Concert Review: Adams and Mahler programs displays the St. Louis Symphony's strengths, January 23, 2016

David Robertson

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David Robertson and The St. Louis Symphony Orchestra are getting their act together and taking it on the road to sunny California this week and next, with appearances in Aliso Viejo, Palm Desert, Berkeley, and Los Angeles, January 27 through February 2. If what I saw in Powell Hall Saturday night is any indication, they're going to take the West Coast by storm.

Saturday's double bill of the John Adams "Saxophone Concerto" and Mahler's "Symphony No. 5" is one of two programs they'll be performing (the other is last weekend's multimedia version of Messiaen's "Des canyons aux étoiles...") and it couldn't be a better showpiece for both the orchestra and Mr. Robertson. That's because although the two works have little in common musically, they both present significant technical and artistic challenges.

Originally performed and recorded (for Nonesuch) by the SLSO in 2013, the concerto is not the most approachable of Adams's works, building its two movements from brief motifs that are so closely related it can be hard to tell them apart. It's edgy, aggressive music that requires a high degree of precision from both the orchestra and soloist. It also demands real endurance from the latter, since the solo sax is rarely silent for the concerto's thirty-minute length. Up on the podium, meanwhile, the concerto demands a conductor who can keep this musical express train from going off the rails and coming across as more a barrage of notes than actual music.

As they demonstrated both in 2013 and again Saturday night, Mr. Robertson and his forces can navigate this tricky score with ease. The jazz-inflected call and response sections, in particular, had the kind of snappy precision that called to mind the big band work of Stan Kenton. Mr. Robertson is obviously very comfortable with the concerto and made the compelling case for a work which, even upon second hearing, still sounds like a rather tough nut to crack.

Tim McAllister

The saxophone soloist, both here and on the road, is the man for whom Adams wrote the piece, Tim McAllister. Mr. McAllister is a brilliant performer, combining classical discipline with the freewheeling style of the great jazz and rock players whose work inspired Mr. Adams. He may have been dressed for the symphony but his stance—knees bent, head thrust forward in concentration—was that of the jazz soloist entirely wrapped up in the music. Mr. McAllister, as Eddie Silva points out in his program notes, was a champion stunt bicycle rider in his youth, and he brought that same daredevil-level fearlessness to his playing here.

Playing and conducting Mahler's "Symphony No. 5" (or any Mahler, if it comes to that) also requires a certain level of chutzpah. That's because it's both a massive work—five movements running around 70 minutes—and a complex one.

The first of what can be regarded as the composer's mature symphonies, it was the also the first of his symphonies with neither vocal soloists nor explicit musical references to Mahler's song cycles. And, as Michael Steinberg points out in his program notes for the San Francisco Symphony, there are other major structural changes as well:

After a run of unconventional symphonies, Mahler comes back to a more “normal” design, one that could be described as concentric as well as symmetrical...The music becomes leaner and harder. About this time Mahler acquired the complete edition of Bach. At least partly in consequence of his excited discovery of what was in those volumes, his textures become more polyphonic. But this new “intensified polyphony,” as Bruno Walter called it, demanded a new orchestral style.

Then there's the fact that Mahler, like John Adams, often drew inspiration from popular music styles. In Mahler's symphonies, it's not unusual to hear a saccharine ländler, an "oom-pah" march, or a clarinet wailing in the style that would later be labeled "klezmer"—sometimes rubbing shoulders with passages of real profundity. Some of Mahler's contemporaries sneered at what they regarded as vulgarity, but ultimately the composer's wide-ranging musical interests are really just a manifestation of his idea that, as he once told Sibelius, a symphony "must be like the world. It must embrace everything."

All of this means that conducting Mahler, to my mind, requires not only a deep understanding of the capabilities of the orchestra's musicians but also a profound grasp of musical structure, along with musical sympathies that extend beyond those of the traditional concert hall.

Over the years, Mr. Robertson has demonstrated that he has those skills and knows how to apply them. His classical credentials are unimpeachable, of course, but he has shown that he's equally comfortable with film music and non-classical styles in general. Yes, I have not always been 100% persuaded by his Mahler symphonies in the past, but that's mostly a reflection of my personal taste. If I set that aside, I am obliged to acknowledge that his interpretations have always been of a very high order and sometimes (as was the case Saturday) superb.

