Symphony Preview: The great commission

St. Louis Symphony Orchestra (SLSO) programs often have a common theme, especially when Music Director Stéphane Denève is on the podium. This Friday, February 2nd, the program notes suggest that the unifying theme is that time-honored source of revenue for composers, the commission. Composers have relied on individuals, organizations, and governments to fund new works for centuries.

[Preview the music with the SLSO's Spotify playlist.]

Valerie Coleman

Friday’s program opens with “Umoja: Anthem of Unity” by Valerie Coleman (b. 1970). Commissioned in 2019 by the Philadelphia Orchestra,  “Umoja” (the Swahili word for “faith”) began life almost 20 years ago as a song for women’s choir. “It embodied,” writes the composer, “a sense of 'tribal unity', through the feel of a drum circle, the sharing of history through traditional ‘call and response’ form and the repetition of a memorable sing-song melody”. Coleman subsequently arranged it for her woodwind quintet, The Imani Winds, who recorded it for Koch International in 2006.

The 2019 version for full orchestra is the most recent of many arrangements of that simple tune, making it the basis of a tone poem in theme and variations format and more than doubling its length. Here the theme is first sung sweetly by the first violin, over a shimmering background of bowed percussion instruments, harp, and strings. Over the next fifteen minutes or so it goes through many transformations and, at one point, is “interrupted by dissonant viewpoints led by the brass and percussion sections, which represent the clash of injustices, racism and hate that threatens to gain a foothold in the world today.” It builds to a triumphant call for unity in the brass and percussion before returning to the quiet serenity of the opening.

According to the program notes by Justino Gordón-LeChevalé, "Umoja" is "a vibrant, musical invocation for a world increasingly in need of unity and freedom." This, along with Coleman's reference to "dissonant viewpoints," proposes another possible unifying idea in the program: the fact that all three composers who are represented here belong to historically marginalized groups. Coleman is a black woman, Florence Price (1887–1953), whose Symphony No. 3 closes the concert, was also a black woman, and the composer of the second work, Samuel Barber (1910–1981), was gay.

Samuel Barber, photographed by
Carl Van Vechten, 1944
Public Domain

Barber is represented by one of his more popular works, the Violin Concerto, Op. 14. It was commissioned in 1939 by Samuel Simeon Fels, founder of the soap company whose principal product, Fels-Naptha, will likely be familiar to those of us d'un certain âge. Fels wanted a concerto for his ward, the Ukrainian-born violinist Iso Briselli. What happened next has been the subject of some debate, but the consensus appears that Briselli’s violin coach, Albert Meiff, disliked the concerto and pressured Briselli not to play it. 

Meiff offered to "help" by rewriting the violin part, apparently under the impression that he was a 20th-century Joseph Joachim. Barber wasn’t having any of it, however. He continued to work on the concerto, Briselli’s exclusivity elapsed, and the premiere finally took place in 1941 with soloist Albert Spaulding and The Philadelphia Orchestra conducted by Eugene Ormandy. Briselli and Barber remained friends and Meiff is now a footnote in musical history.

Meiff was wrong in any case. The concerto proved to be a success, often performed and recorded by a “who’s who” of notable violinists, including this Friday’s soloist Augustin Hadelich. There’s also a 1986 recording by the SLSO under Leonard Slatkin with Elmar Oliveira as soloist.

I have always loved the piece. The dramatic first movement, the contemplative second, and the hair-raising Presto in moto perpetuo finale combine to produce a concerto that is both emotionally moving and, in the finale, filled with virtuoso fireworks. Briselli thought the last movement was too short compared to the first two, but he seems to have missed the fact that sheer length isn’t the same as dramatic impact.

Finally, we turn to Florence Price. Unlike Barber, who had little difficulty finding audiences for his work, Price had to struggle for recognition for her work as a composer. Yes, her Symphony No. 1 earned her first place in the 1932 Wanamaker competition and the work got its first performance the following year by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. That made her the first African American woman to see her work performed by a major symphony orchestra, and yet that symphony wasn’t published until 2008. Her Symphony No. 2 has been lost, as was her Symphony No. 4 until it turned up in her former summer home in Illinois in 2009.

Florence Price
By George Nelidoff
Public Domain

Her Symphony No. 3 has fared somewhat better. Commissioned by the WPA in 1938, it was first performed by the Detroit Civic Orchestra (a.k.a The Michigan WPA Symphony Orchestra) in 1940 to considerable acclaim. First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt was a great admirer. In his review for the Detroit Free Press, J. D. Callaghan wrote that Price “spoke in the musical idiom of her own people, and spoke with authority.” He praised the symphony’s “emotional warmth” helped make the evening “one of profound melody satisfaction.” He singled out the “majestic beauty” of the second movement and noted that the finale “swept forward with great vigor.”

Even so, the symphony disappeared into the same oblivion that claimed so many of Price’s other works until early this century—for reasons that Price understood all too well. “To begin with,” she wrote in a 1943 letter to Serge Koussevitzky, “I have two handicaps—those of sex and race. I am a woman; and I have some Negro blood in my veins.” She went on to ask the Koussevitzky to consider one of her scores for performance, a request which the conductor (to his discredit) apparently ignored.

Price died of a stroke in 1953, so she didn’t live to see her work rescued from obscurity. Her Symphony No. 3, in particular, has gotten a lot of attention in recent years. I heard a pretty persuasive performance of it last July at the Bravo! Vail festival by the Philadelphia Orchestra under Yannick Nézet-Séguin, who is an enthusiastic admirer of Price’s work. She has also been on Stéphane Denève’s radar for years. He originally planned to present the Symphony No. 3 in 2021 on the same bill as the Dvorak Symphony No. 9, but the pandemic killed that program along with many others.

The work is innovative in both its structure and sound. Price’s approach to traditional structures like sonata form can be disconcertingly episodic, as can her cheerful mixture of traditional African American elements (including spirituals) with modernist dissonances, whole-tone passages, and even a somewhat ominous brass chorale that sounds like might have escaped from Siegfried’s funeral music in “Götterdämerung.”  The slyly humorous third movement is based on the African-American juba dance and the fourth is a wild, turbulent, and dissonant Scherzo ending in (John Michael Cooper’s 2022 program notes for the Philadelphia Orchestra) “a fury of roaring percussion and chordal interjections that finally manage to reclaim the work from turbulence and discord.”

This is music that takes a bit of mental retooling on the part of the listener, but it’s worth the effort.

The Essentials: Stéphane Denève conducts the SLSO and violin soloist Augustin Hadelich in Samuel Barber’s Violin Concerto along with the local premieres Valerie Coleman’s “Umoja: Anthem of Unity” and the Symphony No. 3 by Florence Price. Performances are Friday at 10:30 am and 7:30 pm, February 2, at the Touhill Center on the UMSL campus. The Friday night concert will be broadcast Saturday night at 7:30 on St. Louis Public Radio and Classic 107.3.

This article originally appeared at 88.1 KDHX, where Chuck Lavazzi is the senior performing arts critic.

