Review: Merry Mozart with Emanuel Ax and the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra Friday, September 23, 2017

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

Emanuel Ax
Photo: Lisa Marie Mazzucco

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In a new biography, John Suchet calls Mozart "surely the happiest composer who ever lived." We got a great demonstration of that this past weekend as the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra opened its new season with the first in a series of three all-Mozart programs.

That happiness was most apparent in the first half of the concert, which opened with a spirited and elegant dash through the overture to the 1789 comic masterpiece Le nozze di Figaro. Although it includes no music from the opera itself, the overture nevertheless perfectly captures the freewheeling spirit of the work, and maestro David Robertson honored that spirit of fun.

Up next was the Piano Concerto No. 19 in F major, written two years earlier when Mozart was trying to make a living as a composer/pianist in Vienna. One of six that the composer produced that year in a never-ending struggle to engage the attention of the notoriously fickle Viennese public, it's engaging, tuneful, and just sophisticated enough to display Mozart's fine hand at counterpoint.

Soloist Emanuel Ax delivered a performance of crystalline perfection that allowed all of the joy and ingenuity of this piece to come through. Mr. Robertson and the orchestra supported him beautifully with playing that was light, precise, and classically pristine. Contemporary orchestras are bigger and contemporary pianos far more powerful than was the case in Mozart's day, but Mr. Ax and the orchestra still managed to convey that incredible lightness of being that you don't always experience in "big band" Mozart.

The second half of the concert was devoted to works that represented Mozart's last thoughts on the subject of the piano concerto and the symphony: the Concerto No. 27 (premiered the year of Mozart's death, although likely written a few years earlier) and the monumental Symphony No. 41 ("Jupiter," a title Mozart never used for it) from 1788. The contrast between the two is striking.

Back when everyone thought the Concerto No. 27 was produced in the final year of Mozart's life, it was not uncommon to read a kind of end-of-life resignation into this music. It's certainly lyrical and sometimes pensively sad, but it still sounds like the work of the happiest composer who ever lived. It got, in any case, a warm and engaging interpretation from Mr. Ax and Mr. Robertson that brought out peaceful autumnal reflection of this remarkable work.

The Symphony No. 41, on the other hand, bristles with the confidence and self-assertion of a man who had completely mastered symphonic form and was ready, in the words of The Guardian's Tom Service, to see "just how many different expressive and compositional contrasts he can cram into a single symphony." There's a little bit of everything in this music, and Mr. Robertson and his forces brought out all of its kaleidoscopic variety.

I was particularly struck by the simple charm of the Andante cantabile second movement and the "gotta dance" energy of the third movement Menuetto. But it was the propulsive energy of the concluding Molto allegro in all its complex glory that really brought down the house and led to a well-deserved standing ovation. Mr. Robertson and Concertmaster David Halen began the symphony immaculately groomed and ended it with ties slightly askew; that's how much they threw themselves into this performance, and it showed.

The St. Louis Symphony Orchestra's Mozart festival continues on Friday at 10:30 a.m., Saturday at 8 p.m., and Sunday at 3 p.m., September 29 - October 1. The Friday concert features the Piano Concertos Nos. 14 and 20 and the Symphony No. 39. Saturday and Sunday the program will feature the Concertos Nos. 16 and 17 and the Symphony No. 40. Emanuel Ax will once again be the soloist and David Robertson will conduct.

The musicians might not be decked out quite as festively as they were for opening night, when many of the orchestra's women wore colorful evening gowns and Concertmaster David Halen sported a sparkly red vest and tie, but if this opening weekend's concert was any indication, the music will still be celebratory.

Symphony Preview: Mozart in sunshine and shadow

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David Robertson

It's another big all-Mozart weekend at the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra, with two completely different programs: one for the 10:30 a.m. "Coffee Concert" (with Krispy Kreme doughnuts!) on Friday the 29th and another for Saturday at 8:00 p.m. and Sunday at 3:00 p.m., September 30th and October 1st.

