This weekend (December 5 and 6), the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra (SLSO) concerts will have a familiar face at the podium and a brand new one in the solo spot. John Storgårds, a frequent guest at Powell Hall (his most recent appearance was last April), conducts the orchestra in music by Dimitri Shostakovich (1906–1975) and the local premiere of music by Clara Schumann (1819–1896). Cellist Kian Soltani, in his local debut, joins the orchestra for the Cello Concerto in C major by Franz Joseph Haydn (1732–1809)
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| Violinist Joseph Joachim and pianist Clara Schumann. Reproduction of pastel drawing (now lost). By Adolph von Menzel Deutsche Fotothek, Public Domain |
The program is a study in contrasts. The Schumann and Haydn works are generally light and engaging while the Shostakovich is dark and enigmatic. Allow me to elaborate.
The Clara Schumann piece that opens the concerts is her Three Romances, Op. 22, in an orchestral transcription by contemporary Danish composer Benjamin de Murashkin (b. 1981). Originally scored for violin and piano, the Romances were written in 1852 and 1853 and first performed by Clara and Joseph Joachim, a celebrated violinist and close family friend.
Although melodically appealing and suffused with what husband Robert called leichtigkeit (literally “lightness,” with a sense of ease and gentleness), the Romances were among the last things Clara published. In 1854 Robert was confined in a mental asylum, and he would die there two years later. After his death, Clara effectively abandoned composition altogether. “It was,” notes pianist Isata Kanneh-Mason, “as if her creative fire disappeared in the tragedy of her bereavement and the demands of looking after her family during the years that followed.”
What we’ll hear this weekend is not the original version for violin and piano but rather (as noted previously) an orchestral transcription first performed by Storgårds and the Copenhagen Philharmonic in November 2021. I described this as a “transcription” because, glancing at the sheet music, I have the sense that Murashkin has significantly transformed and expanded Clara Schumann’s original. Quoted in this weekend’s program notes, Murashkin described the result as “hopefully something that sounds like it was always ‘meant to be’ rather than orchestrated piano music.”
Meanwhile, you can listen to a masterful rendition of the original by Joseph Silverstein, the former concertmaster of the Boston Symphony, accompanied by pianist Veronika Juchum, the daughter of conductor Eugen Jochum. Tom Sudholt, my co-host for Symphony Preview on Classic 107.3, picked this recording for our December 3rd broadcast, and it’s a winner.
Concluding the first half of the concerts will be Haydn’s C major Cello Concerto, Hob. VIIb/1 ("Hob." refers to the definitive catalog of over 750 Haydn works by Dutch collector and musicologist Anthony von Hoboken). It's an early work, written somewhere around 1761–1765 (when Haydn was in his 30s) and apparently intended for Haydn's friend Joseph Franz Weigl, who was the principal cellist of Prince Nicolaus's Esterházy Orchestra at the time. Judging from the difficulty of the solo part, Weigl must have been quite the virtuoso. He might also have been the only cello in the ensemble since the score has (depending on the edition) only one cello line, marked either "solo" or "tutti" ("all," indicating the orchestral part).
It is, in any event, something of a bridge between the traditional Baroque concerto, with solos alternating with ritornello passages and not much in the way of thematic development, and the more harmonically complex concertos of Mozart.
The concerto was considered lost until 1961, when a copy turned up in the Prague National Museum. The first-ever performance took place in May of the following year, with cellist Milos Shuttle and the Czechoslovak Radio Symphony, conducted by Charles (later Sir Charles) Mackerras. The world premiere recording came in 1964 by the impressive duo of Mstislav Rostropovich and Benjamin Britten with the English Chamber Orchestra. It has since gone on to become one of Haydn’s most popular concertos, performed by a veritable laundry list of notable cellists. That includes Yo-Yo Ma, who was the soloist for the most recent SLSO performance in 2013.
The concerts conclude with Shostakovich’s enigmatic and profoundly odd Symphony No. 15 in A major, Op. 141. Written while the composer was hospitalized in 1971 (he would die of lung cancer four years later) and later completed at his home, it's a mordant and cryptic work by a composer noted for his elusiveness. As Tom Service wrote in a 2013 article for The Guardian:
Every bar of the piece demands a variation on the same simple but utterly profound question: what does it all mean? What is that chirruping little tune at the start of the symphony about? Why does Shostakovich quote from Rossini's William Tell in the first movement, from Wagner's Tristan und Isolde and Ring cycle in its last movement?... And why, as Shostakovich surely knew this would be his last symphony when he was writing it, does the piece scrupulously avoid any trace of the bombast and boisterousness of his earlier symphonies?
It is certainly an odd work. The Allegretto first movement, according to the composer (in a 1973 interview on Chicago classical station WFMT), “is as if played in a toy store,” which might explain the fanciful opening and the recurring quote from William Tell. The solemn second movement, Adagio, alternates brass and string chorales with solo instrumental passages. A brief, sardonic Allegretto follows before the descent into the finale (Adagio – Allegretto) with its quotes from Wagner—the “fate” motive from the Ring cycle and the unsettling opening motif from Tristan und Isolde—and a final, anguished orchestral outburst.
In the end, the symphony fades out with clicking percussion and a sad little chord on glockenspiel and celesta over a string pedal point. Is this, as Paul Schiavo writes in the program notes, “the last movements of some mechanical doll before it winds down”? Or is it, as Tom Service wrote in the Guardian article “the faceless whirring and bleeping that are the grim accompaniments of disease, decline, and death in medical institutions”? No questions are answered and it's not clear whether the music is grinning or grimacing.
“It’s one of those works that just completely carried me away,” the composer said in a 1973 interview, “and maybe even one of my few compositions that seemed completely clear to me from the first note to the last. All that I needed was the time to write it down.” And yet critical responses have been all over the map.
In The Joy of Music, Leonard Bernstein suggested that the meaning of a great work of music can’t always be expressed properly in words. I can’t disagree. The Symphony No. 15 makes sense to me, but I can’t verbalize exactly why. Because if words were really adequate to describe this piece, we wouldn't need the music.
The Essentials: John Storgårds conducts the SLSO and cellist Kian Soltani in Haydn’s Cello Concerto in D major. The program includes Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 15 and the St. Louis premiere of the Three Romances by Clara Wieck Schumann (orchestrated by Benjamin de Murashkin). Performances are Friday at 10:30 a.m. and Saturday at 7:30 p.m., December 5 and 6.
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 me host the Symphony Preview episode about the concert. It was originally broadcast Wednesday, December 3, and can be streamed for a limited time at Classic 107.3.
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