Symphony Review: Denève and the SLSO present a musical and visual feast

Five years ago, when Stéphane Denève was the Music Director Designate of the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra (SLSO), I asked him if he was thinking of using any visuals to go with the ballet scores he was planning since this was something the symphony had done successfully in the past. He said no "because as much as I love combining art forms, I'm very doubtful about the visual and the music together… Every time you have a visual which is very powerful, the music tends to become an accompaniment. And therefore it's very hard to find the right balance to make that successful."

[Find out more about the music with my symphony preview.]

Grégoire Pont
Photo: Israel Solorzano

Judging from the use of animation in the concerts Maestro Denève and the SLSO presented this past weekend (January 27 and 28), he has found that balance. Two out of the three works performed during the concert were accompanied by animation. When we saw the concert on Sunday afternoon the result in both cases was unquestionably successful.

The program opened with the 1912 "ballet-pantomime" "Le Festin de l'araignée" ("The Spider's Feast") by Albert Roussel (1869–1937).  Set in a garden at twilight, the whimsical scenario shows us ants grabbing a rose petal, and worms dodging praying mantises to gorge themselves on a piece of fruit dislodged by the wind. A mayfly, unable to resist the demands of her insect audience, dances herself to death.

Meanwhile, the titular spider has spun an intricate web and is lying in wait for her next meal. She traps and kills an incautious butterfly along with a pair of mantises, who have worn themselves out in a pointless duel over who was responsible for letting those worms give them the slip.  Before she can begin her feast, a dung beetle frees a mantis who deals the spider a death blow. As the night falls, the surviving insects come together to bear away the body of the mayfly in a somber funeral procession. Curtain.

Roussel's score is a tour de force of tone painting. His ants enter with a slightly silly march. The worms slither on in high strings on their way to the fruit and then wiggle off, stuffed with fruit, in the low strings. The spider mends her web with quick rising glissandi in the violins and later does a celebratory dance that echoes the "Danse infernale" from Stravinsky's "Firebird."

As Denève pointed out in his pre-concert chat, the score for "Le Festin de l'araignée" is filled with notations of the ballet's stage directions as a reminder to the conductor; "Entrée des Fourmis" ("Entrance of the ants") at rehearsal number 7. and "Danse de Papillon" ("Dance of the butterfly") at number 19, and so on. Instead of displaying static stage directions on a screen, Denève enlisted the help of French illustrator and animator Grégoire Pont to animate them. Pont's work was shown for the first time last week during a performance of the score that Denève conducted with the New World Symphony in Miami.

As you can see in Pont's Facebook sample reel, his fanciful and witty line drawings match the music perfectly. I especially liked what he did with the final bars, when a firefly, after a few false starts, finally achieves illumination, and his light changes into a crescent moon. It was (ahem) de-light-ful.

Every time Denève conducts a Roussel score for us, I'm reminded of why he has so much affection for this composer's work and how completely justified that affection is. Roussel surely deserves more attention than he has gotten over the years. The high quality of the performances his music gets from Denève and the orchestra should help to remedy that situation.

"Le Festin de l'araignée" got a sympathetic and elegant reading from Denève and the usual excellent playing from the orchestra. Associate Principal Flute Andrea Kaplan got a well-deserved nod during the curtain call for her many fine solos, and everyone else was at the top of their game.

After intermission, we leaped forward to 1942 and a suite from the ballet "Les animaux modèles" ("The Model Animals") by Francis Poulenc (1899–1963).  Denève said this work had a special place in his heart because of the ingenious way the composer, who was already part of the resistance movement, managed to sneak in Antifa messages that would be understood by his audience but would sail over the heads of the Nazis. Fascists, as we are reminded far too often, are notoriously unable to handle nuance.

The most notable example is the insertion in the fifth movement of the suite, "Les deux coqs" ("The Two Roosters") of the refrain of the 1871 Franco-Prussian war song “Alsace et Lorraine”: "Vous n'aurez pas l'Alsace et la Lorraine / Et malgré vous nous resterons Français" (roughly, "You will not have Alsace and Lorraine, and despite you we will remain French). Denève favored us with a couple of bars in his talk, which might have made it easier to spot when the trumpets let loose with it in performance. As Poulenc recalled later, "each time the trumpet started out on the tune, I couldn't help smiling."

The orchestra's spirited and incisive performance, along with Ken Page's suave readings of three of the La Fontaine fables on which the ballet is based, left the audience smiling. The rhyming translations of the fables by the late, multi-talented Craig Hill captured the satirical wit of the originals, at least based on my somewhat rudimentary French.

Denève masterfully built the slow crescendo to the somewhat musically ambiguous "Le petit jour" ("Day Break"), with its abrupt shift to darkness near the end, and brought out all the noble romance of "Le lion amoureux" ("The Lion in Love"). Poulenc's vivid portrayals of a man's two rather picky mistresses and the fight of the roosters with its reminder about the evanescence of victory (probably lost on the Germans) were sharply etched in Sunday's performance.

There was excellent playing here from the horns and brasses, especially in "La mort et la bûcheron" ("Death and the woodcutter"), and impressively precise articulation by the strings. Harpists Julie Smith Phillips and Ellie Kirk added to the richness of the sound.

The final work on the program, "Peter and the Wolf" by Sergei Prokofiev (1891–1953), is written for narrator and orchestra. This time around, however, the narration was replaced with the 2006 “stop motion” animated film “Peter and the Wolf” by British writer/director Suzie Templeton. Templeton's film sticks fairly close to the outline of Prokofiev's original story but embellishes it substantially and sets it in a somewhat dystopic Soviet Russia. Peter is still a hero and the wolf, especially in his animated incarnation, is still menacing. The hunters, though, are essentially thugs, Peter's animal friends are skinny and scruffy, and everyone seems to be leading a hand-to-mouth existence. It's imaginative but a bit bleak.

The music, however, remains unchanged and was played just as well as the last time I heard the orchestra perform it in 2021. Most of the soloists were also the same, including Andrew Cuneo, the Principal Bassoon who played the role of a comically pompous grandfather, and Jelena Dirks, the Principal Oboe who portrayed a mournful and (in this grittier version) unquestionably dead duck. Percussionists Will James and Alan Stewart, the Principal and Associate Principal respectively, played the fearsome hunters. Kevin Ritenauer, who was not part of the 2021 ensemble, joined them on the tympani.

Principal Flute Matthew Roitstein's bird was wonderfully light and agile—allegro and staccato with lots of grace notes, just as written. The contrast with Templeton's clumsy, broken-winged creature (who needs a balloon to stay aloft) was heavily ironic. Ditto clarinetist Steve Ahearn as the cat: musically sly and slinky in contrast with the clumsy and inept animated counterpart.

Titled "Musical Fables," the concert was an innovative approach to putting old wine in new bottles without damaging the vintage. Hats off to everyone.

Next from the SLSO: Denève conducts the orchestra and violin soloist Augustin Hadelich in Samuel Barber’s Violin Concerto along with the local premieres Valerie Coleman’s “Umoja: Anthem of Unity” and the Symphony No. 3 by Florence Price. Performances are Friday at 10:30 am and Saturday at 7:30 pm, February 2 and 3, at the Touhill Center on the UMSL campus. The Saturday concert will be broadcast live on St. Louis Public Radio and Classic 107.3.

This article originally appeared at 88.1 KDHX, where Chuck Lavazzi is the senior performing arts critic.

