Child's play

 

Steven Mackey on "Stumble to Grace"

Who: The St. Louis Symphony Orchestra and pianist Orli Shaham conducted by David Robertson
What: Music of Mackey and Mahler
Where: Powell Symphony Hall, St. Louis
When: September 23 and 24, 2011

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In the program notes for the world premiere of his Stumble to Grace for piano and orchestra, composer Steven Mackey credits the inspiration for the work to watching his toddler son learn to walk, moving from “experimenting with perambulation” to, a year later, showing “a confident lilt in his step”. “I wanted to open my compositional process”, he writes, "to incorporate some of the whimsy and exuberance that he brings to his exploration of the world.”

Judging from what I saw and heard Friday night, Mr. Mackey has achieved that goal and then some. Whimsy and exuberance are, it seems to me, in rather short supply these days both on the concert stage and in the wider world beyond it. Stumble to Grace has both in abundance, along with a loopy, humorous sensibility, flashy orchestral writing, a spectacular piano part, and undeniable charm. The result is pretty much irresistible.

Written in five movements (which Mr. Mackey, in a possible nod to Piaget, calls “stages”), Stumble to Grace moves from a comical opening in which the deceptively simple-sounding piano line plays something like musical “pat a cake” with the celesta and some of the more specialized noisemakers of the percussion battery, proceeds through increasingly sophisticated episodes, and culminates in a cheerful and hair-raisingly tricky fugal finale. It does so in an unmistakably “modern” but still lively and completely approachable way. Mr. Mackey has, happily, no use for the academic aridity that characterized so much “serious” music as recently as a few decades ago. I heard what sounded like nods to Gershwin, Copland, and Debussy (among others), but overall the sound is entirely Mr. Mackey’s own.

Ms. Shaham and her husband, Mr. Robertson, are friends of Mr. Mackey and his wife. Their young children often share play dates and Mr. Mackey has written music for Ms. Shaham’s Baby Got Bach children’s concert series. These performances of Stumble to Grace have, as a result, the kind of authenticity that you would expect from such a close personal relationship between composer and performer. Ms. Shaham, in particular, seemed very much in the spirit of the thing at every moment, acting the role as well as playing it with great assurance. Mr. Robertson led the orchestra through Mr. Mackey’s sometimes-thorny musical maze with his usual aplomb, and the musicians played with the virtuosity that has come to be their hallmark. Mr. Mackey could not, I think, have asked for a better premiere.

Virtuosity was apparent, as well, in the killer reading of the Mahler Symphony No. 1 that concluded the evening. Clocking in at just under an hour, the First is probably the most economical of Mahler’s symphonies. It is, to paraphrase Anna Russell, a kind of Mahler vitamin pill, combining all the composer’s characteristic gestures in one compact work. 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, of course, 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.

A good Mahler First, then, should send you away with tears of joy in your eyes—which is exactly what this performance did. Everything worked for me, including things that sometimes don’t, such as a tendency to linger lovingly over orchestral details or to take slow sections very slowly. This was a Mahler First to remember, with all the humor, drama, and exultation in exactly the right measure and (some minor flubs in the brass section not withstanding) sounding exactly right. It makes me look forward with considerable anticipation to his Bruckner Seventh in November. Yes, a great Mahler conductor is not necessarily a great Bruckner conductor, but bodes well.

Next at Powell Hall: a mostly-American program of Ives, Copland, and Gershwin along with Schoenberg’s ground-breaking Five Pieces for Orchestra. The last is a late substitution for what would have been another world premiere—the Double Bass Concerto No. 3 by Edgar Meyer with the composer as soloist. The one and only performance is Friday, September 30. For more information you may call 314-534-1700, visit stlsymphony.org, like the Saint Louis Symphony Facebook page, or follow @slso on Twitter.