Symphony Preview: New worlds, new sounds

The regular concert season of the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra (SLSO)  resumes on this Friday and Saturday (January 10 and 11) as Opera Theatre’s Principal Conductor Daniela Candillari leads the orchestra in music by Dvořák and Samuel Barber, along with the world premiere of the Accordion Concerto by composer and multi-instrumentalist Nina Shekhar with Hanzhi Wang as the soloist.  The fact that this program is accurately titled “American sounds” tells you a lot about our nation's musical diversity.

[Preview the music with my Spotify playlist.]

The concerts open with the “School for Scandal,” composed by Samuel Barber (1910–1981) at the ripe old age of 21 (and finally performed two years later), when the composer was still a student at the Curtis Institute. Along with his 1935 “Music for a Scene from Shelley,” the overture established his reputation as an exponent of music that was “distinctive and modern but not experimental.”

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

If you’re not familiar with the 1777 Sheridan comedy that inspired the music, fear not; the overture is an entertaining mix of sprightly and romantic themes that’s perfectly capable of standing on its own. Barber described it as “a musical reflection of the play’s spirit,” which is a mix of social satire, romantic misfires, and mistaken identities typical of late 18^th-century British comedies. The Encyclopedia Britannica has a plot summary for those interested.

Next, it’s the world premiere of the Accordion Concerto by contemporary American composer Nina Shekhar (b. 1995). Commissioned for accordionist (and this weekend’s soloist) Hanzhi Wang by Young Concert Artists and The St. Louis Symphony Orchestra, the work runs around 23 minutes. “Writing this concerto,” says the composer, “was an exciting opportunity to learn more about this amazing instrument and allow its unique sound world and extensive technical capability to enrich my own musical vocabulary.”

To me, that vocabulary looks fairly rich already. Her official biography describes her as “a composer and multimedia artist who explores the intersection of identity, vulnerability, love, and laughter to create bold and intensely personal works.” A quick glance at her past projects reveals an artist with a wide range of interests and a willingness to embrace unorthodox techniques.

To pick just one example, her “Mad Libs,” commissioned by the Los Angeles Philharmonic Youth Orchestra, adapts the “fill in the blanks” format of the vintage party game of the same name. The performers were given short stories and musical settings that contain “blanks.”  The students then filled in the story blanks with words of their choosing and came up with sounds that represented those words. 

Nina Shekhar
Photo: Shervin Laniez

Closer to home, her “Turn Your Feet Around” (2021), written for the new music group Alarm Will Sound and the Mizzou International Composers Festival (where the group is the ensemble in residence), deconstructs Gloria Estefan’s “Get on Your Feet.” Check out the video and don’t let yourself be fooled by the unexpected uses of silence.

Closing the concerts is the Symphony No. 9 in E minor, op. 95, (“From the New World”) by Antonín Dvořák. The Czech master wrote it during a visit to America in the early 1890s, and while he never explicitly quotes any American folk material, there's still something about this music that strongly suggests America. From the flute theme in the first movement that seems to echo "Swing Low, Sweet Chariot," to the second movement Largo that has (at least for me) always evoked the majestic solitude of the plains (Dvořák said he wrote it after reading Longfellow's "Hiawatha"), to the "bluesy" flatted seventh chords of the finale, Dvořák "New World" symphony just shouts "USA"—even if it does so with a strong Czech accent.

Some critics have complained about the symphony's structural weaknesses and its episodic nature.  In an essay published posthumously in "The Symphony" (Penguin Books, 1967), English composer/conductor Julius Harrison noted that the work "has come in for considerable criticism as being mainly a succession of enchanting and virile tunes…presided over or helped out by a strongly rhythmic phrase bundled into each movement whenever Dvořák found himself wondering how best to proceed."

Anton and Anna Dvořák in London, 1886
en.wikipedia.org

I beg to differ. As conductor Joshua Wallerstein pointed out in the episode of his “Sticky Notes” podcast dedicated to the Ninth, that “strongly rhythmic phrase” is not just something tossed in whenever Dvorak wasn’t sure what to do. In combination with the pentatonic scale on which it’s based, it is in fact the tiny acorn from which the mighty oak of the symphony grows. It's embedded in every single melodic idea (starting with the main theme of the first movement) and is the major unifying factor of the symphony. “[T]his piece is not only a heavily traditional symphony,” observes Wallerstein, “it’s practically through composed from its very first notes.”