St. Louis theatre calendar for the week of January 29, 2024

What's on St.Louis theater and cabaret stages this coming week. Please leave a comment if anything was wrong or got left out

Ben Nordstrom and
Steve Neale

The Blue Strawberry presents Ben Nordstrom and Steve Neale in We're Not Cool on Saturday, February 3, at 7:30 pm. “Ben and Steve return to Blue Strawberry with their trademark mix of heart and humor sharing songs and stories of fatherhood, marriage and love, a life in the arts, and their meteoric rise into middle age. Songs from Billy Joel to Stephen Sondheim, Ben Rector to Marc Shaiman, Sara Bareilles to Jason Mraz, and more!” The Blue Strawberry is at 364 N. Boyle. For more information: bluestrawberrystl.com.

Tim Schall and Carol Schmidt

The Blue Strawberry presents Sunday Standard Time with Tim Schall and Carol Schmidt on Sunday February 4 from at 6 pm. “Join Tim Schall (vocals) and Carol Schmidt (piano) in the lounge for a casual, classy Sunday evening of jazz standards, a little sophisticated pop and a dash of classic Broadway. Tim is no stranger to the theater and concert stages of St. Louis, Chicago and New York's Lincoln Center. Carol has a rich history of entertaining St. Louis audiences as musician and singer. Together they will help you wind down your weekend with timeless music and a lot of irreverent dry humor.”  The Blue Strawberry is at 364 N. Boyle. For more information: bluestrawberrystl.com.

Sara Sheperd

The Cabaret Project presents Sara Sheperd in Around the Corner: A Choose Your Own Adventure Cabaret on Friday and Saturday, February 2 and 3, at 7:30 pm. “Sara Sheperd is back in the St. Louis spotlight on February 2nd and 3rd , 2024. After spending years playing the iconic Carole King in Beautiful, The Carole King Musical on Broadway and national tours, thousands of St. Louisans saw Sara this past summer as she wowed Muny audiences as the legendary King in their spectacular St. Louis production.  She returns to us to tell her story of how her talent led her not only to play Carole King but also rocking the Broadway stage in shows like Cry Baby, along with her impressive portfolio of national tours and leading stage roles in theaters across America.” All performances take place in the Ballroom at The Sheldon Concert Hall in Grand Center. For more information: thecabaretproject.org

Circus Harmony presents Nocturne Saturdays at 2:00 and 7:00 pm and Sundays at 2:00 pm through February 4.  “Circus Harmony's new dreamlike show, NOCTURNE, is about overcoming your fears, and finding your strengths! It’s a show everyone should see.” Performances, which include museum admission, take place at City Museum, 750 N. 16th Street, downtown. For more information: circusharmony.org.

Funny Girl
Photo by Matthew Murphy for Murphymade

The Fabulous Fox presents presents the musical Funny Girl through February 4. “The sensational Broadway revival dazzles with celebrated classic songs, including “Don’t Rain On My Parade,” “I’m the Greatest Star,” and “People.” This bittersweet comedy is the story of the indomitable Fanny Brice, a girl from the Lower East Side who dreamed of a life on the stage. Everyone told her she’d never be a star, but then something funny happened—she became one of the most beloved performers in history, shining brighter than the brightest lights of Broadway.” The Fabulous Fox is on North Grand in Grand Center. For more information: fabulousfox.com.

The Lemp Mansion Murder Mystery Dinner Theatre and Jest Mysteries present A Fistful of Hollars  through May 4. "Gun slingers, dance hall girls, cowboys, gold diggers, cowboy boots and ten-gallon-hats will abound. Rowdy cowboys will duel to the death as the crooked sheriff watches with glee. But none of these characters are as dangerous as Nasty Nate, he’s the orneriest gun in the west and word is that he’s going to be stirring up trouble at the Lemp Mansion. " The Lemp Mansion is at 3322 DeMenil Place in south city. For more information: www.lempmansion.com

Stray Dog Theatre presents the Agatha Christie’s The Mousetrap Thursdays through Saturdays at 8, February 1 through 17, with an additional performance at 2 pm on Sunday February 11. “As news spreads of a murder in London, seven eccentric strangers find themselves snowed in at a remote countryside guesthouse. A police sergeant unexpectedly arrives, concerned that the murderer at large may be one of the guests at the Manor. One by one, the suspicious guests begin to reveal their sordid pasts.” Performances take place at Tower Grove Abbey, 2336 Tennessee in Tower Grove East. For more information: straydogtheatre.org

Looking for auditions and other artistic opportunities? Check out the St. Louis Auditions site.

To get your event listed here, send an email to chuck at kdhx.org Your event information should be in text format (i.e. not part of a graphic), but feel free to include publicity stills.

Would you like to be on the radio? KDHX, 88.1 FM needs theatre reviewers. If you're 18 years or older, knowledgeable in this area, have practical theatre experience (acting, directing, writing, technical design, etc.), have good oral and written communications skills and would like to become one of our volunteer reviewers, send an email describing your experience and interests to chuck at kdhx.org. Please include a sample review of something you've seen recently.

Symphony Preview: Reanimated

This Saturday and Sunday (January 27 and 28) Music Director Stéphane Denève returns to lead the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra (SLSO) in an unusual program of three works with three things in common. First, they were all written during the first half of the last century. Second, they were all theatrical (two ballets and one piece for narrator and orchestra). And third, all three will be performed in ways that probably would never have occurred to their creators.

[Preview the music with the SLSO's Spotify playlist.]

Albert Roussel in 1913
Public Domain, Link

First, it’s the score for the 1912 “ballet-pantomime” “Le Festin de l’araignée” (“The Spider’s Feast”) by Albert Roussel (1869–1937).  A relatively solitary and independent figure, probably due to the loss of his parents and grandparents before he turned ten, Roussel was influenced by both Impressionism and Neo-classicism. He absorbed those trends into his own personal style, which Nicolle Labelle (in Grove Online) describes as “harmonically spiced and rhythmically vigorous.”

You can hear that in “Le Festin de l’araignée,” which he wrote at the request of Jacques Rouché, director of the Théâtre des Arts in Paris. The scenario, as you might guess from the title, describes a day in the lives and deaths of insects caught by a spider who is himself done in by a praying mantis. That sounds a bit grim, but Roussel’s music is so exotic and appealing in its mashup of late French Romanticism and Impressionism that it’s impossible not to love it.

That said, complete ballet scores don’t always work in a concert setting, tied as they are to the action on stage. In this performance, though, visuals will be provided by illustrator Grégoire Pont using a technique he calls Cinesthetics. This involves Pont creating his illustrations in real time as the score is performed with the intent of “offering audiences spellbinding new connections between eyes, ears, and mind.”

Pont does this using a touch screen and stylus, with the images displayed on a big screen in the auditorium. For a preview of what to expect this weekend, check out the artist’s short demonstration video on YouTube. This is, quite literally, performance art. Given the state of the art in film back in 1912, I doubt that this would have ever crossed Roussel’s mind.

Although not one of France’s better known musical sons, Roussel is a favorite of Denéve, who recorded all of his symphonies for Naxos back in 2010. His performance of Roussel’s Symphony No. 3 with the SLSO in 2020 was enough to convince me that his admiration for the composer is fully justified.

