Odd man out

Anthony Marwood

Who: The St. Louis Symphony Orchestra
What: Robertson conducts Vaughan-Williams, Stephen Mackey, and Tchaikovsky
Where: Powell Symphony Hall, St. Louis
When: February 25 – 27, 2011

On my old Hoffnung Music Festival LP there’s a piece by Franz Reizenstein entitled Concerto Popolare (a Piano Concerto to end all Piano Concertos) in which the soloist and the orchestra duke it out over the course of nearly twelve hilarious minutes. Stephen Mackey’s Beautiful Passing, which closed the first part of this weekend’s St. Louis Symphony program, also involves a pitched battle between soloist and orchestra –a violin in this case – but the resemblance ends there. Reizenstein went for and got laughs; Mackey goes for emotional weight but, to my ears, just gets flash – and takes three times as long to do it.

Consisting of two contrasting sections bridged by a stunningly (and perhaps unnecessarily) difficult cadenza, Beautiful Passage, according to its composer, “has to do with the violin gaining control of its own destiny, competing with, commanding, and ultimately letting go of the orchestra”. Practically speaking, this means that the work begins with lyrical material on the violin being echoed sarcastically or simply ignored by a cacophonous orchestra. It passes through a wildly flashy cadenza and concludes with soloist and ensemble moving more or less together towards a serene finale.

It makes structural sense, but I found it surprisingly unengaging and ultimately not terribly interesting. I say “surprisingly” because, given that the piece was inspired by the death of the composer’s mother, I would have expected to be truly moved. I had a similar response to Mr. Mackey’s Turn the Key last October, so perhaps I’m simply not in tune with his muse, but it seems to me that his compositional toolbox doesn’t have much in it beyond repetition.

All that said, violinist Anthony Marwood turned in a spectacular performance Friday morning. Beautiful Passage is chockablock with fiendishly difficult music for the soloist, including a section in the cadenza that has him effectively playing a duet with himself by rapidly alternating between the instrument’s lowest and highest register – with harmonics thrown in for good measure. It’s bravura stuff, and Mr. Marwood executed it brilliantly. David Robertson drew virtuoso performances from the orchestra as well.

For the true lover of orchestral strings, however, the gem on this weekend’s program was Vaughan Williams’s 1910 Fantasia on a Theme of Thomas Tallis. This lush, rhapsodic meditation a on a 16th century psalm tune conjures up images of the lofty, echoing cathedrals of a bygone age, transforming the modest and mysterious original into an ecstatic celebration of sheer sound. Under Mr. Robertson’s intense direction, the symphony strings were ravishing and the first-chair players in the solo quartet were spot on.

It has always seemed to me that the Fantasia, employing two string ensembles and a solo string quartet, can only be fully appreciated in a live performance. You can distinguish them sonically in a recording, but to truly understand Vaughan Williams’s ingenious reworking of the multiple chorus techniques of the Renaissance (with their reliance on spatial separation), you need to be able to see the interaction among the three groups. Mr. Robertson’s placement of the smaller second orchestra behind and slightly above the main ensemble worked perfectly.

The concert concluded with Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 6 (“Pathetique”) – one of those works which has become so familiar precisely because it is so beautifully written. Tchaikovsky himself regarded it as one of his finest achievements and audiences over the last century or so have clearly agreed. The symphony’s compelling mix of triumph and tragedy is, as the song goes, “simply irresistible”. Only a world-class grouch, for example, could refuse to applaud after the exuberant third movement (which we all did, with Mr. Robertson’s approval) and only a heart of granite could fail to be moved by the despairing finale. Mr. Robertson paused for just a few moments after those final, dying chords in the low strings before turning to the audience for a well-deserved ovation – a good, theatrically apt decision. We all need a moment to exhale at that point.

This concert will be repeated Saturday, March 25, at 8 PM and Sunday, March 27, at 2 PM. For more information on this and other concerts, you may call 314-534-1700 or visit the St. Louis Symphony web site at stlsymphony.org. You can also follow the Symphony on Twitter: @slso.