Review: The natural way

Bramwell Tovey
Photo from bramwelltovey.com

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The weekend got off to a great start this morning (Friday, October 5th) as Bramwell Tovey conducted the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra in a pair of big 19th-century symphonies by Beethoven and Berlioz. The onstage energy was a nice complement to the coffee and Krispy Kreme doughnuts in the foyer.

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

The concert opened with Beethoven's Symphony No. 6 in F major, Op. 68 (the "Pastoral"), a work infused with the composer's love for nature. "How glad I am to be able to roam in wood and thicket, among the trees and flowers and rocks," he once wrote. "No one can love the country as I do." You can hear that love of the natural world everywhere in the sixth symphony: the imitation of birdsong in the second movement, the earthy peasant dance of the third, and the dramatic thunderstorm of the fourth. It's music that brims with love and good cheer.

It got a big, appealing, and beautifully thought-out performance from Mr. Tovey and the orchestra. There was just enough variety in the way individual phrases were shaped to give the music a nice sense of variety without ever engaging in exaggeration. Tempi were ideal, including (for example) a good, steady pulse in the Andante molto mosso second movement. "Andante" is often described as "at a walking pace," and it was easy to think of the composer strolling through the fields in this performance.

Mr. Tovey got outstanding performances from the musicians Friday morning. The strings sounded warm and solid and the woodwinds were at the top of their game. Thanks to Associate Principal Oboe Phil Ross, Principal Flute Mark Sparks, and clarinetists Scott Andrews and Benjamin Adler for those perky bird calls in the second movement.

Nature also plays a big role in the second work on the program, Berlioz's dramatic "Harold in Italy," Op. 16, for solo viola and orchestra. The "Harold" of the title is the protagonist in Lord Byron's epic poem "Childe Harold's Pilgrimage," a character who is, as Thomas May points out in his program notes for the SLSO, "a melancholy young man who wanders through the Mediterranean seeking escape from his disillusionment with life." He's represented by the viola, which wanders into and out of Berlioz's vivid musical canvas without ever really becoming part of it.

Beth Guterman Chu
Photo courtesy of St. Louis Symphony Orchestra

The soloist this weekend is SLSO Principal Viola Beth Guterman Chu who, according to her interview in the program, strongly identifies with the composer's depiction of Harold. "Harold is a dreamer," she observes. "He is melancholic, but also innocent. Playing the piece suits my musical temperament." I could certainly hear that sympathetic understanding of the character in her committed, virtuoso performance. While not flashy, the solo line nevertheless has significant technical challenges, which she overcame with apparent ease.

Mr. Tovey's interpretation brought out all the drama in this music. From the imposing musical mountains of the first movement to the wild abandon of the "Orgy of the Brigands" in the last, this was a performance of intense theatricality. Berlioz, an unapologetic man of the theatre himself, would undoubtedly have approved.

I think he might also have approved of Mr. Tovey's staging decisions. "Harold in Italy" isn't so much a viola concerto as a symphonic work in which the viola sometimes plays a prominent role. Rather than keep Ms. Chu on stage for the long stretches during which her instrument is silent, Mr. Tovey chose to have her enter, exit, and move across the stage according to her instrument's role in the music. The score directs the soloist to "stand in the fore-ground, near to the public and isolated from the orchestra" ("L'exeeutant doit étre place sur l'avant-scene, pres du public et isole de l'orchestre") but doesn't specify how to get there.

That could have been distracting or come across as a gimmick, but I thought it worked exceptionally well. In the first movement, for example, she was offstage until the viola's first appearance, at which point she entered stage right and, as directed in the score ("La Harpe doit étre placee pres de l' Alto solo"), stood next to harpist Allegra Lilly for their duet. In the second movement, for the sequence in which the viola plays ethereal glissandos against a plodding line in the basses (playing the role of marching pilgrims), Ms. Chu was far stage left, next to the basses. In both cases, the visual choices enhanced and clarified the music.

Besides, the composer himself was not averse to that sort of thing. The offstage string trio that accompanies the viola's final appearance in the finale, for example, was all his idea.

The Berlioz/Beethoven concert repeats Saturday night, October 6, at 8 pm, a performance which will also be broadcast live on St. Louis Public Radio. The on Sunday at 3 pm, Ben Whiteley conducts the orchestra, chorus, and vocal soloists in "A Celebration of Muny at 100." The concerts take place at Powell Hall in Grand Center.

