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| Hannu Lintu Photo: Marco Borggreve |
Spring may be on its way, but this Friday and Sunday (March 14 and 16) a brisk Nordic breeze will, sonically speaking, waft through the Touhill Performing Arts Center for the first half of the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra concert as Finnish guest conductor Hannu Lintu presents a pair of works from his native land. They’re part of a tribute to the late Helsinki-born composer Kaija Saariaho, who died of a brain tumor in 2023.
The concerts open with Saariaho’s “Ciel d’hiver” (“Winter Sky”), which had its local premiere on October 7, 2022, under the baton of Jonathon Heyward. My description of it here comes from the preview article I wrote back then.
Since 1982, Saariaho had been living in Paris, where her studies at the Institute for Research and Coordination in Acoustics/Music (IRCAM) convinced her to turn away from serialism and towards spectralism, a movement that treats orchestral color (the sonic spectrum) as a compositional cornerstone. You can hear that in the rich acoustic palette of “Ciel d’hiver,” which is a 2014 re-orchestration of the second movement of Saariaho’s 2002 suite "Orion."
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| Kaija Saariaho Photo courtesy of the SLSO. |
Beginning with high woodwinds suspended over growling low notes with not much in between, the work strongly suggests the bleak emptiness of a dark, chilly night. The aurora borealis shimmers in the exotic percussion battery, and eventually the winds begin to moan ominously. Finally the sky clears to a tinkling piano motif and an evanescent cello melody and it all fades to black.
All that suggests, as W.C. Fields repeatedly declaims in “The Fatal Glass of Beer,” that “it ain’t a fit night out for man nor beast.” But this music has a forbidding beauty all the same.
Up next is the local premiere of the 2024 Viola Concerto by Magnus Lindberg (b. 1958) with soloist Lawrence Power, for whom the concerto was written. I interviewed Lindberg about it on my YouTube blog:
Lindberg’s comments on the virtues of writing for an 18th century-sized orchestra (strings, woodwinds, and trumpets only) are especially interesting, as are his thoughts on how his approach to composition has evolved over the decades.
The concerts conclude with the Symphony No. 2 in C major, Op. 68 by Robert Schumann (1810–1856). Written in 1845 and 1846, it’s the product of a time in the composer’s life marked by both an intense burst of creativity and an onset of the illness that would eventually destroy both his mind and body. If the first half of the program is about varieties of darkness, then Schumann’s symphony is about an eventual emergence into the light.
“For several days,” he wrote to his friend Felix Mendelssohn in September of 1845, “drums and trumpets in the key of C have been sounding in my mind. I have no idea what will come of it.” What came of it was the fanfare-like motif that dominates the Sostenuto assai – Allegro, ma non troppo first movement. Although highly reminiscent of the fanfare that opens Haydn’s Symphony No. 104 (“London”), it’s much more emotionally ambiguous, especially in the overall context of a movement that Judith Chernaik (in Schumann: The Faces and the Masks, 2018) describes as “agitated, even distraught in feeling.” Indeed, both the first movement and the Scherzo second movement can come across as a mix of the energetic and febrile, depending on how the conductor approaches them.
Schumann recognized that there was an element of agony and conflict behind the symphony. “I sketched it out,” he wrote to Mendelssohn, “while suffering severe physical pain; I may well call it the struggle of my mind, by which I sought to beat off my disease.” That struggle is most apparent in the anguished Adagio espressivo third movement, which Chernaik accurately describes as “an unmediated expression” of the composer’s suffering. It’s only in the Allegro molto vivace finale that he shows us his hope of returning health.
P.S. I put together my own playlist for this one so that I could include the world premiere recording of Lindberg’s concerto as well as a recording of the Schumann Symphony No. 2 by the SLSO under the baton of the late Jerzy Semkov, who was Music Director of the orchestra from 1975 to 1979..
The Essentials: Hannu Lintu conducts the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra and soloist Lawrence Power in the Viola Concerto by Magnus Lindberg, Kaija Saariaho’s “Ciel d’hiver,” and Schumann’s Symphony No. 2. Performances take place at the Touhill Performing Arts Center on Friday at 7:30 pm and Sunday at 3:00 pm, March 14 and 16. The Friday concert will be broadcast on Saturday night, March 15, at 7:30 pm on St. Louis Public Radio and Classic 107.3.
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