From the first solo trumpet notes of the opening Trauermarsch (played so authoritatively by Karin Bliznik) to the wildly exuberant Rondo finale, this was a Mahler 5th that can stand with the best of them. I'd compare it favorably with Bernstein's 1964 New York Philharmonic recording, and that's saying something. At every point, Mahler's structure was clear, tempi were perfectly chosen, and all the elements of the work were in perfect balance.

Mahler's orchestration is filled with wonderful details that give nearly every section a chance to stand out. For example, Karin Bliznik and her fellow trumpeters Jeff Strong, Tom Drake, and Mike Walk carry a lot of narrative weight in the first two movements and on Saturday night did so beautifully. Roger Kazaa's horns (there are seven of them; Mahler doesn't stint) gave a real sinister rasp to their trills in the first movement and Mr. Kazaa himself was both poetic and powerful in the solo horn parts in the third movement Scherzo. Mr. Robertson had Mr. Kazaa move to the front of the orchestra for that movement; a smart decision that clarified the exchanges between the solo horn and the rest of the section.

The little major key chorale passage for trumpets and trombones in the second movement simply glowed. The famous fourth movement Adagietto for harp and strings (which the orchestra performed alone as part of Friday's "Music You Know" concert) was a touching mix of beauty and tragedy, with sensitive work by Principal Harp Allegra Lilly and the orchestra strings. And so it went, moment by impressive moment. If this doesn't knock their sandals off out there on the West Coast, I don't know what will.

The St. Louis Symphony returns to Powell Hall on Friday and Saturday, February 5 and 6, as violinist Anthony Marwood conducts an evening of chamber music by Bach, Dvorák, and Peteris Vasks. For more information, visit the SLSO web site, where you can also purchase tickets for all of the California performances.

Symphony Preview, January 22 and 23, 2016: As the world turns

John Adams
Photo: Lambert Orkis, earbox.com

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The second and more substantial half of this weekend's St. Louis Symphony double bill consists of only two works: John Adams's "Saxophone Concerto," which the SLSO recorded in 2014, and Mahler's powerful "Symphony No. 5," which hasn't been heard here since 2009.

The Adams was a joint commission from the SLSO, the Boston Symphony, the Sao Paulo Symphony, and David Robertson’s Other Orchestra, the Sydney Symphony (where it had its first performance in August of 2013). When I first heard it in 2013, I found the concerto a tough nut to crack from a musical structure standpoint, largely because Adams’s style had developed to the point where entire movements were constructed from brief motifs that were so closely related it was often hard to tell them apart.

The long first movement of the concerto, for example, unfolds from a short, snappy rising arpeggio for the solo sax. That sense of rapid upward movement remains even when, towards the end, the mood shifts to the kind of sultry nocturne that wouldn’t be out of place in a film noir. The second and final movement—based on a two-note descending figure often embellished with cascades of notes in the solo part—ups the ante with a hyperkinetic solo line that rises to a classic jazz wail just before the final notes.

Timothy McAllister
timothymcallister.com

At the time I wasn't sure whether the concerto itself warranted repeated hearing, so it will be good to get reacquainted with the piece. Better yet, the soloist is once again the ferociously talented Timothy McAllister, whose 2013 performance melded classical virtuosity with a real jazz sensibility.

At well over twice the length of the Adams concerto, the Big Dog on the program is the Mahler symphony. It's a work of sharp contrasts, with moments of pure poetry alternating with massive orchestral assaults. "Doors suddenly open to totally unfamiliar scenes," writes Eddie Silva in his program notes, "or to themes you thought had been used up, only to return, sometimes menacingly.”

But then, that's quintessential Mahler. "[A]ll of Mahler's music", wrote his great champion, Leonard Bernstein, in 1967, "is about Mahler—which means that it is about conflict."

Think of it: Mahler the Creator vs. Mahler the Performer; the Jew vs. the Christian; the Believer vs. the Doubter; the Naïf vs. the Sophisticate; the provincial Bohemian vs. the Viennese homme du monde; the Faustian Philosopher vs. the Oriental Mystic; the Operatic Symphonist who never wrote an opera. But mainly the battle rages between Western Man at the turn of the century and the life of the spirit.