Francis Poulenc in 1922
Photo by Joseph Rosmand

After intermission we leap forward to 1942 and a suite from the ballet “Les animaux modèles” (“The Model Animals”) by Francis Poulenc (1899–1963).  A member of that eccentric group of French composers known as “Les Six,” Poulenc is best known for witty and somewhat Neoclassical works like his Organ Concerto, Concerto for Two Pianos and Orchestra (performed so brilliantly here in 2018, and his many pithy pieces for solo piano. Poulenc also had a more serious side, though, as revealed in his opera “La voix humaine” (a fine performance of which graced Opera Theatre’s 2020 season), his religious works, and his 1955 opera “Dialogues des Carmélites” (“The Dialogs of the Carmelites,” also presented at Opera Theatre in 2014).

“Les animaux modèles” shows off both sides of Poulenc’s musical personality. Based on the tales from the twelve volumes of Fables by Jean de La Fontaine (1621–1695), the full-length ballet ranges from brightly comic numbers like “L'homme entre deux âges et ses deux maîtresses” (“The Middle-Aged Man and His Two Mistresses”) to the passionate nobility of “Le lion amoureux” (“The Lion in Love”) and the solemnity of the concluding “Le repas de midi” (Lunchtime). The suite includes these numbers along with three others.

Since it was written in Nazi-occupied France, “Les animaux modèles” has a subtext that goes beyond La Fontaine’s fanciful stories. Poulenc was already part of the resistance, having joined the Front National des Musiciens (The National Front of Musicians), which fought the Teutonic invasion of the musical world, and embedding pro-French and anti-Nazi themes in his music. He did so in a way that went over the heads of the Nazis, fascists being notoriously unable to handle nuance. As David Raymond wrote in program notes for the Rochester Philharmonic, “The fables of LaFontaine are (or were) considered one of the glories of French literature, and given that any educated French audience would recognize them, Poulenc’s ballet became a symbol of French civilization and resistance.”

We’ll hear one example of the composer’s Antifa sarcasm Sunday, in the fifth movement of the suite, “Les deux coqs” (“The Two Roosters”), in which Poulenc quotes the 1871 anti-German song “Alsace et Lorraine.” Written in the wake of the Franco-Prussian war (which resulted in the German annexation of Alsace and Lorraine), the refrain goes like this:

Vous n'aurez pas l'Alsace et la Lorraine,
Et malgré vous nous resterons Français ;
Vous avez pu germaniser la plaine,
Mais notre cœur, vous ne l'aurez jamais.

Rough translation: “You will not have Alsace and Lorraine, and despite you we will remain French; you were able to Germanize the plain, but you will never have our hearts.” As Poulenc recalled later, “I gave myself the treat, recognized only by some members of the orchestra…each time the trumpet started out on the tune, I couldn’t help smiling.”

Unlike Poulenc’s audiences, most Americans are unlikely to be familiar with La Fontaine’s work, so Denève has chosen a novel approach. The suite has been cut down from its original eight movements to six, and each one will be paired with a modern English translation (by the late Craig Hill) of its original fable, read by our own "trusty and well-beloved" thespian Ken Page.

Prokofiev in New York, 1918
en.wikipedia.org

With the final work on the program, “Peter and the Wolf” by Sergei Prokofiev (1891–1953), we go from adding narration to removing it. Composed in 1936 on a commission from Natalia Satz, director of the Moscow Children’s Musical Theater, this tale (with a text by Prokofiev) of the stalwart Peter’s mostly successful attempt to protect his animal friends from the nefarious wolf has proven to be wildly popular worldwide.

It has been much admired at the SLSO as well, most recently performed in May 2021 under the baton of David Robertson with actress and singer/songwriter Alicia Revé Like as the narrator. This time around the narrator will be replaced with the Oscar-winning 2006 animated film “Peter and the Wolf” created by British writer/director Suzie Templeton. Templeton uses a technique known as “stop motion,” in which real-world objects are manipulated one frame at a time to create the illusion of motion.

Stop motion dates back to the silent film era, but I remember it primarily from the films of Ray Harryhausen, where it was used to create special visuals for films like “The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms” (1953) and “The Golden Voyage of Sinbad” (1973). George Pal used stop motion for his “Puppetoons” in the 1940s and Nic Park used a variant called “Claymation” (in which the figures were sculpted from plasticine clay) for a series of films in the 1990s and 2000s such as the whimsical “Wallace and Gromit” shorts and the Hollywood hit “Chicken Run” (2000).

These days mass-market films have moved on to less time-consuming digital techniques, but stop motion still holds a place in the hearts of many film fans and directors. Using it here instead of the usual narrator will, according to the program notes, “tell a richer and more nuanced tale” and “demonstrate that music can tell powerful stories without uttering a single word.”

Next from the SLSO: Music Director Stéphane Denève returns to conduct the SLSO and actor Ken Page in Poulenc’s ballet “Les animaux modèles” (“The Model Animals”), Roussel’s ballet “Le Festin de l’araignée” (“The Spider’s Feast”), and Prokofiev’s “Peter and the Wolf.” In an interesting change-up, Prokofiev’s work will be performed without the usual narration but with Suzie Templeton’s animated 2006 film, while the Poulenc will be performed with Page reading contemporary translations of the La Fontaine fables that inspired the composer.  Performances will be Saturday at 7:30 pm and Sunday at 3 pm (January 27 and 28) at the Stifel Theater downtown.

This article originally appeared at 88.1 KDHX, where Chuck Lavazzi is the senior performing arts critic.

Symphony Review: Local premiere of Williams's "Zodiac Suite" highlights a jazzy SLSO concert

Sunday afternoon (January 21) Conductor Laureate Leonard Slatkin led the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra (SLSO) in a mostly glorious conclusion to their three-concert series of works celebrating the intersection of classical and what Slatkin calls “vernacular” music—a term he uses for jazz, folk, spirituals, theatre, and popular music in general. Sunday, though, the emphasis was firmly on jazz and its progenitor, ragtime.

[Find out more about the music with my symphony preview.]

The afternoon opened with a literal bang in the form of the cymbal crash that begins “A Joplin Overture” by American composer and critic Paul Turok (1929–2012). Written in 1973 and first played by Slatkin and the SLSO the following year, it’s mostly a series of expansions on themes from “The Entertainer, A Rag Time Two Step" by Scott Joplin (1868–1917) that lead to a brief coda in which a series of Joplin tunes get together for a rousing finale. Turok’s colorful orchestration and somewhat whimsical approach to Joplin’s themes combine to create a work that is, appropriately, entertaining.

Like all but the final work on the program (the ever-popular “Rhapsody in Blue”) this was a piece that was essentially brand new to the orchestra, none of whom were around in 1974. Nevertheless, they played with skill and panache under Slatkin’s knowing direction.

The Aaron Diehl Trio takes a curtain call
L-R: Aaron Diehl, David Wang, Aaron Kimmel

Next was the chamber orchestra version of the 1945 “Zodiac Suite” by pianist/composer Mary Lou Williams (1910–1981). The twelve movements depict both mystical aspects of the constellations and the personalities of the composer’s friends based on their birth signs. 

