Casual Friday: "Music you Know" with the St. Louis Symphony

David Robertson

Who: The St. Louis Symphony Orchestra
What: Music You Know
When: Friday, November 21, 2014
Where: Powell Symphony Hall, St. Louis

Share on Google+:

The title of Friday's St. Louis Symphony concert said it all: "Music you Know." Presented by The Whittaker Foundation, the evening probably was, for the many of those in attendance, something of a reunion with old friends.

Like many such reunions, it was a relatively informal gathering. Many of the audience members were dressed more casually than is usually the case and drinks were allowed in the auditorium. Traditional concert etiquette was relaxed—applauding between movements was OK, and conductor David Robertson even brushed off the almost comic outbreak of coughing that marred a particularly impassioned performance of "Ase's Death" (from Grieg's "Peer Gynt" suite) with a few witty asides.

Printed program notes were minimal as well. SLSO blogger Eddie Silva provided a page of "fun facts" about the popular pieces on the bill, but most of the information about the music came from Mr. Robertson's spoken commentary. Mr. Robertson is an engaging speaker, but in this case most of his remarks ran far too long, so it sometimes felt as though he were simply killing time. Extensive stage resets after each piece also tended to slow down the overall pace of the evening. Normally, SLSO concerts flow more smoothly.

Dana Edson Myers

Still, the essentials were in place. Performances of concert standards like the Mussorgsky/Rimsky-Korsakov "Night on Bald Mountain" and Tchaikovsky's "Marche Slave" were wonderfully precise, crisp, and passionate. The selections from the "Peer Gynt" incidental music had a lovely transparency and grace. There were a few moments of sloppiness in the excerpts from Copland's "Rodeo" ballet (including an uncharacteristic lapse by Concertmaster David Halen) but on the whole the orchestra did justice to this quintessentially American classic.

The two works for violin and orchestra came off well. Dana Edson Myers, of the orchestra's first violin section, gave a deeply felt "Meditation" from Jules Massenet's "Thais" and Becky Boyer Hall (of the second violins) burned up the stage with the world premiere of "Beinn na Caillich (Hill of the Old Woman), Fantasia for a Fiddler" by the SLSO violist Christian Woehr. Based in part on the traditional Scots song "Over the Sea to Skye," the piece vividly depicts the wild Scottish seacoast (complete with wind machine) and comes to a flashy virtuosic finish.

Becky Boyer Hall

"Music you Know" was clearly pitched primarily to people who don't attend the symphony on a regular basis, presumably in hopes of enticing them to attend regular season concerts. That weekend's Saturday and Sunday concerts, with Mahler's "Das Lied von der Erde," got a particularly hard sell. I hope it worked. With over 2200 people in attendance, the hall was nearly full. I'd love to see that kind of turnout on a regular basis.

Next at Powell Hall: Mr. Robertson conducts an all-American program featuring the original jazz band version of Gershwin's "Rhapsody in Blue," Bernstein's "Symphonic Dances from West Side Story," and two local premieres: "Hell's Angels" by Michael Daugherty and "Try" by Andrew Norman. Kirill Gerstein is soloist for both the Norman and Gershwin works, while nearly all of the SLSO bassoon section is featured in "Hell's Angels." Performances are Friday and Saturday at 8 p.m. and Sunday at 3 p.m., November 28-30. For more information, visit the symphony web site.

Symphony Preview: Old favorites at Powell Hall on Friday, November 21st

The title of this Friday's St. Louis Symphony concert says it all: "music you know." For the overwhelming majority of classical music lovers, this will be an evening with old friends.

Share on Google+

And that creates its own set of challenges. Because the music David Robertson and the orchestra will be performing is so familiar that it is, I expect, difficult to come up with a way of playing and conducting it that respects the intent of the composers while still providing a creative outlet for the conductor and musicians. It will be interesting to see what the Maestro does with these wonderful old chestnuts.

Mussorgsky in 1865
en.wikipedia.org

The concert opens with Rimski-Korsakov's orchestration (actually more of a recomposition) of Mussorgsky's "Night on Bald Mountain," a work that was already a concert standard when Leopold Stokowski produced his own orchestration of it for Disney's "Fantasia." Originally titled "St. John's Eve on Bare Mountain" (and composed on St. John's Eve in 1865) the original version wasn't published until 1968 and wasn't recorded (under the original title) until 1971 (by David Lloyd-Jones and the London Philharmonic). I have the 1980 Claudio Abbado/London Symphony recording, and it's striking how different it is from Rimsky-Korsakov's rewrite. Still, Rimski-Korsakov's version remains the most well known, and it's always a rouser.

The lovely "Méditation" from Jules Massenet's 1894 operatic potboiler "Thaïs" is next. In the opera it accompanies a wordless scene in which the titular courtesan contemplates abandoning her sybaritic life to join the Cenobite monk Athanaël in the desert. Outside of the opera, it's one of those little bonbons that inevitably showed up as filler on LP records of longer works on in collections of classical "greatest hits." Dana Edson Meyers, of the symphony's first violin section, is the soloist.

Tchaikovsky's rousing "Marche Slave" from 1876 is next. It's essentially musical propaganda, written to support the Serbians (who were backed by Russia) in the Serbo-Turkish War of 1876-78. It includes quotes from two Serbian folk songs along with the Tsarist anthem "God Save the Tsar" (which also shows up in the "1812 Overture"). Divorced from 19th century politics, it's still invigorating stuff.

Henrik Klausen as Peer (1876)
en.wikipedia.org

After intermission, it's up to Norway for a suite of the incidental music Grieg wrote for Ibsen's play "Peer Gynt." Extremely popular in Norway, this elaborate five-act tragedy about the globetrotting adventures of a feckless young man who seems afflicted with terminal immaturity has not traveled as well as the great dramatist's other works. Grieg's music, on the other hand, has become an international favorite, thanks to the composer's ability to create appealing themes and paint vivid orchestral pictures of the play's action.

Up next is the one piece on the program that won't be familiar: the world premiere of "Beinn na Caillich (Hill of the Old Woman), Fantasia for a Fiddler" by the symphony's own Christian Woehr. He and SLSO violinist Becky Boyer Hall (the soloist for this piece) are members of Strings of Arda, described by program annotator Eddie Silva as "a world-music ensemble made up of Symphony musicians." Based only on the title, I'd expect an innovative take on Celtic themes.

The concert concludes with Aaron Copland's "Four Dance Episodes from Rodeo." Written for Agnes Demille (for whom Copland also composed "Billy the Kid" and "Appalachian Spring"), "Rodeo" (original subtitle: "The Courting at Burnt Rance") quotes extensively from Western folk tunes and ends with a lively "Hoe Down" that was once famously appropriated to sell beef. Leonard Bernstein's dynamic Columbia recording from 1960 was one of the first LPs I owned as a youngster and I still have fond memories of this music. Most of you probably do as well.

The essentials: David Robertson conducts the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra along with violin soloists Dana Edson Myers and Rebecca Boyer Hall on Friday at 8 p.m., November 21. The concert takes place at Powell Symphony Hall, 718 North Grand in Grand Center. For more information: stlsymphony.org.