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| Vadim Repin Photo: Gela Megredlidze |
What: Music of Debussy, James MacMillan, and Tchaikovsky
Where: Powell Symphony Hall, St. Louis
When: March 14 and 15, 2015
[Find out more about the music with the SLSO program notes and my preview article.]
Two of the three works on this past weekend's St. Louis Symphony Orchestra concerts (the ones that aren't by James MacMillan) will also be on the bill when the orchestra performs in Carnegie Hall on Friday, March 20th. If what we heard Sunday afternoon is any indication, they'll be representing their home town proudly.
The concert opened with Debussy's "Nocturnes"— three short tone poems (total playing time is around 25 minutes) inspired by literary poems by the symbolist writer Henri de Regnier. Although nothing in the three movements is explicitly nocturnal, the music nevertheless has that oddly otherworldly quality of things seen only faintly in the dark—or maybe just in a dream. The clouds in the first movement ("Nuages") coalesce and disperse in a whirl of filmy chords; the eerie procession of the second movement ("Fêtes") begins with muted trumpets and harps, builds to a climax, and then vanishes; and the wordless female chorus of the final movement ("Sirènes") is sometimes so faint that you can't be sure whether it's there at all.
Mr. Robertson and orchestra gave this piece a wonderfully nuanced and atmospheric treatment. You could almost hear the ocean in the ebb and flow of "Sirènes," for example, and the celebration of "Fêtes" had just the right touch of mystery. So did "Nuages," which was also distinguished by nice work from Cally Banham on the English horn. The women of Amy Kaiser's chorus were wonderfully seductive sirens in the final movement, and handled Debussy's sometimes challenging score (singing long lines softly is no easy thing) with great skill.
Next was the work which won't be on the program in New York (there's a new piece by Meredith Monk in that slot)—the 2009 "Violin Concerto" by contemporary Scottish composer James MacMillan. In interviews Mr. MacMillan has described himself as strongly to the kind of composer who is “deeply suspicious of any significant move towards tonality, any hint of pulse that is actually discernible, and any music which communicates successfully with a non-specialist audience.” And, in fact, his "Piano Concerto No. 3," which we heard last month, certainly was a colorful piece with lots of immediate appeal.
Mr. MacMillan is quoted in last weekend's concert program notes as saying that the concerto reflects the Celtic fiddle music of his childhood. "I've grown up with fiddle music," he recalls. "I used to play in folk bands when I was younger, and fiddles were always the core part of that music." With the exception of a brief dance-like passage in the first movement and a lyrical oboe line in the second that suggested a Scottish air, however, I heard very little of that influence.
What I did hear was a lot of jagged modernism and a lack of any real structural coherence. Musical episodes followed each other like cars in a freight train with no real through line. In the end, I felt that I had heard a series of miniatures (some more appealing than others) rather than a single unified work. The work felt, overall, less audience friendly than the "Piano Concerto."
The concerto demands some real virtuosity from the violin soloist, and it certainly got that from Vadim Repin. Mr. Repin worked closely with the composer during the concerto's genesis, introduced it to the world, and has been a major advocate for it since. We can, therefore, probably take his breathtakingly fluid performance as being definitive. He handled with ease passages that sounded absurdly difficult. More to the point, his playing had real soul, which, while it still didn't completely win me over to the music, at least made a good case for it.
When I heard to the Internet broadcast of Tchaikovsky's "Symphony No. 4" that concluded this weekend's concerts on Saturday night, I felt that Mr. Robertson's approach was perhaps a bit too detached and deliberate. When I witnessed his deeply passionate and committed reading on Sunday, it was obvious that what I was really hearing Saturday night was the cumulative distancing effect of microphones and signal processors, along with the bandwidth limitations of an Internet audio stream. There is, in fact, no real substitute for hearing this music live.
The Fourth is my favorite Tchaikovsky symphony. The composer poured all of his hope and despair into this most compact and dramatically expressive of all his essays in the genre. From the commanding "fate" motif first intoned by the brasses at the beginning to the nearly hysterical triumph of the finale, this is a piece that grabs you by the lapels and doesn't let go until the end.
Mr. Robertson and the orchestra were pretty near flawless here. The tempo and dynamic contrasts were well chosen and served the symphony's relentless sense of movement well. Timpanist Shannon Wood and his fellow percussionists performed heroically, and little individual instrumental moments that Tchaikovsky sprinkles throughout the work were done to perfection. Principal Oboe Jelena Dirks and Principal Bassoon Andrew Cuneo were singled out for solo bows at the end, but all the players sounded at the top of their game.
As I noted at the top, the orchestra will be in New York this weekend, but there is a Youth Orchestra concert on Sunday, March 22, at 3 p.m. The orchestra returns to the Powell Hall stage March 27-29 for a showing of the movie classic "The Godfather" with Nino Rota's score performed live on stage, and the regular season resumes on Friday, April 10, with Mozart and Shostakovich conducted by Hannu Lintu. For more information: stlsymphony.org.
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