the soloist and orchestra trading licks the way an actual combo would. Shaham and the first violins seemed to be having an especially good time playing off each other here. Will James on jazz percussion and Peter Henderson on piano added considerably to the period atmosphere.

As much as I loved Shaham’s performance, though, I found it difficult to become involved with Bates’s score.  It felt more like a quasi-Impressionist collection of motifs that suggested but never really achieved the status of themes. It reminded me a bit of Debussy, except without the melodies and harmonic infrastructure.

The concert concluded with the Big Event, Berlioz’s splendiferous 1830 “Symphonie Fantastique.” Denève and the orchestra played this wildly hallucinatory work (Leonard Bernstein once dubbed it "the first psychedelic symphony in history”) back in 2019, as the closer of his last concert as Music Director Designate (he became the official MD that fall). At the time I described Denève’s interpretation as consistently engrossing, filled with interesting details (something that would prove to be a hallmark of his work on the podium) and concluding with a downright hair-raising final two movements. I’m repeating myself here because all of that still applies to what we experienced last Sunday.

The St. Louis Symphony Orchestra season continues October 4th and 6th at the Touhill Performing Arts Center; check out my preview for more information or head over to the SLSO web site.

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.

Symphony Preview: Czech list

This weekend (November 17–19), guest conductor Christian Reif leads the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra and violinist Randall Goosby in a program of works by three very different composers who all hail from towns that are now part of the Czech Republic.

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

The concerts open with the first-ever SLSO performance of the 1938 “Suita rustica,” Op. 19, by Vítězslava Kaprálová (1915–1940). If you’ve never heard of her before that’s not surprising. Her untimely death from typhoid at the age of 25 was at least partly responsible for her lack of wider recognition, although given the maturity and number of her compositions, it’s not entirely clear why, in the late 20th century, her work apparently gained little traction outside of the Czech Republic.

Vítězslava Kaprálová
Public Domain

Maybe audiences weren’t entirely sure what to make of her combination of Czech folk elements with what were then seen as “modernist” sounds. Or maybe it was just symptomatic of the difficulty women composers have had, until very recently, getting serious attention.

It’s a pity in any case, because after listening to the recording of the “Suita rustica” by Jiří Pinkas and the Brno Philharmonic in the SLSOs playlist, I’m strongly motivated to seek out more of Kaprálová’s music. This lively and colorful three-movement work neatly merges the traditional with the contemporary in a way that’s hard to resist.

Up next is the 1945 Violin Concerto in D major, Op. 35, by Erich Wolfgang Korngold (1897–1957).  Like Kaprálová, Korngold was born in the city of Brünn, Austria-Hungary—now Brno, Czech Republic. Unlike her, he wrote in a far more traditional and clearly Austrian style. The second son of music critic Julius Korngold (1860–1945), Korngold was a skilled pianist at age 5 and was composing by age 7. He was much admired by, among others, Jean Sibelius, Giacomo Puccini, Richard Strauss, and Gustav Mahler (who recommended that he study with Alexander von Zemlinksy).

Erich Wolfgang Korngold

Korngold composed his first ballet at age 11 and his most famous opera, “Die tote Stadt,” at 23. In 1934 director Max Reinhardt enticed him to Hollywood to write the music for his lavish film version of “A Midsummer Night's Dream” (well worth seeing, despite the many cuts in Shakespeare's text). He returned to Austria but was drawn back to California in 1938 to write the score for “The Adventures of Robin Hood.” While he was there, Hitler's Anschluss of Austria took place, and Korngold became an émigré ("We thought of ourselves as Viennese," he would recall later. "Hitler made us Jewish.")

Korngold is most remembered these days, though, as a film composer. The lush, late-19th century romanticism of his scores came to typify the big budget movies of the 1930s and 1940s, especially action/adventure films like “Captain Blood” (1945), “The Adventures of Robin Hood” (1938), and “The Sea Hawk” (1940). He scored his share of straightforward dramas, as well, including “Kings Row” (1942), “Of Human Bondage” (1946), and “Escape Me Never” (1947).

Korngold returned to the concert world for the final decade of his life, but like many other notable composers throughout history, was not shy about recycling his own musical material. For his Violin Concerto he repurposed melodies from the films “Juarez” (1939), “Anthony Adverse” (1936), “Another Dawn” (1937), and—in the lively finale—"The Prince and the Pauper” (1937). The concerto had its world premiere right here in St. Louis in 1947 with Jascha Heifetz as the soloist and the French-American conductor Vladimir Golschmann on the podium. Golschmann was music director of the SLSO from 1931 to 1958 (the longest-reigning SLSO music director to date) and made a number of recordings with the orchestra.