That paragraph is also quintessential Bernstein, and its verbosity could not be more appropriate for its subject. For Mahler was nothing if not musically verbose. His musical gestures are invariably grand and, surprisingly for a man who essentially wrote nothing for the stage, brilliantly and aptly theatrical. Here's Bernstein again:

He took all (all!) the basic elements of German music, including the clichés, and drove them to their ultimate limits. He turned rests into shuddering silences; upbeats into volcanic preparations as for a death-blow. Luftpausen became gasps of shock or terrified suspense; accents grew into titanic stresses to be achieved by every conceivable means, both sonic and tonic. Ritardandi were stretched into near-motionlessness; accelerandi became tornadoes; dynamics were refined and exaggerated to a point of neurasthenic sensibility. Mahler's marches are like heart attacks, his chorales, like all Christendom gone mad. The old conventional four-bar phrases are delineated in steel; his most traditional cadences bless like the moment of remission from pain. Mahler is German music multiplied by n.

Bernstein could have been Mahler reincarnated. Given that he was born several years after Mahler died, maybe he was.

But I digress.

"Photo of Gustav Mahler by Moritz Nähr 01"
by Moritz Nähr (1859–1945)
Licensed under PD-US via Wikipedia

Mr. Silva provides a concise road map to the symphony in his notes, so there's no point in my providing one here. The Wikipedia article on the work is also worth a read, especially since it includes examples of the principal themes and shows how they're developed over the symphony's 70-minute (or thereabouts) length. Allow me to recommend as well Michael Steinberg's San Francisco Symphony program notes for their in-depth analysis and their illumination of the relationship between the 5th and its predecessor, which briefly (and somewhat mysteriously) quotes the opening trumpet fanfare in its own first movement.

According to musicologist Donald Mitchell, Mahler once told Sibelius that a symphony "must be like the world. It must embrace everything." Mahler's 5th, with its incredible dynamic and emotional range and the kaleidoscopic brilliance of its orchestration, is the composer's world, to be sure. But its triumph, tragedy, and even its grotesque comedy are our world as well.

The essentials: The St. Louis Symphony Orchestra conducted by David Robertson presents John Adams's "Saxophone Concerto," with soloist Timothy McAllister, and Mahler's "Symphony No. 5" Friday at 10:30 a.m. and Saturday at 8 p.m., January 22 and 23. Performances take place at Powell Symphony Hall, 718 North Grand. For more information: stlsymphony.org.

Symphony Preview, January 22, 2016: Love is in the air

"The Bartered Bride as performed at Zoppsot" by Unknown
Taken from: Rous, Samuel Holland (1919).
"Bartered Bride Prodana Nevesta". Retrieved 2009-06-17.
Licensed under PD-US via Wikipedia

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It's another two-for-one sale at Powell Hall this Friday and Saturday as David Robertson and the St. Louis Symphony present "Music You Know: Romantic Favorites" on Friday night, and major works by John Adams and Mahler Friday morning and Saturday night. I'll talk about the second program in another article.

The Friday night favorites concert opens with the lively and colorful overture to Smetana's 1865 comic opera "The Bartered Bride." It was his biggest stage hit in his native Bohemia but hasn't gotten much traction elsewhere. Operabase.com places it number 3 in its list of most-performed operas in the Czech Republic, but it doesn't even make their top fifty world-wide. The overture is another story, often showing up on concert programs and in recordings, often in conjunction with the popular "Dance of the Comedians". You can even hear the latter in the 1994 Road Runner cartoon "Chariots of Fur."

Next is a suite from the incidental music Gabriel Fauré wrote for a 1900 production of Maeterlinck’s elusive and once-popular drama "Pelléas and Mélisande". The story of doomed and forbidden love inspired multiple composers, including Debussy, who fashioned a weirdly compelling opera from it. Fauré's suite nicely captures the oddly ethereal and unsettled nature of the play.