Originally composed for jazz trio (and recorded in that version by Williams), the suite was arranged for jazz trio and chamber orchestra by Williams with input from composer/arranger Milt Orent (1918–1975), and had its premiere in the format on New Year’s Eve 1945. The performance was poorly rehearsed and got lukewarm reviews, and the work fell into neglect.

Which, based on what we heard Sunday, is a serious injustice. The “Zodiac Suite” is a stunning integration of ideas from both the classical and jazz worlds. The suite is a virtual history of early 20th century music, from boogie-woogie and swing to French Impressionism and even Hollywood film scores. It’s as though Williams took every sound that was in the air for the first half of the century and turned them into her personal musical kaleidoscope.

To pick just a few examples, “Cancer” develops a smoky slow blues over a rolling piano bass line that could have come from Rachmaninoff. “Leo” kicks off with a brassy Hollywood fanfare that gives way to a melting violin solo (neatly done by Concertmaster David Halen) with a lush orchestral backdrop. “Scorpio” uses “exotic” percussion sounds (mallets on the snare drum) and syncopation in a way that seems to anticipate Les Baxter’s 1951 “Quiet Village.” “Capricorn” showcases the winds with Debussy-esque harmonies. And it all wraps up with an elegant jazz waltz in “Pisces.”

With its rich harmonic inventiveness and fine performances by Slatkin, the SLSO musicians, and the Aaron Diehl trio (Diehl on piano with David Wang on bass and Aaron Kimmel on drums), the “Zodiac Suite” was, at least for me, the absolute highlight of a concert in which there was no shortage of wonderful moments. It was warmly received, resulting in a dynamic encore from the Diehl trio, featuring impressive solos by Wang and Kimmel.

There were also plenty of opportunities for members of the orchestra to shine in the work that opened the second half of the concert, the delightfully frivolous score of “Krazy Kat, a Jazz Pantomime” written in 1921 by John Alden Carpenter (1876–1951). Based on the wildly imaginative comic strip of the same name, the 1922 New York premiere of “Krazy Kat” had sets and costumes by the strip’s creator George Herrimann and a scenario based on the strip’s absurd love triangle of the eponymous gender-fluid cat, the brick-tossing mouse Ignatz, and the stolid Offisa Pup, a police dog dedicated to protecting Krazy from Ignatz.

"Krazy Kat" ballet, 1922
Source unknown

There’s not that much jazz in the piece, but there is plenty of cheerful Loony Tunes anarchy. The music changes moods, meters, and styles in rapid series of sonic “jump cuts” that might be a challenge for a lesser orchestra or conductor, but seemed more like a playground for Slatkin and company. The many brief solo bits came off perfectly, with fine stuff from (among others) harpist Megan Stout, piccolo player Ann Choomack, Principal Flute Matthew Rothstein, Nathan Nabb on soprano sax, pianist Peter Henderson, Associate Principal Bassoon Andy Gott, and Associate Principal Trombone Amanda Stewart. Slatkin kept it all running smoothly and didn’t miss a moment of the score’s humor.

The afternoon concluded Gershwin’s massively popular “Rhapsody in Blue” in the 1942 full orchestra version by Ferde Grofé. As Slatkin noted in his introduction, 2024 marks the 100th anniversary of the work’s premiere and the 50th anniversary of the recording by Slatkin and the SLSO as part of their Vox Box of Gershwin’s complete works for orchestra and piano and orchestra. It was not only the first time all of that music had been recorded, but it was also the first of a long series of recordings Slatkin did with the orchestra—recordings that very much helped to raise the SLSO’s profile.

That made it something of a sentimental event for both Slatkin and the audience, so Jeffrey Siegel, who recorded it with the orchestra back in 1974, no doubt seemed a logical choice for the part this time. Sadly, based on what we heard Sunday, this turned out not to be an ideal decision. The piano part of the “Rhapsody” is a testimony to Gershwin’s skill as a keyboard virtuoso and while Siegel was more than up to that challenge fifty years ago (as you can clearly hear in his recording), that no longer appears to be the case.

Slatkin and the orchestra were in top form at least. Principal Clarinet Scott Andrews nailed that famous opening glissando, giving it a real ‘20s jazz feel. Ditto Principal Trumpet Steven Franklin. The saxophone trio Nathan Nabb, Zach Stern, and Joel Vanderheyden (two altos and a tenor, respectively) came through loud and , but at least from our seats all the way on house right, Steven Schenkel’s banjo was swamped. That’s one of the reasons I prefer the jazz band version, but to each their own. The sound was lush and clear in any event, and Slatkin did an excellent job of maintaining the delicate balance between orchestra and soloist.

In his comments earlier in the evening, Slatkin pointed out that this two-week series was mostly about the way jazz made its way into the concert hall in the years running up to “Rhapsody in Blue,” making that work the culmination of the process rather than the beginning of it, as is popularly assumed. The variety of his musical selections and the quality of the performances have made that point admirably, in my view.

This series was also a reminder of what so many of us loved about the “Slatkin Years”: the combination of eclectic and imaginative programming with the deep connection between him and the orchestra. Despite the fact that the 2024 SLSO is a completely different group from the 1974 SLSO, that bond is still there. And Leonard Slatkin remains a St. Louis treasure.

If you missed this concert, never fear: it was recorded and will be broadcast this Saturday, January 27, at 7:30 pm on St. Louis Public Radio and Classic 107.3 and will be available for streaming for a limited time at the SLSO web site.

Next from the SLSO: Music Director Stéphane Denève returns to conduct the SLSO and actor Ken Page in Poulenc’s ballet “Les animaux modèles” (“The Model Animals”), Roussel’s ballet “Le Festin de l’araignée” (“The Spider’s Feast”), and Prokofiev’s “Peter and the Wolf.” In an interesting change-up, Prokofiev’s work will be performed without the usual narration but with Suzie Templeton’s animated 2006 film, while the Poulenc will be performed with Page reading contemporary translations of the La Fontaine fables that inspired the composer.  Performances will be Saturday at 7:30 pm and Sunday at 3 pm (January 27 and 28) at the Stifel Theater downtown.

This article originally appeared at 88.1 KDHX, where Chuck Lavazzi is the senior performing arts critic.

St. Louis theatre calendar for the week of January 22, 2024

What's on St.Louis theater and cabaret stages this coming week. Please leave a comment if anything was wrong or got left out

Hold On!
Photo courtesy of The Black Rep

The Black Rep presents the world premiere of Hold On! By Paul Webb through January 28.  “Although the Civil Rights Act of 1964 legally desegregated the South, discrimination was still rampant in certain areas, making it difficult for Blacks to register to vote. In 1965, an Alabama city became the battleground for suffrage. “Hold On!,” the inspiration behind the award-winning 2014 feature film “Selma,” explores the conflict between two extraordinary men, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Lyndon Baines Johnson. Both brilliant leaders, their personal battle, like the battle on the streets of Selma, is ultimately decided by King’s greater moral courage.” Performances take place at the Edison Theatre on the Washington University campus. For more information: www.theblackrep.org.

Circus Harmony presents Nocturne Saturdays at 2:00 and 7:00 pm and Sundays at 2:00 pm  January 27 through February 4.  “Circus Harmony's new dreamlike show, NOCTURNE, is about overcoming your fears, and finding your strengths! It’s a show everyone should see.” Performances, which include museum admission, take place at City Museum, 750 N. 16th Street, downtown. For more information: circusharmony.org.