This weekend's soloist, Randall Goolsby, is no stranger to the Korngold concerto, having recently played it with both the Oslo Philharmonic and the Rhode Island Philharmonic. The 27-year-old American violinist also appears to be a rising star on the concert scene, having just recorded concertos by Max Bruch and Florence Price with Yannick Nézet-Séguin and the Phildelphia Orchestra for Decca.

Wrapping everything up is the Symphony No. 7 in D minor, Op. 70, by the most thoroughly Czech composer of them all, Antonín Dvořák (1841–1904). Dvořák’s Seventh has always been a favorite of mine, for reasons that are difficult to articulate. I can’t hear it without thinking of a long journey down a dark mountain river. Flashes of light illuminate the trip, but we don’t see the sun until the work’s final moments, when the tonality changes from D minor to D major.

Composed between December 1884 and March 1885, the symphony was written for the Philharmonic Society of London, which had just made the composer an honorary member. Indeed, as a letter to his friend Antonin Rus indicates, he was a bit obsessed with the project. “Everywhere I go,” he wrote, “I think of nothing else than my work, which must be such as to shake the world, and with God’s help it will be so.”

His obsession paid off handsomely. The symphony’s premiere took place on April 22, 1885, with the composer conducting the Philharmonic Society Orchestra at St. James’s Hall and it was, as Alec Robertson writes in his 1962 biography of Dvořák, “a huge success. The work, which pleased conservatives and progressives alike, was favourably compared to Schubert’s C major symphony, and declared to be more immediately appealing than the Brahms F major [Symphony No. 3, Op. 90, published in 1884].”

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

That placed him in some pretty august company. Schubert’s Symphony No. 9, D. 944, which was first published in 1828 (but not performed until eleven years later), was nicknamed “The Great” to distinguish it from an earlier symphony in the same key. By the 1880s, it had achieved the status of greatness among audiences and critics alike. As for the Brahms Symphony No. 3 in F major, Op. 90, the critic Eduard Hanslick called it “artistically the most nearly perfect” of the composer’s symphonies. Dvořák himself was among the work’s greatest admirers, describing it to his publisher Simrock as “[surpassing] his first two symphonies; if not, perhaps, in grandeur and powerful conception—then certainly in—beauty.”

The Dvořák Seventh got similar responses from critics both past and present. In his chapter on Dvořák in the first volume of Robert Simpson’s “The Symphony” (Pelican Books, 1966), Julius Harrison doesn’t hesitate to call it “the finest of them all… Dvořák now scales the heights of Parnassus as he was never to do again.” Robertson calls it “undoubtedly a great work.” I agree, of course, and I think you will probably do so as well.

I’m not sure what approach Reif will take to the  Seventh, although Simon Thompson (writing for Bachtrak) called his performance of it last year with the Royal Scottish National Orchestra “smooth as silk” with the finale “feeling like a rich overflowing towards which the whole evening had been building.” If it’s anything like the legendary 1960 recording by George Szell and the Cleveland Orchestra in the SLSOs playlist (one of my personal favorites), it should be memorable.

The Essentials: Christian Reif conducts the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra and violinist Randall Goosby in the “Suita rustica” by Vítězslava Kaprálová, Erich Wolfgang Korngold’s Violin Concerto, and Antonín Dvořák’s Symphony No. 7. Performances are Friday at 10:30 am, Saturday at 7:30 pm, and Sunday at 3 pm, November 17 through 19, at the Touhill Performing Arts Center. The concert will also be broadcast Saturday night at 7:30 on St. Louis Public Radio and Classic 107.3.

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

Symphony Review: Sunshine and shadow with Mǎcelaru and the SLSO

Have you ever walked out of a fiercely air conditioned building and directly into the kind of parboiled summer weather we had this past summer? It’s like smacking into a wall. The impact is visceral.

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

That’s the sensation I had this past Sunday (October 15, 2023) at the Touhill Center when the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra and guest conductor Cristian Măcelaru cranked up the first few measures of the program opener, “heliosis.” Which is exactly what the composer had in mind.

Commissioned by the Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra, “heliosis” (the medical term for heat exhaustion) is the work of Austrian composer/conductor/pianist Hannah Eisendle (b. 1993). Eisendle calls it a “summer piece,” and so it is. But the summer it evokes is dirty, suffocating, sticky with dust.”  Not so much the languorous summer of, say, Honegger’s “Pastorale d’été” (presented by the SLSO in 2021) as that of The Lovin’ Spoonful’s “Summer in the City.”

So that first massive 15-second orchestral assault perfectly set the stage for a brilliantly orchestrated six-minute run through a heat-drenched acoustic landscape. Unorthodox effects like string harmonics and glissandos suggested  something surreal or unearthly (summer on Mars, perhaps?). At one point they combined to produce an effect very much like a tape recording grinding to a halt. There was also an aggressive march that wouldn’t have been out of place in a Shostakovich symphony, and the whole thing built to a final blast reminiscent of the last measures of Stravinsky’s “Sacre du Printemps.”