Symphony Preview: A weekend in the country

"Beethoven's Walk in Nature" by Julius Schmid
By Michael Martin Sypniewski [Public domain]
via Wikimedia Commons

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It's a big musical weekend with the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra October 5-7, with two separate concerts. Friday and Saturday the orchestra performs Beethoven's Symphony No. 6 in F major, Op. 68 (the "Pastoral," composed in stages between 1802 and 1808) and Berlioz's dramatic "Harold in Italy" (1834), Op. 16, for solo viola and orchestra. Then Sunday the SLSO Chorus and vocal soloists join the orchestra for a 100th birthday tribute to the Muny.

There's probably not much I can tell you about the "Pastoral" that you don't already know, but I'll give it a try with a few possibly Fun Facts.

FF #1: The first performance of the Symphony No. 6 took place at a concert on December 22nd 1807 at Vienna's Theater an der Wien, with the composer as both soloist and conductor. It wasn't a huge success. The hall was freezing cold, the musicians poorly prepared, and the program was a four-hour monster, including the premieres of not only the Symphony No. 6 but also the Piano Concerto No. 4, the "Choral Fantasy" for piano, chorus, and orchestra (a work often seen as a kind of "first draft" for the finale of Beethoven's Symphony No. 9), and the Symphony No. 5. No record survives of what the lines at the toilets were like.

FF #2: As the program annotator for the City of London Philharmonia reminds us, Beethoven used the third movement to poke fun at inept rural musicians (something Mozart also does in his "Musical Joke"). "Beethoven knew the efforts of amateur country bands well and was rather amused at the way they played. In the third movement, entitled 'peasants' merrymaking', he makes the oboe come in on the wrong beat and the bassoonists contributions comically mechanical."

FF #3: Many of Beethoven's compositions have subtitles, and nearly all of them were tacked on after the fact by other people. Not so the Symphony No. 6. The full title Beethoven gave the work translates as "Pastoral Symphony, or Recollections of Country Life."

There's more background on the 6th in a symphony preview article I wrote for the SLSO's last performance of it back in 2015. Rather than repeat it all here, you can just check out the original post.

Berlioz in 1832
Painting by Émile Signol

Nature plays a big part in Berlioz's "Harold in Italy" as well. The "Harold" of the title is the protagonist in Lord Byron's "Childe Harold's Pilgrimage," an epic narrative poem published between 1812 and 1818. Harold is, as Thomas May points out in his program notes for the SLSO, "a melancholy young man who wanders through the Mediterranean seeking escape from his disillusionment with life," so it's not surprising that the highly romantic Berlioz found himself attracted to the character. As Peter Gutmann writes in an article for classicalnotes.net:

Berlioz must have closely identified with Byron's title character, a melancholy dreamer who visits and comments upon sites of classical antiquity in search of meaning to counter his own world-weary disillusionment. Although Berlioz desperately had sought the Prix de Rome, once he got to Rome he wrote in his Mémoires that his life there was "a continual martyrdom"...His boredom soon turned to wanderlust, as he fled his residency to wander the Italian countryside, gathering impressions, dreams and inspirations that would infuse his new work.

The structure of "Harold in Italy" is fairly straightforward, with four movements that correspond to those of the traditional 19th-century symphony. Berlioz described the work as "Symphonie en quatre parties avec un alto principal" ("Symphony in Four Parts with Viola Obbligato") rather than a concerto and, in fact, the viola isn't so much a standout soloist as a partner with the orchestra. That's why the great virtuoso Niccolò Paganini, who originally asked Berlioz to write the work for him, rejected it when he got a look at a first draft and realized how often the violist wasn't playing.

Like his more popular "Symphonie Fantastique," Berlioz's "Harold in Italy" has an idée fixe--a recurring theme that's associated with Harold and which pops up repeatedly throughout the piece. In the "Symphonie Fantastique" the theme changes with the character of each movement. In "Harold," though, the theme remains (to quote Mr. Gutmann) "a fixed point of reference for the changing scenes through which the hero passes, coloring them with his poetic awareness, exuberance, introspection and anxiety."