Funny Girl
Photo by Matthew Murphy for Murphymade

The Fabulous Fox presents presents the musical Funny Girl opening on Tuesday, January 23, and running through February 4. “The sensational Broadway revival dazzles with celebrated classic songs, including “Don’t Rain On My Parade,” “I’m the Greatest Star,” and “People.” This bittersweet comedy is the story of the indomitable Fanny Brice, a girl from the Lower East Side who dreamed of a life on the stage. Everyone told her she’d never be a star, but then something funny happened—she became one of the most beloved performers in history, shining brighter than the brightest lights of Broadway.” The Fabulous Fox is on North Grand in Grand Center. For more information: fabulousfox.com.

The Lemp Mansion Murder Mystery Dinner Theatre and Jest Mysteries present A Fistful of Hollars  January 19 through May 4. "Gun slingers, dance hall girls, cowboys, gold diggers, cowboy boots and ten-gallon-hats will abound. Rowdy cowboys will duel to the death as the crooked sheriff watches with glee. But none of these characters are as dangerous as Nasty Nate, he’s the orneriest gun in the west and word is that he’s going to be stirring up trouble at the Lemp Mansion. " The Lemp Mansion is at 3322 DeMenil Place in south city. For more information: www.lempmansion.com

Looking for auditions and other artistic opportunities? Check out the St. Louis Auditions site.

To get your event listed here, send an email to chuck at kdhx.org Your event information should be in text format (i.e. not part of a graphic), but feel free to include publicity stills.

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Capsule Review: Great voices highlight "Manon Lescaut" at Winter Opera

Joseph Park, Zoya Gramagin
Photo: ProPhotoSTL

Wednesday night I attended a dress rehearsal of Winter Opera’s production of Puccini’s 1894 blockbuster hit “Manon Lescaut.” Performances are tonight and Sunday (January 19 and 21) and if what I heard at the rehearsal is any indication, audiences will be mightily impressed by the high quality of the singing. There’s not a weak vocal link in the cast and the chorus is its usual reliable self, with the singers all creating individual characters while maintaining a solid ensemble sound.

In the title role, soprano Zoya Gramagin displays a rich, powerful voice that is an excellent match for wide emotional and musical range of the part. As the tragic Chavalier des Grieux, Taylor P. Comstock sounds very much like a classic heldentenor with ringing high notes. Bass-baritone Joseph Park, an alumnus of Opera Theatre’s prestigious Young Artists program last year, is Manon’s sugar daddy Geronte. He’s a skilled actor with an imposing voice, but he’s clearly far too young for the role, the somewhat unconvincing grey wig notwithstanding.

Zoya Gramagin, Taylor P. Comstock
Photo: ProPhotoSTL

Tenor Thomas M. Taylor IV gets the evening off to rousing start as the songwriter Edmondo, who leads the chorus in the jolly “Ave sera gentil” (“Hail gentle evening”), neatly setting the tone for the seriocomic first act.

The rehearsal was a bit rocky otherwise, so it’s hard to say what the final product will look like this weekend. You’ll just have to see it for yourself.

Besides, this will be a chance for local audiences to see a Puccini opera which, despite its initial success, has since been largely eclipsed by the more coherent and tuneful works that came after it, mostly notably “Tosca,” “La Bohème,” and “Madama Butterfly.” This was Winter Opera’s first production, for example, and Opera Theatre has never taken it on at all. Performances are tonight at 7:30 and Sunday at 2 pm at the Kirkwood Performing Arts center.

Symphony Preview: The SLSO goes Krazy for Gershwin (among others)

This Saturday and Sunday (January 20 and 21) St. Louis Symphony Orchestra (SLSO) Conductor Laureate Leonard Slatkin concludes his two-week, four-concert series with the ensemble he led from 1979 to 1996. Both concerts are at the Touhill Performing Arts Center. Here’s what to expect.

[Preview Sunday's music with the SLSO's Spotify playlist.]

Slatkin and the SLSO Youth Orchestra
Photo: Dilip Vishwanat

On Saturday at 7:30 pm, Slatkin conducts a joint concert by members of the SLSO and the St. Louis Symphony Youth Orchestra—a group he founded back in 1970. That makes it an event with a special meaning for him. “For me,” he said in a recent interview, “it will be one of those moments where I hope I don’t lose it just because I see people on stage who could be my grandchildren.”

The program consists of three audience favorites that need very little introduction. It begins with the “Academic Festival” Overture by Johannes Brahms (1833–1897), written in 1880 as a tribute to the University of Breslau which had just awarded him an honorary degree.

Not that it was strictly voluntary, mind you. Brahms had intended to send a nice “thank you” note but Bernhard Scholz, Director of Music in Breslau, insisted on an actual composition for the solemn occasion. The composer’s ironic response was a complex piece scored for a huge orchestra and consisting mostly of a fantasy on student drinking songs, concluding with a majestic setting of “Gaudeamus igitur” (“So let us rejoice,” preferably with a stein of beer). We don’t often think of Brahms as a jolly fellow, but the “Academic Festival” Overture just overflows with good cheer. Prosit!

Next, it’s “A Lincoln Portrait” by Aaron Copland (1900–1990). Written in a burst of patriotic fervor after the Pearl Harbor attack, it premiered in Cincinnati in 1942 with André Kostelanetz at the podium and local actor William Adams reading the narration. It's stirring stuff, blending Copland's spacious music with Lincoln's inspiring words. Saturday’s narrator is Kevin McBeth, Director of the St. Louis Symphony IN UNISON Chorus.

The concert concludes with a certified rouser: “Francesca Da Rimini: Symphonic Fantasy after Dante,” op. 32, composed in 1876 by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky (1840–1893). It was inspired by the story from Canto V of Dante’s “Inferno” about Francesca da Rimini (original name Francesca da Polenta), a real noblewoman in 13th-century Italy. Her husband caught her in flagrante delicto with his brother and murdered them both. This being the medieval moral universe, it was Francesca and her lover who ended up in the second circle of hell rather than her homicidal spouse.

Tchaikovsky’s musical evocation of the circle, in which sinners are buffeted about by tempestuous winds, is colorfully dramatic. In “Inferno,” Dante is so moved by Francesca’s story that he falls “as a corpse might fall, to the dead floor of Hell.” Tchaikovsky portrays that in a violent, impassioned coda with multiple brass chords and cymbal crashes echoing the poet’s collapse. It never fails to get applause.

Paul Turok
Photo courtesy of the SLSO

On Sunday at 3 pm, it’s the regular SLSO in the last of three programs examining the influence on the classical canon of what Slatkin calls “vernacular music”—a term he uses for jazz, folk, spirituals, theatre, and popular music in general. Sunday, though, the emphasis is firmly on jazz and its progenitor, ragtime.

The concert opens with “A Joplin Overture” by American composer and critic (!) Paul Turok (1929–2012). Composed in 1973 and first played by Slatkin and the SLSO the following year, this short work (according to Daniels’ Music Online) “appears to be the beginning and ending of Turok's Great Scott!— Orchestral Suite after Scott Joplin, spliced together. Joplin's famous rag The Entertainer is prominent.” I can’t find any recordings of either work anywhere, so I’ll just have to take their word for it.

