A fabulous 'Winter Fable' with the St. Louis Symphony and Circus Flora

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Looking for something different in holiday entertainment? Seriously consider "A Winter Fable," the current collaboration between Circus Flora and the St. Louis Symphony. It features great music by Steven Jarvi and the symphony—including some rarely played pieces by Ippolitov-Ivanov, Dvořák, and Janáček—and an impressive array of circus acts. It's major holiday fun.

The Flying Walledas at Powell Hall
circusflora.org

Music, as I have observed before, has always been a part of the Circus Flora experience, so their partnership with the symphony (this is their fourth) isn't as unusual as it might seem. The big difference is that here the performers are working with music written for other purposes rather than with material composed specifically for their show. Which makes it that much more impressive that the music selected by Circus Flora Theater Director Cecil MacKinnon (who doubles, as always, as Yo-Yo the Narrator) and Mr. Jarvi is such a good match for the acts.

And the acts this year are impressive. Juggler, aerialist, and clown Amanda Crockett is the star of the show as far as I'm concerned. She grabbed my attention immediately with her ingenious hat juggling routine (to the strains of Bartók's "Romanian Folk Dances") with its striking bits of illusion. At times the hat seemed to defy gravity and the laws of physics, apparently staying rigidly suspended in mid air one minute and then threatening to float away the next. There's no trickery or special equipment involved, just precise physical acting.

As if that weren't enough, her later comic trapeze act (accompanied by a couple of Brahms "Hungarian Dances") demonstrated that, like Circus Flora's former resident clown Giovanni Zoppé, Ms. Crockett is also an experienced aerialist.

Juggler Kyle Driggs also impressed us with a fluid and graceful routine using five lightweight rings and an umbrella, as did Matt Roben with his comic cycling act. Luciano's Pound Puppies—a troupe of trained shelter rescue dogs—were also great fun. They were a huge hit with the younger set, although I have to admit I found their antics pretty irresistible as well.

Acrobatic acts are prominent this year, including Shayna Swanson's athletic aerial silk specialty and brief turn with the Cyr wheel (a kind of giant metal Hula Hoop); the Poema Family's wonderfully precise, rapid-fire Risley act; and the team of Nina Chubrikova and Yury Kuznetsov (a.k.a. Duo Resonance), a last-minute substitution for the hand-balancing team Duo Mai.

Amanda Crockett
amandacrockett.com / Van Larson

Duo Resonance mixes traditional hand standing and balancing routines with a kind of fluid choreography carried out on a slick low-friction mat. Once again, the accompanying music—Janáček's evocative 1894 overture "Jealousy"—neatly synched up with the action.

The St. Louis Arches are on hand as always and, as always, were true crowd pleasers. Selected from participants in Circus Harmony, our city's only comprehensive circus school, the Arches invariably bring down the house with their fast-paced juggling, tumbling, and acrobatics.

The most thrilling moments of the evening came, as is so often the case, from The Flying Wallendas and their trademark human pyramid high above the stage. The high wire is suspended at about the level of the dress circle boxes. That means that while a seat in the dress circle area is not always ideal for seeing the action down on the stage (which, for these performances, extends farther into the house than usual), it gives you a view of the Wallendas in action that you'll never get in a conventional circus tent.

Finally, I'd like to throw a few well-earned words of praise at Mr. Jarvi and the orchestra. While some of the music on the program is fairly familiar. it is, for the most part, the sort of thing not often heard on the Powell Hall stage, so the high quality of the performances deserves to be singled out. I don't think I've ever heard the SLSO do Ippolitov-Ivanov's two "Caucasian Sketches" suites before, but here we had three of the four sections of the second suite as well as the popular "Procession of the Sardar" from the first suite. I especially enjoyed the increasingly boisterous "Lezghinka," with its flashy percussion passages. It's always gratifying to hear live performances of pieces I know primarily from recordings.

It was equally gratifying to see the orchestra given a solo spot performing the exhilarating "Furiant," the final movement of Dvořák's Op. 39 "Czech Suite"—another one of those works heard far more often on recordings than in live performances. They got an enthusiastic round of applause and deserved every bit of it.

Performances of "A Winter Fable" continue through Sunday, December 14, at Powell Hall in Grand Center. Holiday programming continues next weekend as Kevin McBeth leads the IN UNISON® Chorus in "A Gospel Christmas" on Thursday, December 18, and Steven Jarvi leads the orchestra and Holiday Festival Chorus in the Macy's Holiday Celebration concerts Friday through Sunday, December 19-21. For ticket information, visit the symphony web site.