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| David Robertson |
The most familiar thing on the program is Sibelius’s 1895 tone poem “The Swan of Tuonela.” A tone poem, for those of you who have never gone through a “music depreciation” class, is an orchestral work that describes and/or is inspired by something non-musical. In this case, the inspiration comes from the Finnish national epic “The Kalevala”—specifically, its description of the island of Tuonela, where the spirits dead reside. The island is surrounded by a black river, on which a lone swan floats and sings a mournful song. The music is vividly descriptive, which is why it’s a favorite of those same music depreciation classes.
Sibelius assigns the swan’s song to the English horn, a relative of the oboe with with a darker and richer sound (it’s pitched a fifth lower) that is a perfect match for the music’s imagery. Cally Banham, who holds the Solo English Horn chair with the orchestra, will be the soloist. She has done fine work with the orchestra over the last several years, so expect good things from her this weekend.
The English horn is, amusingly, neither English nor a horn (it’s a member of the woodwind family). When I was a kid, the story (since discredited) was that the the name came from a mistranslation of the Middle French phrase, cor anglé (“angled horn,” referring to the fact that the mouthpiece is at a slight angle to the body of the instrument). Current thinking is that it actually goes back to the old German word for the instrument’s ancestor (the oboe da caccia) which was know as an “engellisches” (“angelic”) horn because of its resemblance to horns played by angels in Medieval paintings. Its sound, in any case, is unmistakable.
The first run this week is “My Father Knew Charles Ives,” composed in 2003 by John Adams, whose work is often performed by the SLSO. The title is not literally true. While the elder Adams was a musician—he taught his son to play the clarinet and the two played together in local bands—he never actually met the famously craggy composer/businessman.
He did, however, share Ives’s eclectic musical sensibility. As Paul Schiavo relates in his program notes, Adams “credits his father with introducing him to both classical and popular music without prejudicial favoring of one over the other.” He goes on to note that, according to Adams, “the two men had experiences and interests in common, and the composer imagines that they would have liked each other.”
“My Father Knew Charles Ives” is, in short, a tribute both to the elder Adams and to Ives. Laid out in three movements and running just under a half hour, the work (as described in Mr. Schiavo’s notes) seems very much like the kind of thing Ives himself might have written. The first movement, “Concord,” is a musical picture of the New Hampshire town where Adams grew up and which inspired some of Ives’s most notable music. The second, “The Lake,” “conveys the lulling movement of water and a poetic spirit in the form of a melody for oboe. From across the lake comes the sound of dance music, the indistinct bits of melody blending with the watery sonorities” (Ives does something similar in his “Three Places in New England,” especially in the “Putnam’s Camp” and “Housatonic at Stockbridge” movements).
The last section, “The Mountain,” “was inspired by boyhood memories of Mount Kearsarge, in New Hampshire, but also by more recent experiences hiking in California’s high country.” It ends with what Adams calls “a moment of sudden, unexpected astonishment” as the climber sees the view for the top.
The concerts conclude with Prokofiev's 1944 Symphony No. 5, last seen on the Powell Hall stage in November of 2010 in what I called a “highly charged” and “triumphant” performance by conductor emeritus Leonard Slatkin (his 1985 recording with the SLSO is still available on line at archivmusic.com). Composed at the artists' colony of Ivanovo east of Moscow just as the war with Germany was turning in Russia's favor, the symphony was described by Prokofiev as "a hymn to free and happy Man, to his mighty powers, his pure and noble spirit" and while there is certainly an air of triumph, especially in the majestic opening theme, it has always seemed to me that the war was never far from the composer's mind. You can hear it in (among other places) the militant percussion of the first movement and the anguished climax of the third.
The aura of triumph is also leavened by Prokofiev's characteristic irony. The composer of the Sarcasms for piano always seems to have a raised eyebrow or cynical smile behind his most demonstrative music. In the 5th symphony sarcasm takes various forms, including caustic comments from the brass and percussion and the deliberate interruption of the boisterous Allegro giocoso finale by a short, dissonant passage for string quartet and trumpet.
The essentials: David Robertson conducts the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra and oboe soloist Cally Banham in Sibelius's "Swan of Tuonela," John Adams's "My Father Knew Charles Ives," and Prokofiev's "Symphony No. 5" Saturday at 8 p.m. and Sunday at 3 p.m., September 27 and 28. The Saturday concert will be broadcast on St. Louis Public Radio, 90.7 FM, HD 1, and on the station web site. The concerts take place at Powell Symphony Hall, 718 North Grand in Grand Center. For more information: stlsymphony.org.
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