It was all very unsettling, as Eisendle apparently intended it to be. More to the point, it was brilliantly played by Măcelaru and the band—no small accomplishment, given the wild and wooly nature of the score. It certainly deserved more than the single round of applause that it got, if only for the quality of the performance.

L-R: Cristian Măcelaru, Benjamin Beilman 

Ah, well. The Mozart Violin Concerto No. 5 that followed dissipated any aural heat exhaustion in short order. The last of the composer's violin concertos, the Fifth is filled with unexpected turns of phrase, including the so-called "Turkish" interlude of the finale in which the cellos and basses strike their strings, col legno, to produce an exotic percussive effect. Or it would have if Mǎcelaru hadn't downplayed it.

There are also multiple cadenzas—one in each of the first two movements and two more in the finale—plus an abrupt interruption in the opening Allegro aperto movement for a six-bar solo Adagio. Mozart was playing around a bit with the concerto form and since he was the original soloist, he had plenty of opportunities to do so.

All this means that there are plenty of chances for the soloist to shine, which Benjamin Beilman emphatically did. Fully engaged with the music, his fellow performers and Măcelaru, he brought a beautifully full tone and wide emotional range to the concerto. I don’t know whether the cadenzas were his own or not—many violinists have written their own, going back to (at least) Joseph Joachim (1831–1907)—but in any case, they exhibited a gratifying variety of expression.

Warm applause was followed by an encore: a pair of Béla Bartók’s brief 44 Duos for Two Violins with Cristian Măcelaru as his performing partner—a reminder that the conductor started his musical life as a violinist, as well as a demonstration that he remains quite a good one.

Concluding the program was the Symphony No. 2 in D major, Op. 73, by Brahms. Written and first performed in 1877, it boasts one of the sunniest final movements you will ever hear, a fact which has led many commentators (including yours truly) to view it as, in the words of Redland Symphony program annotator James Keays, “one of the most cheerful of Brahms' mature works.”

Which it is, at least in its last two movements. The sonic sky is almost cloudless during the Allegretto grazioso (Quasi Andantino) third movement and the Allegro con spirito finale wraps everything up in a blaze of glory. But taken together these constitute only around a third of the work’s roughly 45 minutes. The Allegro non troppo first movement opens with some aural sunshine in the horns, but clouds quickly move in via an ominous roll on the tympani that anticipates the violent confrontations of the ensuing Adagio non troppo.

The Brahms Second is, like many of the composer’s works, a multi-layered work that operates on more than one emotional level at once. It’s one of the things that makes him a great composer and that can make conducting his symphonies a challenge.

When Măcelaru began his performance with a more leisurely tempo than I would have expected, I was afraid that this might be an interpretation that leaned too heavily on the dark side. As the symphony progressed and I became more engrossed in his well-shaded rendering of the composer’s emotionally complex canvas, however, it became clear that such fears were unjustified. Indeed, given the wide interpretive range Măcelaru has displayed with the SLSO in past appearances, I realized that I should have known better. This is a conductor who rarely makes a misstep.

This is an orchestra that now seems incapable of them as well. While all the musicians were in top form, special kudos must go Principal Horn Roger Kaza and the rest of his section. Brahms has given the horns some pretty choice stuff here, and they gave it their all. The long solo in the first movement coda was a “perfect 10.” Congratulations to the strings as well on those wide leaps Brahms hands them early in that same movement.

A few comments on the venue itself are in order. With a smaller stage than the Stifel Center and about half the seating capacity (1600 seats vs. 3100 at Stifel) the Anheuser-Busch Performance Hall at the Touhill Center has a somewhat warmer acoustic signature than Stifel, but it’s still “dry” enough to make individual instrumental voices easy to discern. This was especially beneficial in the Mozart concerto, where even the most subtle of Beilman’s playing was clearly audible. And, of course, the small size means that it’s difficult to get too far away from the orchestra. It is, altogether, a fine symphonic space, at least from the audience standpoint.

Next at the SLSO: Elim Chan conducts the SLSO and piano soloist Ingrid Fliter in a program consisting of Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 3, Mendelssohn’s Symphony No. 3 (“Scottish”), and the symphonic poem “Moondog” by contemporary composer Elizabeth Ogonek. Performances take place at the Touhill Center on Friday at 10:30 am and Saturday at 7:30 pm, October 20 and 21.  The Friday morning performance will be broadcast Saturday evening on St. Louis Public Radio and Classic 107.3 and will be available for streaming 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.