Here's what Harold's theme looks like when we first hear it, after a long orchestral introduction:

Image from classicalnotes.net

Trivia point: yes, that's neither the familiar bass nor treble clef but rather the alto clef. Unless you have played the viola at some point in your life (which I once attempted, without much success), you've probably never seen it before. And probably never will again.

Playing that alto clef music will be SLSO Principal Viola Beth Guterman Chu. When the symphony's board polled the musicians about works they'd like to see on the 2018/2019 season, a number of them suggested both "Harold in Italy" and Ms. Chu as the soloist. I'm told she was very pleased and touched by the tribute from her fellow musicians.

Conducting Ms. Chu and the orchestra will be Bramwell Tovey, last seen here back in February when he conducted a highly theatrical version of Orff's "Carmina Burana" and a moving "Chichester Psalms" (Leonard Bernstein). A composer as well as a conductor, Mr. Tovey is the Principal Conductor of the B.B.C. Concert Orchestra and Music Director Emeritus of the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra where he was formerly music director from 2000 to 2018. As of last month, he is also Artistic Advisor of the Rhode Island Philharmonic.

Image credit: St. Louis Symphony Orchestra

The final program for Sunday's Muny birthday party will be announced from the stage on Sunday afternoon. The SLSO press release, however, promises selections from "Annie Get Your Gun" (Irving Berlin), "Girl Crazy" (George and Ira Gershwin), "Show Boat" (Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein II), and "The Pirates of Penzance" (Gilbert and Sullivan; huzzah!) as well as tunes from lesser-known musicals like "Eileen" (Victor Herbert), "The Desert Song" (Sigmund Romberg), "Of Thee I Sing" (George and Ira Gershwin; the first American musical to win the Pulitzer Prize for Drama) "The Student Prince" (Romberg again), and "Sweet Adeline" (Kern and Hammerstein).

Yes, I know: some of these are actually operettas rather than musicals, but let's not be picky.

Joining the orchestra and chorus will be vocal soloists Justin Michael Austin, Daniel Berryman, Keith Boyer, Cree Carrico, Debby Lennon, Elizabeth Stanley, and Phil Touchette, who will perform favorites by Cole Porter, George Gershwin, Jerome Kern, Victor Herbert, and others. Ben Whiteley conducts.

The Essentials: Bramwell Tovey conducts The St. Louis Symphony Orchestra and viola soloist Beth Guterman Chu Friday at 10:30 am and Saturday at 8 pm, October 5 and 6. The program consists of Beethoven's Symphony No. 6 ("Pastoral") and Berlioz's "Harold in Italy." Then Ben Whiteley conducts the orchestra, chorus, and vocal soloists in "A Celebration of Muny at 100" on Sunday, October 7, at 3 pm. The concerts take place at Powell Hall in Grand Center.

Symphony Review: Sunshine and shadow with Mozart and Shostakovich

Hannu Lintu

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Who: The St. Louis Symphony Orchestra conducted by Hannu Lintu
What: Music of Mozart and Shostakovich
Where: Powell Symphony Hall, St. Louis
When: April 10 and 11, 2015

[Find out more about the music with the SLSO program notes and my symphony preview.]

There was something vaguely disconcerting about leaving Powell Hall Friday morning after hearing the SLSO and guest conductor Hannu Lintu perform Shostakovich's harrowing 1943 "Symphony No. 8" in C minor. Walking out into that bright spring morning was a bit like suddenly waking up from a nightmare. For just a moment, the light seemed a little dimmer.

The eighth symphony is the kind of thing that prompted British critic Robert Layton to somewhat dismissively label Shostakovich a "documentary composer, far more bound up with this time" than some of his contemporaries. He wasn't entirely wrong. Certainly understanding the twin horrors of Hitler and Stalin that lie behind the scarred face of this work can enhance one's appreciation of it. In Russian musicologist Solomon Volkov's 1979 "Testimony," allegedly based on Shostakovich's memoirs, the composer is quoted as saying: "I feel eternal pain for those who were killed by Hitler, but I feel no less pain for those killed on Stalin's orders... That is what my symphonies are about, including Number Eight." But I think the Shostakovich Eighth is no more inextricably bound up with World War II than the Beethoven "Eroica" is with the Napoleonic wars.