Grove Online describes Turok’s music as “mainly conservative, characterized by accessible, memorable themes, a restrained but expressive use of dissonance, and a masterful handling of tone color and sonority.” Sounds like a good match for St. Louis’s own King of Ragtime.

Next, it’s music by a composer with impeccable jazz credentials, Mary Lou Williams (1910–1981). A highly regarded pianist, arranger, and composer, Williams was something of a keyboard prodigy. Encouraged by her stepfather Fletcher Burley, she became proficient enough by the age of 12 to start sitting in with local bands and even touring on the segregated TOBA vaudeville circuit.  TOBA officially stood for Theatre Owners Booking Association, but blues singer Gertrude “Ma” Rainey more accurately called it Tough on Black Asses due to lower salaries and less desirable theatres.

Mary Lou Williams
by William P. Gottlieb 
Public Domain

That was all in the past when she started work on her “Zodiac Suite” in 1942, however. Williams had moved on to the Big Time, appearing as a headliner at Barney Josephson’s Café Society in Greenwich Village, recording exclusively for Moe Asch’s Asch label, and, by the time the suite had its first performance in 1945, hosting “Mary Lou Williams’ Piano Workshop” on AM jazz station WNEW. She would later retire from performing and concentrate on composing religious works before returning to the secular jazz scene with her 1975 album “Zoning.” In 1977 she became artist-in-residence at Duke University, a position she held until her death.

All twelve movements of the “Zodiac Suite” depict mystical aspects of the constellations, reflecting Williams’s interest in astrology. Eleven of them also reflect the personalities of the composer’s contemporary jazz musician friends based on their birth signs.  Ten of the eleven movements we’ll hear Sunday are portraits of: Billie Holiday and tenor saxophonist Ben Webster (“Aires”), Duke Ellington (“Taurus”), trumpeter Shorty Baker ("Gemini"), alto saxophonist Lem Davis (“Cancer”), jazz legends Art Tatum, Dizzy Gillespie, Bud Powell, Thelonious Monk, Charlie Parker and John Coltrane ("Libra"), trombonist Vic Dickenson (“Leo”),  Ethel Waters (“Scorpio”), pianist Eddie Heywood (“Sagittarius”), dancer/choreographer Pearl Primus and trumpeter Frankie Newton (“Capricorn”), and Eartha Kitt and singer/guitarist/civil rights advocate Josh White (“Aquarius”).

“Virgo” is apparently just Virgo.

Originally composed for the traditional jazz trio of piano, bass, and drums, the suite was expanded by Williams in 1946 to include a chamber orchestra and more closely integrate contemporary jazz and classical music, including (according to Linda Dahl’s 1999 biography of Williams) the work of composers like Ellington, Stravinsky, Hindemith, and Bartók. I haven’t been able to find a recording of that version anywhere, but the SLSO Spotify playlist does have the Smithsonian/Folkways 1995 re-issue of the composer’s own 1945 recording for Asch. Pianist Aaron Diehl (who recorded the suite with The Knights last year) will head to jazz trio on Sunday, with David Wong on bass and Aaron Kimmel on drums.

George Herrimann, 1922
By George Herriman - Entre Comics
Public Domain

After intermission, it’s fifteen minutes of frivolity with “Krazy Kat, a Jazz Pantomime” written in 1921 by John Alden Carpenter (1876–1951). Like his contemporary Charles Ives (1874–1954), Carpenter was interested in bringing vernacular sounds into the concert hall. However, he did so in a less radical fashion, writing in a relatively conservative style with strong elements of French Impressionism. Also like Ives, Carpenter had substantial formal training but made his living primarily in the business world—specifically in his father’s Chicago ship chandlery, George B. Carpenter & Co.

Based on the wildly imaginative comic strip of the same name, “Krazy Kat” had sets and costumes by the strip’s creator George Herrimann and a scenario based on the strip’s absurd love triangle of the eponymous gender-fluid cat (sometimes Krazy is male, sometimes female, at the cartoonist’s whim; today it would probably be banned in Florida), the brick-tossing mouse Ignatz, and the stolid Offisa Pup, a police dog dedicated to protecting Krazy from Ignatz. The strip’s visual and linguistic inventiveness, while baffling to many readers, strongly influenced the next generation of cartoonists—most notably Walt Kelly, the creator of “Pogo.”

The music is appropriately cartoonish in a way that will be familiar to admirers of Carl Stalling’s Warner Brothers animation scores, but there isn’t much in it that most of us would now think of as “jazz” aside from the frenetic chase scene near the end. Never mind; it’s all great fun. And this will be the first time it has been heard here since the SLSO played it way back in 1923 under the baton of guest conductor Frederick Fisher.

Sunday’s concert, like the first two in the series, concludes with music of George Gershwin. This time it’s the composer’s first foray into the concert hall, the popular “Rhapsody in Blue.” It was first performed as the finale of "An Experiment in Modern Music," as bandleader Paul Whiteman billed the February 12, 1924, concert by his Palais Royal Orchestra at New York's Aeolian Hall. The “Rhapsody” was the most memorable piece to emerge from Whiteman's experiment although there were some other fun nuggets in it as well. You can hear them on Spotify in a recreation of the entire concert under the baton of Maurice Peress that was released in 1987. 

Commemorative Gershwin stamp, 1973
USPS, Public Domain

With the composer at the piano, that first performance must have been quite an event, especially since Gershwin hadn’t gotten around to writing down the entire solo part. “We can assume,” writes Peress, “that Gershwin improvised, for the score does contain a humorous warning for Whiteman, ‘Wait for the nod…,’ just before the entrance of the lovely slow theme, andantino moderato.”

Although Gershwin would orchestrate his later concert works, it was composer Frede Grofé (best known for his “Grand Canyon Suite”) who did the arrangement for that first concert, tailored specifically for Whiteman’s jazz band. Grofé would later do several orchestrations of the “Rhapsody” the last of which, for full symphony orchestra, was published in 1942, five years after the composer’s death. That was the only arrangement available until 1971, when Samuel Adler and the Berlin Symphony recorded a reconstruction of Whiteman’s original. Peress would later use that as the basis for his own 1987 version.

That said, what we’ll hear Sunday is the 1942 version, as that’s what Slatkin, pianist Jeffrey Siegal (also the soloist this time), and the SLSO used for their 1974 recording. Since then the SLSO has performed both versions and recorded the jazz band original with David Robertson and Kirill Gerstein for Myrios in 2018.  The saxophones and banjo from the original are also there as optional instruments in what Peress calls “the Hollywood Bowl version”; it’s just that some care is necessary to prevent the full orchestra from swamping them. Somehow, I doubt that’s going to be an issue for Slatkin.

The Essentials: Leonard Slatkin conducts the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra, St. Louis Symphony Youth Orchestra, and narrator Kevin McBeth in music by Brahms, Copland, and Tchaikovsky on Saturday, January 20, at 7:30 pm. On Sunday, January 21, at 3 pm Slatkin conducts the orchestra and piano soloist Jeffrey Siegel in Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue” along with music by Paul Turok, Mary Lou Williams, and John Alden Carpenter. Both concerts take place at the Touhill Center on the University of Missouri—St. Louis campus. The Sunday concert will be broadcast on St. Louis Public Radio on Saturday, January 27,  at 7:30 pm.