Bob Becker
nexuspercussion.com

Bringing us up to intermission is the 1987 "Girlfriends Medley" for xylophone and strings by Bob Becker, a member of the innovative percussion ensemble Nexus (a ragtime LP by whom I still treasure). "As a composer," says Wikipedia, "Becker employs a multicultural approach by mixing the style of western military drumming with North Indian Hindustani idioms, such as raga scale patterns and tabla drumming." You won't hear any of that in this charming short piece, though, which rings changes on some ragtime and Great American Songbook standards.

The second half kicks off with the familiar "Wedding March" from the incidental music Mendelssohn wrote for a production of Shakespeare's "A Midsummer Night's Dream" in 1843. The orchestra will be performing all of Mendelssohn's score later this season (an uncommon occurrence on concert stages), with actress Maureen Thomas reading bits of the play, so think of this as a preview.

The next piece is a preview of sorts as well; it's the "Adagietto" for harp and strings from the work that takes up most of the other concert program this weekend, Mahler's "Symphony No. 5." There's no evidence that Mahler ever intended this haunting, sweetly sad little gem to be played independently (although that was already being done as early as 1909, four years after the symphony was first published), but it has proved so popular that conductors and audiences alike seem to find it irresistible all on its own.

Three-Cornered Hat at the Alhambra Theatre,
Cape Town, in 1966
grutbooks.com

Things come to a vibrant finish with the second of two suites from Manuel de Falla's ballet "El sombrero de tres picos" ("The Three-Cornered Hat"), which had its premiere in 1919 in London with choreography by Léonide Massine and sets and costumes by Pablo Picasso. The suite concludes with the ballet's final "jota," in which the opera's comic villain gets tossed up and down on a blanket by frolicking party guests to the hilarity of all. Try it at your next party, but don't say I gave you the idea.

The essentials: The St. Louis Symphony Orchestra conducted by David Robertson presents "Music You Know: Romantic Favorites" Friday at 8 p.m., January 22. The performance takes place at Powell Symphony Hall, 718 North Grand. For more information: stlsymphony.org.

Sax and violins

Gershwin

Who: The St. Louis Symphony Orchestra conducted by David Robertson with saxophonist Timothy McAllister and pianist John Kimura Parker
What: Music of John Adams and George Gershwin
Where: Powell Symphony Hall
When: October 5 and 6, 2013

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Saturday night’s concert began with Gershwin's fiery Cuban Overture and ended with an appropriate Latin encore from pianist John Kimura Parker—Joplin's wistful Solace: A Mexican Serenade.  In between was a high-energy evening from which the spirit of jazz was never entirely absent.

The official program for this weekend's symphony concerts featured music by two composers: George Gershwin and John Adams.  Although their musical styles could not be more different, they both broke from the musical establishments of their time and carved out their own personal compositional approaches.  Gershwin's music is more immediately appealing; Adams's more formal.  But hearing them together on the same program made me realize how much they have in common.

John Adams

Adams was represented by his whimsical The Chairman Dances: Foxtrot for Orchestra (composed for and then cut from Nixon in China) and the local premiere of his brand-new Saxophone Concerto, a joint commission from the SLSO; the Boston Symphony; the Sao Paulo Symphony; and David Robertson’s Other Orchestra, the Sydney Symphony (where it had its first performance in August).  The former got an appropriately charming and even danceable treatment from Mr. Robertson and his forces.

I found the concerto a tough nut to crack from a musical structure standpoint, largely because Adams’s compositional style has now developed to the point where entire movements are constructed from brief motifs (I hesitate to call them themes) that are so closely related it’s often hard to tell them apart.  The long first movement of the concerto, for example, unfolds from a short, snappy rising arpeggio for the solo sax.  That sense of rapid upward movement remains even when, towards the end, the mood shifts to the kind of sultry nocturne that wouldn’t be out of place in a film noir.  The second and final movement—based on a two-note descending figure often embellished with cascades of notes in the solo part—ups the ante with a hyperkinetic solo line that rises to a classic jazz wail just before the final notes.

Quoted in Paul Schiavo's program notes, Adams says that his "lifelong exposure to the great jazz saxophonists" inspired him to write the concerto.  And, in fact, it’s easy to hear echoes of Charlie Parker and the other great sax men of the '50s and '60s in this music with its driving beat, call and response sections, and improvisatory feel.  It sounds difficult as hell, but the brilliant playing of Timothy McAllister (for whom the work was written) was more than up to the challenge.  He may have been dressed for the symphony but his stance—knees bent, head thrust forward in concentration—was that of the jazz soloist entirely wrapped up in the music.