Jonathan Chu
stlsymphony.org

In any case, Mr. Lintu and the orchestra gave us an awfully good account of the music Friday morning. This was a beautifully and precisely calibrated performance that honored the composer's every intention. Mr. Lintu is, as I have noted before, a commanding and visually compelling figure on the podium. His big gestures are striking, but he can also coax delicate sounds with a minimum of physical display. He displays, in short, a nearly ideal mixture of romantic intensity and intellectual control—a winning combination for a work as complex as this one.

The gradually building tension of the long first movement was handled just right, so that the shattering climax and violent, mechanistic parody of a march that come about halfway through had maximum impact. The Allegretto second movement, which combines a march with a slightly demented dance, had a nice sarcastic edge.

The Allegro Non Troppo third movement is essentially "perpetual motion" music from Hell driven by what Mark Wigglesworth calls a "machine-like ostinato." It came across as appropriately driven without sounding frantic. The trumpets and trombones executed the weird little "oom-pah" dance interlude towards the end with impressive precision.

Strong dynamic contrasts underscored the despair of the fourth movement passacaglia, and the fifth movement's slow journey towards the light was beautifully paced. The final, luminous measures on flutes and strings were breathtakingly lovely. Mr. Lintu gave it a good ten count before lowering his baton at the end, so we could all appreciate the silence.

Beth Guterman Chu
stlsymphony.org

Although scored for a massive orchestra (around ninety players), the Shostakovich Eighth is filled with solo and small ensemble passages that put all of the principal players in the spotlight at some point. Mr. Lintu gave them all a chance to stand at the end and they all deserved it. I was especially impressed by the horns this time around—Shostakovich often drives them up to the top of their register—but the truth is everyone played flawlessly.

The concert opened with the "Sinfonia concertante" in E-flat major for Violin, Viola, and Orchestra, K. 364, by Mozart—music so different it might as well be from another planet. Conducting without a baton and gracefully sculpting phrases from the air, Mr. Lintu gave us another finely tuned and classically balanced reading.

The soloists—both members of the SLSO string section—were the wife and husband team of Beth Guterman Chu on viola and Jonathan Chu on violin. As you might expect, their playing had the special kind of warmth and camaraderie that come from musicians who know each other well and anticipate each other's moves. They seemed to be having a wonderful time, which meant that we in the audience did as well.

Next at Powell Hall: Vasily Petrenko conducts Scriabin's "Symphony No. 3" and Rachmaninoff's "Piano Concerto No. 3" and with soloist Simon Trpceski on Friday and Saturday, April 17 and 18, at 8 p.m. For more information: stlsymphony.org.

Symphony Preview: Mozart and Shostakovich offer stark contrasts at the SLSO Friday and Saturday, April 10 and 11, 2015

Dmitri Shostakovich
shostakovich.hilwin.nl

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In the introduction to his chapter on Shostakovich in the 1967 Penguin Books edition of "The Symphony," British musicologist Robert Layton described the Russian symphonist somewhat dismissively as a "documentary composer, far more bound up with this time than...Prokofiev, or any other of his Soviet contemporaries."

That's probably not the prevailing view of Shostakovich these days, but I do think that a full appreciation of his "Symphony No. 8 C minor," op. 65, which the SLSO is performing this weekend, requires some understanding of the time and place of its origin.

Shostakovich wrote the work in a little over two months, during the summer of 1943 (although he probably had it sketched out in his head long before that). It was a time when the tide of the war was turning against Germany. Leningrad was still under siege but the Germans had been defeated at Stalingrad earlier that year, and the overall mood was more optimistic. Official composers were expected to reflect that in their music.

But Shostakovich was unable to comply. Yes, he was glad to see the Nazis lose, but he could take no joy in seeing Stalin win. He recalled all to clearly the Soviet dictator's reign of terror. In Russian musicologist Solomon Volkov's 1979 "Testimony," allegedly based on Shostakovich's memoirs, the composer is quoted as saying: "I feel eternal pain for those who were killed by Hitler, but I feel no less pain for those killed on Stalin's orders. I suffer for everyone who was tortured, shot, or starved to death. There were millions of them in our country before the war with Hitler began. The war brought much new sorrow and much new destruction, but I haven't forgotten the terrible pre-war years. That is what my symphonies are about, including Number Eight."