This article originally appeared at 88.1 KDHX, where Chuck Lavazzi is the senior performing arts critic.

Symphony Rreview: A hot time in the cold town with Slatkin and the SLSO

Before he started his pre-concert chat with the audience at the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra (SLSO) concert Saturday night (January 13) Conductor Laureate Leonard Slatkin smiled and said, “Look how many of you made it!”

[Find out more about the music with my symphony preview.]

He was referring to the fact that despite a light snowfall and Antarctic wind chill values, the Busch Concert Hall at the Touhill Center was packed (it was officially sold out, but bad weather always results in some no-shows). The audience was rewarded for braving the deep freeze by an impeccably  performed and consistently entertaining program of music from (mostly) the 1920s.

La création du monde

It was second of three concerts demonstrating the influence of what Slatkin calls “vernacular music”—jazz, folk, spirituals, theatre, and popular music in general—on the classical canon. It consisted of three infrequently heard works by European composers inspired by American jazz and dance tunes and was followed by one big whopping hit by an American composer inspired by a visit to Paris. It would have gotten serious points for variety even if it hadn’t been so well done.

It all started with the 1923 ballet “La création du monde” (The Creation of the World) by Darius Milhaud (1892–1974), a work heavily influenced by the composer’s brief infatuation with jazz and ragtime (even though the latter was in its sunset years by then).  With a scenario by Blaise Cendrars based on the poet’s 1922 collection of African folk tales, the ballet featured Picasso-esque sets and costumes by Fernand Léger that looked impressive but were clumsy and awkward for the dancers. Which may explain why “La création du monde” is rarely seen but often heard.

Scored for a small wind ensemble, percussion (including a typical jazz drum kit), and a string quartet with the alto sax replacing the viola, it’s a piece in which every player can be clearly heard. But it’s also one in which quasi-independent instrumental lines often converge into what could, in less skilled hands, turn into mere cacophony. That makes it a bit of a challenge for both the players and the audience.

Section I, with its fast-moving fugue, is a good example. Keeping the individual lines clear here looks tricky in the score, but Slatkin and the musicians kept everything clearly delineated. This is music that requires close attention by the listener, and this neatly balanced performance made that easy. The roster of fine performers included Nathan Nabb on sax, Peter Henderson on piano, Kevin Ritenauer on the drum kit, and Jelena Dirks on oboe.

Ebony Concerto

Parenthetical note: the tune of the oboe’s soulful, blues-drenched solo sounded so much like the one Gershwin wrote for his Concerto in F two years later that I suspect Milhaud’s theme might have been on his mind at the time.

Jazz was certainly on the mind of Igor Stravinsky (1882–1971) in 1945 when he wrote his brief “Ebony Concerto” for clarinetist Woody Herman and his band. It crams a lot of musical variety into its ten minutes without overwhelming the listener with its ingenious mix of 1940’s jazz and the composer’s neoclassicism.

It also defies expectations by using the soloist more as a featured member of the band than as an individual player. There were long stretches in which SLSO Principal Clarinet Scott Andrews was more observer than participant, with prominent musical roles taken over by the large sax section. Still, when Andrews was given the chance to cut loose and strut his stuff, he did so beautifully, showing his wide expressive and dynamic range. I don’t often think of Stravinsky’s neoclassical works as being “fun,” but I can’t think of a better way to describe this one.

Intermission and another stage change brought the “Kleine Dreigroschenmusik” (“Little Threepenny Music”) by Kurt Weill (1900–1950). Scored for a 1920’s dance band with a bandoneon (a conertina much favored by Agentine tango composers) added for a bit of spice, it’s a suite of tunes from Weill and Bertolt Brecht’s 1928 “play with music” “Der Dreigroschenoper” (“The Threepenny Opera”) that the composer put together in 1929 at the request of legendary conductor Otto Klemperer. Without Bertolt Brecht’s pungent lyrics, most of the tunes sound deceptively cheerful, although even without its words, the “Kanonensong” (“Canon Song”) still feels dark and threatening.

Slatkin and the band gave us a performance marked by crisp, precise playing, careful attention to Weill’s small touches of humor, and more outstanding solo work. A tip of the hat is also due to Winnie Cheung on bandoneon. Her instrument is only called for in three of the eight movements, but the obvious joy in her performance was contagious.

Kleine Dreigroschenmusik

When Weill and Brecht were completing work on “Der Dreigroschenoper” George Gershwin (1898–1937) was putting the finishing touches on the work that concluded Saturday night’s show, “An American in Paris.” As someone who loves visiting the City of Light, I have to say that Gershwin did a bang-up job of capturing city's lively sidewalk cafes and bustling boulevards as well as (in the blues-infused central section) the charm of Paris at night.

Slatkin could probably conduct this score blindfolded at this point. His 1974 recording with the SLSO (“that orchestra is all gone now,” he quipped, “but the conductor is still here”) is one of the best you can buy, especially in the digitally remastered version that came out last summer. His performance Saturday night was a perfect balance of lush romanticism and a scrupulous attention to orchestral detail. It was the perfect way to end an evening that was both engaging and revelatory.

As a bonus, we got an encore: an orchestration by Leonard Slatkin’s father Felix (1915–1963), the St. Louis-born violinist and concertmaster for Twentieth Century Fox Studios, of Alfred Newman’s main theme for the 1943 film “The Song of Bernadette.” It features prominent solos for the violin and cello which, on the original soundtrack, were played by Leonard Slatkin’s father and mother (Eleanor Aller). 

Saturday night those parts played with great warmth by concertmaster David Halen and Principal Cello Daniel Lee. Newman’s music was shamelessly moving as only a vintage Hollywood score can be, especially when played this well. The arrangement was reconstructed from the soundtrack (a major accomplishment all by itself) by Leonard Slatkin's wife, composer Cindy McTee.

Finally, here’s a laurel wreath for the stage crew. Saturday’s concert effectively featured four different ensembles: Milhaud’s augmented quartet, Stravinsky’s 1940’s big band (plus harp), Weill’s 1920’s cabaret band, and Gershwin’s big, late Romantic orchestra. That meant three big stage changes with the biggest of the lot (from Weill to Gershwin) taking place while the audience watched. It’s a tribute to their professionalism that these changes all went quickly and smoothly, with the precision of a well-oiled machine.

Next from the SLSO: Leonard Slatkin and the orchestra return to the Touhill for two concerts. Slatkin conducts a joint performance by the orchestra and youth orchestra on Saturday, January 20, at 7:30 pm, with music by Brahms, Copland, and Tchaikovsky. On Sunday, January 21, at 3 pm, Slatkin conducts the orchestra and pianist Jeffrey Siegel in Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue” in a program that also includes John Alden Carpenter’s “Krazy Kat” ballet, Paul Turok’s “A Jopin Overture,” and selections from Mary Lou Willams’s “Zodiac Suite” with guest artists The Aaron Diehl Trio.

This article originally appeared at 88.1 KDHX, where Chuck Lavazzi is the senior performing arts critic.