Dvořák gets more respect than he used to these days. As a long-time fan of his music, I’m happy to see that.

P.S. This week’s playlist doesn’t have the Shekhar concerto since but it does have fine recordings of the Barber and Dvořák, both by the SLSO conducted by Leonard Slatkin.

The Essentials: Daniela Candillari conducts the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra Friday at 10:30 am and Saturday at 7:30 pm, January 10 and 11. The program consists of Samuel Barber’s “The School for Scandal” Overture, the world premiere of Nina Shekhar’s Accordion Concerto with soloist Hanzhi Wang, and the Symphony No. 9 in E minor, Op. 95 (“From the New World”). Performances take place at the Touhill Performing Arts Center on the University of Missouri St. Louis campus. The Saturday concert will be broadcast live on St. Louis Public Radio and Classic 107.3

UPDATE Friday, January 10th: Due to the cancellation of the Friday morning concert, a second performance has been added on Saturday the 11th at 10:30 am. Details at the SLSO web site.. Check the web site for details.

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

Review: Farewell Symphony

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

David Robertson

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In her program notes for the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra concerts this past weekend (May 4 - 6, 2018), René Spencer Saller quotes composer and jazz trumpet virtuoso Wynton Marsalis as describing the final, quiet moments of his "Swing Symphony" this way: "It's a wistful feeling; it's not sad, and it's not happy. It's a feeling of contentment, a quiet celebration. It's like the last breath you take: 'We did this. We had a good time.'"

He could easily have been describing the mood among many at Powell Hall on Sunday afternoon, when the quirky, fade-out trumpet solo that brought Mr. Marsalis's piece to an end also brought to an end David Robertson's tenure as Music Director of the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra. I have no doubt that Mr. Robertson will return as a guest conductor at some point (as Leonard Slatkin continues to do), but these were the last notes of the last concert he will ever conduct as the orchestra's leader. The champagne toast to Mr. Robertson in the lobby at intermission had a celebratory air, but overall it was hard for me to ignore the fact that this marked the end of an era.

That era was marked by, among other things, a cheerful and well-considered advocacy for newer works in general and American music in particular. It seems only appropriate, then, that the program consisted entirely of American music composed since World War II, beginning with a nicely shaded performance of the "Three Dance Episodes" from Leonard Bernstein's wartime musical "On the Town." The final dance, "Times Square: 1944" had an especially nice swing and a cheerfully raucous trumpet solo by Associate Principal Thomas Drake.

Up next was another Bernstein composition, the "Prelude, Fugues, and Riffs" for clarinet and jazz band. It was written in 1949 for the Woody Herman combo, but the band broke up before the piece could be performed. The work didn't see the light of day in its final form until October 16, 1955, as part of an episode for the cultural television show Omnibus, to which Bernstein was a frequent contributor. It's a piece that crackles with energy, from the driving brass and percussion opening to the concluding "Riffs" section with its wild, keening clarinet solo.

Scott Andrews

SLSO Principal Clarinet had the solo spot this weekend, accompanied by guest instrumental ensemble the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra with Wynton Marsalis on lead trumpet and the SLSO's Gerard Pagano on bass trombone. If there were any doubts as to whether a classically trained musician could but lose and "wail," Mr. Andrews's ecstatic performance surely put them to rest.

The concerts concluded with Mr. Marsalis's "Swing Symphony" (officially his Symphony No. 3), first performed by Simon Rattle and the Berlin Philharmonic in 2010. With seven movements and a running time of over an hour, it's an big work that encompasses, as Ms. Saller points out in her notes, "a whirlwind tour of jazz history, moving from ragtime to big band, bebop, hard bop, Afro-Cuban mambo, and the modal experiments of Miles Davis and John Coltrane." I'd add that there is also, in the penultimate "Think Space: Theory" movement, a nod to the jazz/classical fusion that Gunther Schuller called "third stream jazz" in the late 1950s in the form of a complex jazz fugue.

That's an ambitious undertaking made even more so by the fact that it's cast as a kind of modern version of the Baroque concerto grosso, with the larger ensemble (the full orchestra) set against the smaller solo group (the Lincoln Center jazz band). Unfortunately, the size of the Powell Hall stage made it impossible to clearly separate the two groups. The jazz band was surrounded on all three sides by the orchestra, which made it hard to clearly hear the differences between the two, at least from our seats in the Dress Circle.