Stalin in 1943
en.wikipedia.org

"Between 1937 and 1939 alone," wrote Mark Wigglesworth in his notes for the Netherlands Radio Philharmonic Orchestra recording the Shostakovich Eighth, "one and a half million Russians were liquidated. People were forced to inform on each other and in one region a quota was even established whereby everyone needed to inform on five people. If you could only name four, you had to be the fifth. In addition, Stalin's policy of agricultural collectivism led to such poverty and famine that there were even reports of parents eating children."

Against such a backdrop, only a memorial would suffice

Laid out in five movements—the last three of which are played without pause—and running just over an hour, the "Symphony No. 8" can sometimes feel overwhelming in its intensity. This is especially true of the long (just under 30 minutes) first movement. Marked Adagio, Allegro Non Troppo, it begins with a dramatic three-note theme in the lower strings, variations of which recur throughout the piece, and rises to a shattering climax in a violent, mechanistic parody of a march before fading out in a despairing lament for solo trumpet and strings. It's reminiscent of the opening movement of Shostakovich's "Symphony No. 5," which was probably the composer's intent.

That would be powerful enough all by itself, but Shostakovich follows it with a grotesquely martial Allegretto and a propulsive Allegro Non Troppo which, as Mr. Wigglesworth writes, "seems to go the whole hog in expressing the total crushing of an individual. The relentlessness of its machine-like ostinato shows no pity at the human shrieks that ride above it". It's fast and, like the mechanized warfare that seems to have inspired it, relentlessly loud.

A final blast of winds and percussion leads to the Largo fourth movement. It's a passacaglia with a repeating bass line that rises only to repeatedly fall back again. Higher instruments try—and fail—to escape the pull of its gravity. Blogger Paul Serotsky calls this movement "static, chilled, drained, the frozen heart of the symphony."

But nothing stays frozen forever. As the Allegretto final movement begins, that plodding bass line yields to what Mr. Serotsky calls "the first friendly sound in the entire symphony": a little phrase on the bassoons that sounds almost jaunty. Like the first movement, this one also builds to a massive orchestral outburst. But instead of falling into despair at the end, it yields to soft, hauntingly beautiful music in the flutes and strings. Maybe it's hope. Maybe it's just resignation. It is, in any case, in C major. And it's the end.

The Mozart family, c. 1780
en.wikipedia.org

The concerts will open with a work so different from the Shostakovich that it might as well have been composed on another planet. It's the "Sinfonia concertante" in E-flat major for Violin, Viola, and Orchestra, K. 364, by Mozart. Written when the composer was touring Europe in 1779, the work is generally considered to be Mozart's most successful experiment in this form, which is essentially a symphony with a group (a pair, in this case) of instrumental soloists.

There's no horror here, but there is around a half-hour of great music. That includes a Presto finale that begins with what New York Philharmonic program annotator James M. Keller calls "a tune of ineluctable charm" and then moves on to a theme which is "the perfect expression of late-18th-century mores. For a moment we are transported to the drawing room of an 18th-century aristocrat. The conversation is clever and cultured, but suddenly all heads turn as one of the assembled eminences—a Voltaire, perhaps, or a Franklin—imparts an observation that towers above the surrounding babble, and then brings the proceedings back to earth with an irrepressible chortle."

Which seems only right, as Mozart was a fellow much given to irrepressible chortles, musical or otherwise.

The soloists for the Mozart are both members of the band: Assistant Principal Viola Jonathan Chu (playing violin this time around) and Principal Viola Beth Guterman Chu. They're also married to each other, a fact which has at least the potential to add an air of intimate communication to their performance.

At the podium will be Hannu Lintu. When I saw him here in October 2013 I found his style on the podium to be a nearly ideal mixture of romantic intensity and intellectual rigor—fire combined with ice. For a program with contrasts as stark as this one, that could be a good fit.

The Essentials: Hannu Lintu conducts the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra with violinist Jonathan Chu and violist Beth Guterman Chu on Friday at 10:30 a.m. and Saturday at 8 p.m., April 10 and 11. The program features Mozart's "Sinfonia concertante," K. 364 and Shostakovich's "Symphony No. 8." The concerts take place at Powell Symphony Hall, 718 North Grand in Grand Center. For more information: stlsymphony.org.