Timothy McAllister

My mental jury is still out on whether the concerto itself warrants repeated hearing, but I have no doubts about the excellence of Mr. McAllister’s performance.  Ditto for the symphony under Maestro Robertson.  Unlike Mr. McAllister, they haven’t been playing the music for several months now, which made the polish of their sound that much more impressive.  A good thing, too, since this weekend’s performances of the concerto were being recorded by Nonesuch for a CD that will include the performance of Adams’s City Noir that the orchestra recorded back in February.

The concert opener, Gershwin's Cuban Overture is, a kind of musical postcard of a 1932 trip to Havana.  Composers have been drawing on their travels for inspiration for centuries, of course.  Mendelssohn's Hebrides Overture, Tchaikovsky's Capriccio Italien, Saint-Saëns's "Egyptian" piano concerto—the list goes on and on.  Gershwin did them all one better, though.  He brought back not only some Afro-Cuban tunes (including Ignacio Piñeiro's "Échale Salsita") but some traditional percussion instruments as well. The haul included a bongo, claves, gourd, and maracas—all of which are prominently featured in this sunny souvenir.

It has been over a decade since the symphony did this piece, but you’d hardly guess that from the high gloss of their performance.  The Cuban instruments came through surprisingly well, given that they were embedded with the rest of the percussion section at the back instead of being placed downstage in front of the conductor (as Gershwin requests in the autograph copy of his score).

John Kimura Parker

Closing the official program was Gershwin's 1925 Concerto in F with John Kimura Parker at the keyboard.  The concerto isn't particularly complex from a purely structural point of view, but I still find it amazing to contemplate that it was written only a year after the far more rudimentary Rhapsody in Blue. Gershwin's development as a serious composer took place with an almost supernatural rapidity, as though he somehow knew that his life on this planet would be tragically short (he died of a brain tumor just a few months short of his 40th birthday).

As it is, the Concerto is a beautifully crafted piece: lean, powerful, without a spare note.  Reviewing the December 3, 1925, premiere of the concerto for the New York World, critic Samuel Chotzinoff noted that Gershwin's "shortcomings are nothing in the face of the one thing he alone of all those writing the music of today possesses.  He actually expresses us.  He is the present, with all its audacity, impertinence, its feverish delight in its motion, its lapses into rhythmically exotic melancholy."  You can feel and hear that "jazz age" urgency in every note of this music.

Gershwin was a pretty formidable pianist, so the concerto bristles with technical challenges—none of which were an obstacle for Mr. Parker.  Working without a score, he approached this music with an ideal combination of concentration and joy.  I wasn’t sure I was going to be equally enthusiastic about Mr. Robertson’s interpretation—I was afraid that his tempo contrasts in the opening measure were going to kill the rhythmic drive—but I needn’t have worried.  He made it all work, and brought out some interesting nuances in the process.

There was impressive solo work by members of the orchestra as well as by Mr. Parker.  The famous muted blues trumpet solo in the second movement, for example, had all the mournful soul one could hope for in the hands of Karin Bliznik (singled out by Mr. Robertson for a bow during curtain calls), and its later echoes by Mark Sparks (flute) and Barbara Orland (oboe) were also quite effective.

Mr. Parker got spontaneous applause after the spectacular first movement and a “standing O" at the end.  He responded with that Joplin piece I mentioned at the top of this review as an encore, describing the great ragtime composer as the "third icon of American music" alongside Gershwin and Adams.  It was a romantic, rubato-filled reading that served as a nice contrast to the Gershwin and helped bring the evening back to its Afro-Latin beginnings.

Next on the regular calendar: British violinist Anthony Marwood is both soloist and conductor an all-Mozart program consisting of the Symphony No. 1 and Symphony No. 35 (“Haffner) as well as the 2nd and 3rd violin concertos.  Performances are Friday and Saturday at 8 PM and Sunday at 3 PM, October 11-13. For ticket information: stlsymphony.org.