Wynton Marsalis

Still, there is much that's powerful and ingenious in this work. The first movement, "St. Louis to New Orleans," moves seamlessly from the sounds of ragtime to low-down blues, while the "All-American Pep" movement that follows is a wonderfully hallucinatory tribute to 1920s jazz. "Midwestern Moods" is a driving tribute to the Kansas City style big band sound (described by Mr. Robertson as "eight beats to the bar and no cheating"), "Manhattan to L.A" evokes the infectious sounds of Latin jazz, and "Modern Modes and the Midnight Moan" includes a brilliantly manic trumpet solo by Mr. Marsalis, along with a final section that vividly evokes a smoky, late night club. The classical fusion sounds of "Think Space: Theory" act as a bridge to the final movement, "The Low Down Up on High," with its echoes of Afro-American sacred music and a final, oddly unresolved trumpet solo that fades out into breathy silence.

It's a vivid sonic tapestry, in short, with some especially inventive writing for the jazz band (I don't think have ever seen such a wide variety of mutes in a brass section, for one thing). The structure of the work is, perhaps, a bit too episodic for its length, but on the whole it was a great pleasure to hear it.

The "Swing Symphony" bristles with great solo moments for both the jazz band and orchestral musicians, and they got bravura performances from everyone when we heard the work on Sunday afternoon, under Mr. Robertson's deeply committed and well-paced direction. The packed house responded with multiple standing ovations for Mr. Robertson, Mr. Marsalis, and the musicians. As valedictory appearances go, it was unbeatable.

We did this. We had a good time.

This past weekend's concerts concluded the SLSO regular subscription season, but special events continue at Powell Hall throughout May and June, beginning with a showing of the classic musical film "An American in Paris" this coming Saturday and Sunday, May 12 and 13, 2018. The orchestra will perform the score live under the direction of Norman Huynh. The regular season resumes in September.

Review: The St. Louis Symphony's all-American program is even better the second time around

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

Violinist Gil Shaham

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If this past weekend's St. Louis Symphony Orchestra program (January 14 and 15, 2017) provoked a strong sense of déjà vu in the audience, it's because the orchestra presented a nearly identical program three years ago.  The two major works—Erich Wolfgang Korngold's Violin Concerto and Dvořák's New World symphony—were the same, as were the conductor (David Robertson) and the soloist (Gil Shaham).

The only difference, in fact, was in the short opening work.  Three years ago it was Ingram Marshall's Bright Kingdom.  This time around it was The Chairman Dances, Foxtrot for Orchestra by John Adams.  But that was familiar as well, having last been performed by the orchestra under Mr. Robertson in the fall of 2013.  Even Gil Shaham's unlisted encore was the same: Schön Rosmarin, Fritz Kreisler's pastiche of the waltzes of Joseph Lanner.

For some background on the music itself, check out my symphony preview article.  For my thoughts on the performances, read on.

So how much has changed over the years?  Looking back at my original review of the Korngold and the Dvořák, I'd say the short answer is "not much." 

Mr. Shaham is as thoroughly in command of this music as he was the last time he played it here, with a singing tone and a real and obvious joy in his performance.  He flew through the virtuoso fireworks of the first and third movements easily and brought out all the yearning of the second movement Romance.  Back in 2014, I commented that Mr. Shaham was sometimes swamped by the orchestra, but I didn’t hear such balance problems this time around—probably because I was seated on the orchestra floor as opposed to the dress circle.  In Powell Hall, location can be everything when it comes to vocal and instrumental soloists.

In an interview during the intermission of Saturday night's broadcast of the concert, Mr. Robertson noted that, although the concerto is scored for a large, late-romantic orchestra, performing it requires the kind of intimate give and take between the soloist and the ensemble that is more characteristic of chamber music—and which makes each performance a unique event.  You could see that in the close communication between Mr. Shaham and Mr. Robertson when we attended the concert on Sunday afternoon.  They were physically close as well, with Mr. Shaham sometimes playing very close to the podium.

They were, in short, a joy to see and hear.

