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.

Review: The big sing

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

The St. Louis Symphony Chorus

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

It was a gala festival of the human voice this past weekend (February 9 - 11) at Powell Hall as Bramwell Tovey conducted the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra, Chorus, and Children's Chorus in two great 20th century works for chorus and orchestra--one of which is by a composer whose centenary the music world is celebrating right now.

That composer is Leonard Bernstein. Born in 1918, the famed conductor, composer, and media personality didn't produce a huge catalog of works, and not all of them have aged well. But when he was at the top of his game, he produced appealing music of tremendous power. And he was definitely at the top of his game when he wrote the opening work in last weekend's concerts, the 1965 Chichester Psalms.

Scored for "treble" voice (boy soprano/contralto or countertenor), solo quartet, choir, and orchestra, the work is quintessentially Bernstein with its yearning melodic lines, theatrical flourishes, and just enough dissonance to add spice without assaulting one's ears. It's a beautiful and moving plea for peace that feels every bit as timely now as it was over sixty years ago.

In her pre-concert remarks, SLSO Chorus director Amy Kaiser noted that the Chichester Psalms presents significant linguistic and musical challenges. The psalms are sung in Hebrew (not a language often encountered in the classical world) and the music uses unconventional time signatures like 7/4 and 10/4, which create a sense of urgency but can be difficult to sing. Her singers handled it all beautifully, though, with a seamless sonic blend and all the power a person could wish for. The brief SATB (soprano, alto, tenor, bass) quartet section towards the end was wonderfully clear, as was the lovely a cappella finale.

Amy Kaiser

Vocal soloist Devin Best's voice had an ethereal clarity in the second movement, with its setting of the well-known 23rd Psalm ("The Lord is my shepherd"), but even with amplification it was sometimes difficult to hear him.

A former student of Bernstein, Mr. Tovey conducted with an impressive feel for the theatricality of this music, and the orchestra responded with expert playing. The string sound, in particular had a wonderful richness, and there were lovely solo moments from Associate Concertmaster Heidi Harris along with cellists Melissa Brooks (the Associate Principal) and Anne Fagerburg.

It has been almost 16 years since the SLSO has tackled the Chichester Psalms, but I hope we don't have to wait that long to hear it again.

For most of the audience last weekend, I expect, big draw was the second work on the program, Carl Orff's 1936 "scenic cantata" Carmina Burana. It's a piece that has been performed many times here over the past several years, most recently in a fully staged version by the Nashville Ballet in 2015. The SLSO last did it in May, 2014 with Carlos Izcaray on the podium.

Mr. Tovey's was possibly the most unabashedly theatrical interpretation of the piece yet, and while I'm not convinced that all of his decisions were the best ones, there's no denying that this was a very exciting and entertaining Carmina Burana overall. He made smart use of dramatic pauses and wasn't shy about playing with tempos here and there. He brought out more of the bawdy humor in some of the poems than some conductors have in the past, most notably in the "In Taverna" (In the Tavern) section, and had the baritone and soprano soloists play a steamy love scene at the conclusion of "Cour D'Amours" (Court of Love).

That could have come across as artificially stagey, but the soloists made it work. Baritone James Westman and soprano Tracy Dahl clearly had great fun with their romantic scene, and Ms. Dahl handled the absurdly difficult upward glissando in "Dulcissime" with easy elegance. Mr. Westman's comically inebriated abbot in "Ego sum abbas" was a real crowd pleaser as well.

The tenor has only one number, but done properly "Olim lacut colueram"--a macabre number sung from the point of view of a roasted swan about to be eaten--is a neat little musical horror show. The melody lies at the very top of the tenor range, often forcing the singer into his falsetto, but Benjamin Butterfield sounded completely at ease with it. I'm not persuaded that playing the piece mostly for laughs, complete with avian shakes of the head and arms, really does the text justice, but Mr. Butterfield did it extraordinarily well.

The bulk of Carmina Burana, though, is carried by the chorus, which has to sing in Latin, Middle High German, and Old Provençal, and do it consistently for an entire hour. When we heard them Friday night, their articulation was crisp and clean and the sound well balanced. The Children's Chorus was in fine collective voice as well.

Next at Powell Hall: Singer/songwriter Rufus Wainwright performs with the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra on Friday, February 16, at 7:30 pm. Then Matthew Halls conducts the orchestra and clarinet soloist Scott Andrews (SLSO Principal Clarinet) Saturday at 8 pm and Sunday at 3 pm, February 17 and 18. The program consists of Schubert's Symphony No. 3, Carl Maria von Weber's Clarinet Concerto No. 1, and Mendelssohn's Symphony No. 1 (written when the composer was 15). The concerts take place at Powell Symphony Hall, 718 North Grand in Grand Center.