This weekend (November 29 and 30) conductor Kevin John Edusei makes his St. Louis Symphony Orchestra (SLSO) debut in a toe-tapping evening of music by Bela Bartók (1881––1945), Sergei Rachmaninoff (1873–1943), and Ludwig van Beethoven (1770–1827). Let’s put on our dancing shoes and find out more.
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| Béla Bartók using a phonograph to record Slovak folk songs sung by peasants in Zobordarázs from Griffiths, Paul (1978) A Concise History of Modern Music, Thames and Hudson ISBN: 0-500-20164-1., Public Domain |
The concerts open with Bela Bartók’s 1923 Dance Suite, written in celebration of the 50th anniversary of the unification of the Hungarian cities Óbuda, Buda, and Pest to form the national capitol Budapest. A pioneering ethnomusicologist as well as celebrated composer and pianist, Bartók spent much of 1908 tramping through the Hungarian countryside with fellow composer Zoltán Kodály collecting Magyar folk tunes. The spiky melodies and complex polyrhythms of that music would strongly influence what both composers produced from then on.
The Dance Suite is an excellent example. Its six short movements (the entire thing runs around 15 minutes) are inspired by (but not direct quotes of) Wallachian, Hungarian, and even Arabic songs and dances—the latter stemming mostly from a 1913 trip the composer took to Algeria. This is Bartók at his most approachable, with endless melodic and rhythmic invention.
Do you want to hear more of the kind of music Bartók collected, check out John Uhlemann’s Music from Distant Traditions show Sundays at 2 pm here at Classic 107.3. Many recent episodes are available for on-demand listening.
Next is one of the great virtuoso showpieces of the twentieth century, the flashy Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini, Op. 49, written in 1934 by Sergei Rachmaninoff. The Russian expatriate was one of the previous century’s great virtuoso pianists and the Rhapsody served him well as he toured America and Europe. He played the solo role at the premiere performance in Baltimore, Maryland, with the Philadelphia Orchestra conducted by another giant of 20th-century music, Leopold Stokowski.
The piece is a sort of mini-concerto, consisting of 24 variations on the twenty-fourth and last the 24 Caprices for Solo Violin by the eccentric virtuoso and composer Niccolò Paganini (1782–1840). The 24th caprice has proved to be an irresistible basis for variations by a wide variety of composers from Brahms to Eugène Ysaÿe. Rachmaninoff’s Rhapsody is probably the most well-known of the lot, even producing a romantic tune (in variation 18) that has had a life of its own, including a brief run as the accompaniment for (if my memory is correct) a Folger’s coffee commercial.
Listen also for the quote of the Latin plainchant “Dies Irae” (a theme that crops up often on Rachmaninoff’s music) about a third of the way through and note the extreme technical difficulty of the last variation. Even Rachmaninoff was said to have found it scary. Legend has it that he was so nervous about playing his own work at the Baltimore premiere that he drank a glass of crème de menthe to steady his nerves. That worked so well that he continued the practice every time he was called upon to play the Rhapsody, motivating the press to refer to it as the “Crème de Menthe Variations.”
Apocryphal? Maybe, but it’s a good story, nevertheless. Fortunately this weekend’s soloist is Joyce Yang, who gained international attention by winning the silver medal at the 12th Van Cliburn International Piano Competition in 2005. She went on the garner rave reviews and multiple awards, performing with many high-profile orchestras worldwide. That includes the SLSO, with whom she played another notoriously difficult Rachmaninoff work, his Piano Concerto No. 3, in 2019.
It’s worth noting that Paganini’s original caprice includes some pretty fancy variations of its own, as you can both see and hear in a YouTube video featuring violinist Salvatore Accardo and including images of the sheet music synched with his performance.
The concerts will conclude with Beethoven’s “right trusty and well-beloved” Symphony No. 7 in A major, op. 92. First performed at a December 8, 1813, at a charity concert to benefit widows and orphans of soldiers killed in the Battle of Hanau—which marked the beginning of the end of Napoleon’s dreams of empire—the work was greeted with wild acclaim by audiences and critics alike. The second movement Alegretto, in particular, “enchanted connoisseur and layman,” according to a contemporary review in the Allgemeine Musikalische Zeitung.
Perhaps the most famous and most enthusiastic review of the Seventh, though, came from Richard Wagner. It’s so effusive it’s worth quoting at length:
All tumult, all yearning and storming of the heart, become here the blissful insolence of joy, which carries us away with bacchanalian power through the roomy space of nature, through all the streams and seas of life, shouting in glad self-consciousness as we sound throughout the universe the daring strains of this human sphere-dance. The Symphony is the Apotheosis of the Dance itself: it is Dance in its highest aspect, the loftiest deed of bodily motion, incorporated into an ideal mold of tone.
Now THAT is a boffo notice.
“If Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony unites people with the idea of brotherhood,” observed Stéphane Denève in the program notes from the SLSO’s May 2021 performance, “his Seventh Symphony unites people with the idea of dance.” These days anything that unites us in a positive way is certainly welcome, it seems to me.
The Essentials: Conductor Kevin John Edusei makes his St. Louis Symphony Orchestra debut in a program of Béla Bartók’s Dance Suite, Sergei Rachmaninoff’s Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini, and Ludwig van Beethoven’s Symphony No. 7. Joyce Yang will be the piano soloist. Performances are Saturday at 7:30 pm and Sunday at 3 PM, November 29 and 30.
The Saturday concert will be broadcast live on St. Louis Public Radio and on Classic 107.3. Classic 107.3 is also where you can hear Tom Sudholt and I host the Symphony Preview episode about the concert on Wednesday, November 26, from 8 to 10 pm. It will also be available for streaming beginning on Thanksgiving Day.
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