Three years ago, I dubbed Mr. Robertson's Dvořák 9^th a "world class" interpretation, and I'm just as enthusiastic this time around.  His approach has, if anything, gotten even more nuanced and refined over the last few years, with wonderful little details that I don't recall hearing in 2014.  The profound hush of the transition to the second subject in the Largo second movement is a good example, as are the many subtle shadings he brought to the exuberant Scherzo third movement.

The orchestra played very well, some issues in the horns not withstanding, and all the important solo passages were sheer perfection.  That includes the flute passages in the first movement by Mark Sparks and Jennifer Nichtman, Scott Andrews’s fine clarinet work in the fourth movement, and Cally Banham's plaintive rendition of The Most Famous English Horn Solo in the World in the Largo.

As for The Chairman Dances, Mr. Robertson and his forces brought out the whimsy in this odd little number, which was cut from the 1987 opera Nixon in China.  It was originally intended to accompany a surrealistic scene in which a painting of Chairman Mao comes to life and dances with his widow during a state dinner. 

There's a kind of quirky nostalgia to the music, which rises to a big orchestral climax before slowly fading out to the sounds of woodblock and sandpaper, as though Mao were doing a soft shoe number as he fades away.  It's rhythmically tricky stuff, and the percussion section—including Peter Henderson on piano—did a fine job with it.

The concerts concluded with another unlisted encore, the original version of the lively and tune-filled overture to Leonard Bernstein's often-revised 1956 operetta Candide.  The piece seems to be a favorite of Mr. Robertson's, and he and the band gave it a cheerfully unbuttoned (but still precise) reading.

The orchestra is taking this weekend's program on its road trip to Spain next month, with performances in Valencia, Madrid, and Oviedo.  If what we heard Sunday is any indication, they'll represent both our town and our nation well. 

I also have to say that, given the poisonous nature of our current political climate, it's good to see that while all the works on this program were written on these shores, three of the five composers represented were born elsewhere.  And two of them were immigrants fleeing fascism.  It's a reminder that America has always been a far more heterogeneous nation than some people want to admit.

The regular symphony season continues next weekend as Andrey Boreyko conducts the orchestra and pianist Till Fellner in Shostakovich's eccentric Symphony No. 15 and Beethoven's Piano Concerto No. 2.  Performances are Friday at 10:30 a.m. and Saturday at 8 p.m., January 20 and 21; visit the SLSO web site for details and information on the Spain tour.

Preview: Made in America, the St. Louis Symphony season resumes

The St. Louis Symphony Orchestra resumes its regular concert series this weekend (Saturday and Sunday, January 14 and 15) with a preview of the repertoire for its tour of Spain, which consists of appearances in Valencia on February 8, Madrid on February 9 and 10, and Oviedo on February 11. All three works on the program were written here in the USA, although only one of them is actually the work of an American composer.

John Adams

That native-born American is John Adams, whose "The Chairman Dances, Foxtrot for Orchestra" opens the concerts. Written for but eventually dropped from his groundbreaking 1987 opera Nixon in China, this short (around 12 minutes) piece was intended to accompany a surrealistic scene in which a painting of Chairman Mao comes to life and dances with his widow during a state dinner. It has since had an independent life of its own and is probably one of the composer's most commonly heard short works, right up there with his "Short Ride in a Fast Machine" from 1986.

Up next is Erich Wolfgang Korngold's Violin Concerto in D major, op. 35, which first saw the light of day right here in Mound City back in 1947. Jascha Heifetz was the soloist, and on the podium was the French-American conductor Vladimir Golschmann. Golschmann was music director of the SLSO from 1931 to 1958 (the longest-reigning SLSO music director to date) and made a number of recordings with the orchestra.

Korngold's name will be familiar to classic film fans. Born in Moravia in 1897, Korngold was a child prodigy hailed as a "musical genius" by Gustav Mahler. He composed his first ballet at age 11 and his most famous opera, Die tote Stadt, at 23. In 1934 director Max Reinhardt enticed Korngold to Hollywood to write the music for his lavish film version of A Midsummer Night's Dream (well worth seeing, despite the many cuts in Shakespeare's text). He returned to Austria, but was drawn back to California in 1938 to write the score for The Adventures of Robin Hood. While he was there, Hitler's Anschluss of Austria took place, and Korngold became an émigré ("We thought of ourselves as Viennese," he would recall later. "Hitler made us Jewish.")

Erich Wolfgang Korngold

Even if you didn't know Korngold was a film composer, you could guess it by the lush romantic sound of this music. You might also recognize some of the themes since Korngold, like many other notable composers throughout history, was not shy about recycling his own musical material. In this case, he repurposed melodies from the films Juarez (1939), Anthony Adverse (1936), Another Dawn (1937), and—in the lively finale—The Prince and the Pauper (1937). It's flashy stuff and should fit nicely under the hands of soloist Gil Shaham (Mr. Robertson's brother-in-law), who did such an impressive job with it the last time he performed the concerto with Mr. Robertson and the SLSO in 2014.

Closing the concerts is the Symphony No. 9 in E minor, op. 95, (“From the New World”) by Antonín Dvořák. The Czech master wrote it during a visit to America in the early 1890s, and while he never explicitly quotes any American folk material, there's still something about this music that strongly suggests America. From the flute theme in the first movement that seems to echo "Swing Low, Sweet Chariot," to the second movement Largo that has (at least for me) always evoked the majestic solitude of the plains (Dvořák said he wrote it after reading Longfellow's "Hiawatha"), to the "bluesy" flatted seventh chords of the finale, Dvořák "New World" symphony just shouts "USA"—even if it does so with a strong Czech accent.

Some critics have complained of the symphony's structural weaknesses and its episodic nature. In his book Nineteenth-Century Romanticism in Music, for example, British musicologist Rey M. Longyear disses the composer's "labored attempts" at cyclic form and dismisses it as "one of [Dvořák's] weaker works."

Dvořák with his friends and family
in New York

English composer/conductor Julius Harrison, on the other hand, had a more balanced view in an essay published posthumously in The Symphony (Penguin Books, 1967). He acknowledged that the symphony "has come in for considerable criticism as being mainly a succession of enchanting and virile tunes loosely strung together in patchwork style, presided over or helped out by a strongly rhythmic phrase bundled into each movement whenever Dvořák found himself wondering how best to proceed." But he then went on to note that "only a cynic can be deaf to the call of this warm-blooded music, so spontaneous it all sounds even in its moments of calculated joinery… The symphony was in fact a heartfelt greeting from the New World to [Dvořák's] friends parted from him by circumstances and the ocean."

I couldn't agree more. This tremendously appealing piece is one of the first classical works I ever encountered, and I've never lost my affection for it. If you've never heard it before, I'll bet it will strike you the same way.

The Essentials: David Robertson conducts the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra and violin soloist Gil Shaham on Saturday at 8 p.m. and Sunday at 3 p.m., January 14 and 15. The concert takes place at Powell Symphony Hall, 718 North Grand in Grand Center. For more information: stlsymphony.org.

Review: A celebration of musical diversity at the St. Louis Symphony

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

Leonard Slatkin

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Last Saturday, November 12, former music director Leonard Slatkin conducted the St. Louis Symphony in a highly entertaining program of works by American composers. Ironically, given the outcome of our recent election, the evening was a celebration of our nation's diversity, with music informed by African-American and Jewish-American culture, as well as two major works by gay composers: Samuel Barber's Piano Concerto and Aaron Copland's Billy the Kid ballet suite.

Commissioned in 1959 by the piano manufacturer G. Schirmer as a vehicle for John Browning, the Barber concerto is heavily influenced by the big, muscular sound for which the late American pianist was famous. Resplendent in a shimmering turquoise gown, soloist Elizabeth Joy Roe -- a late substitute for the scheduled Olga Kern -- proved to be more than equal to the work's technical challenges, tearing the place up with a display of steely power that belied her diminutive appearance. You could hear that most obviously in her pristine rendering of the fire hose of notes that Barber pours out in the first movement cadenzas, as well as in the rapid-fire virtuoso flourishes of the last movement.

In a review for Classical Source, Colin Anderson called Ms. Roe's recording of the Barber concerto last year with the London Symphony "full of power and crusade and with no shortage of subtlety." I couldn't agree more. Her encore, a Rachmaninoff-esque arrangement of Gershwin's "The Man I Love," was an ideal choice, melding virtuosity to lyricism. This was a very promising local debut for the young Chicago-born pianist. I hope to see more of her here in the future.

Mr. Slatkin and the orchestra haven't played the concerto since 1992, when Mr. Browning was the soloist, but they sounded entirely comfortable with it Saturday night.

The second half of the concert opened with the suite from the 1938 ballet Billy the Kid by our second gay composer, Aaron Copland. Composed to a scenario by Lincoln Kirsten for Ballet Caravan, Billy the Kid was the first of Copland's two "cowboy" ballets (the other one is the popular Rodeo) and the first major work to display the popular "open" sound that would come to characterize his most often-played pieces.

Elizabeth Joy Roe

Mr. Slatkin and the SLSO recorded the entire ballet for EMI back in 1985, and it was interesting to compare the two performances. His tempi are more brisk than they were back then, but otherwise the grandeur, drama, and the flashes of droll humor in the score came through with the same clarity. The orchestra sounded great in the many solo and small ensemble moments Copland sprinkles throughout the work, and the percussion section deserves a shout-out for the "Gun Battle" sequence.

The concerts closed with Porgy and Bess: A Symphonic Picture for Orchestra by the noted composer and arranger Robert Russell Bennett. It's a work featuring African-American musical ideas translated for the stage by a Jewish-American composer and then arranged by a native Missourian who would go on to work with some of the biggest names in Broadway and Hollywood -- a quintessential example our nation's rich, multicultural heritage.

Bennett includes pretty much all of the "greatest hits" from Gershwin's original score, although the fact that they're out of sequence can feel a bit disconcerting if you know the opera well. Still, he intelligently expands on Gershwin's orchestrations while still respecting the composer's intent, and Mr. Slatkin conducted the musicians in a smartly turned out performance that did full justice to all of Gershwin's and Bennett's colors.

There was excellent work here by Cally Banham on English horn and Karin Bliznik on offstage trumpet in the opening sequence, and by the four additional sax players in the grand seduction of "There's A Boat that's Leavin' Soon for New York." "It Ain't Necessarily So" had real sinuous ease, "Bess, You Is My Woman Now" had true heart and soul, and the finale ("Lord, I'm on My Way") had the same mix of triumph and tragedy as the operatic original. I still love Gershwin's own Catfish Row suite, but Mr. Slatkin and the SLSO musicians made a fine case for the Bennett suite as well.

Mr. Slatkin followed the Gershwin up with an unexpected encore: an American folk music pastiche by his father, Felix Slatkin, titled "Devil's Dream." The original is from the 1962 LP Hoedown! The Fantastic Fiddles of Felix Slatkin that I still remember with fondness (it includes a truly memorable "Orange Blossom Special"). All of the original arrangements have been lost, but Leonard Slatkin's wife, composer Cindy McTee, has been painstakingly reconstructing them from the master recordings. If "Devil's Dream" was any indication, she's doing one hell of a job.

Speaking of Felix Slatkin, the concerts open with Kinah (Hebrew for "elegy") written by Leonard Slatkin and first performed by him last December with the Detroit Symphony, where he is currently Music Director. It's a memorial to his late father, who died at the tragically young age of 47 the day before he and his wife, the cellist Eleanor Aller, were scheduled to perform the Brahms Double Concerto in public for the first time.

Written in a style that is both obviously contemporary and deeply romantic, Kinah struck me, from the very first notes, with a sense of delicate beauty, longing, and loss. The work is based on a four-note motif drawn from the second movement of the Brahms concerto, but that actual passage isn't heard in its original form until the very end, after a vast wall of sound that could have come straight from the pen of Alan Hovhaness. In the ensuing hush, an offstage violin and cello try, but always fail, to complete the phrase, just as the elder Slatkin and Ms. Aller never completed their performance. It was profound and heartbreaking and beautifully done.

In an added personal touch, the offstage cellist was the man who played the part at the work's Detroit premiere, Mr. Slatkin's brother Frederick Zlotkin. The violinist was SLSO Associate Concertmaster Heidi Harris.

Next at Powell Hall: David Robertson conducts the orchestra and chorus with soloists Caitlin Lynch, soprano; Michelle DeYoung, mezzo-soprano; Nicholas Phan, tenor; and Kevin Thompson, bass in Mozart's Requiem and John Adam's On the Transmigration of Souls, along with The Unanswered Question by Charles Ives. Performances are Friday and Saturday at 8 p.m., and Sunday at 3 p.m., November 18-20, at Powell Hall in Grand Center.