David Robertson will conduct both programs, which will feature the same soloist as last weekend, the redoubtable Emanuel Ax. That means that piano concertos will again be prominently featured.. Expect four of them this time: No. 14 in E-flat major, K. 449 on Friday; No. 16 in D major, K. 45 and No. 17 in G major, K. 453 on Saturday and Sunday; and No. 20 in D minor, K. 466 on Friday.

The first three, like the last week's Concerto No. 19, date from 1784, an immensely productive year in Mozart's life when he was celebrated and a rising young composer and pianist in Vienna, while No. 20 was written the following year. He knocked out the 14th through 17th concertos in two months, in fact-between February 9th and April 10th. Even for a composer who famously dashed off music as though (to cite an image from Peter Shaffer's Amadeus) he were taking dictation from God, that's pretty impressive. "Composing," as John Suchet notes in a new Mozart biography, "was Mozart's way of breathing."

And they're really, really good concertos to boot. "While no man can accurately be referred to as the inventor of a musical form," write Brockway and Weinstock in Men of Music, "Mozart did such a perfect job of fusing and adapting certain elements he found at hand that the classical concerto for piano and orchestra may be regarded as his achievement." He created works that were simultaneously entertaining and insightful, despite the fact the only two years earlier he had dismissed the entire genre a letter to his father as requiring music that was "either so simple a coachman could sing it, or so unintelligible that audiences like it simply because no sane person could understand it."

For me, the giant among these four concertos is No. 20. It's gripping, menacing, and filled with the kind of high drama that audiences would come to love so much in the ensuing decades of the 19th century. Beethoven loved this concerto, performing it often and composing two cadenzas for it, Mozart's own having been lost to history. It is, in fact, sufficiently "modern" for its time that Viennese audiences might have been put off by it, had it not been the work of a man who was at the peak of popularity. "The composer-pianist was at the time still the idol of Viennese society," writes former Los Angeles Times music critic Herbert Glass, "his audiences willing to accept anything that flew from his pen, even so uncharacteristic a score as the Concerto in D minor-if Mozart were also the performer."

The final work on the Friday's program-Mozart's Symphony No. 39 in E-flat major, K. 543-is the first of a set of three that the composer dashed off in the summer of 1788. Nobody is really certain of the source of what Arthur V. Berger (in a New York City Symphony program note) called the "sudden efflorescence of inspiration" that produced Mozart's last and, in the estimation of many writers, greatest symphonies, but the results speak (or rather sing) for themselves.

K. 543 gets less attention than the other two, much as a normal human being would be less noticed standing next to a pair of NFL linebackers, but that doesn't make it any less a great composition. "This symphony," writes musicologist Andrew Firmer, "is...a prime example of the composer's genius that he is not only able to conjure up melodies, but weave them with apparent contradictions that seem to connect with impossible ease." Those contradictions include Mozart's assimilation of the contrapuntal techniques he got from the music of Bach and Handel. "It was this synthesis of 'learned' style with the clean clarity of classicism," writes Brian Robins at allmusic.com, "that caused so much trouble for Mozart's contemporaries, to whom his late style became increasingly 'difficult.'" Today, with over two centuries of hindsight, it's clear that this "difficult" music is both ingeniously complex and wonderfully clear.

Concluding the Saturday concert is the second member of that titanic trio, the Symphony No. 40 in G minor, K. 550. Like the Concerto No. 20, it's urgent and forward-looking, which may be one reason why it's one of the composer's most popular works. It has also produced a wide variety of responses from critics and Mozart biographers. Some, like Charles Rosen in his legendary tome The Classical Style, have emphasized its obvious dark and brooding moods while, others have noted what Robert Schumann called its “Grecian lightness and grace.” Personally, I tend to come down on the “dark and brooding” side. Like Mr. Rosen, I see it as "a work of passion, violence, and grief."

Interestingly, the noted early music authority Nikolas Harnoncourt is of the opinion that Mozart ultimately intended his last three symphonies to be heard as a single, twelve-movement work. He recorded them that way in 2014, in a two-disc set that The Guardian's Andrew Clements describes as "thrillingly well played." Hearing all three over the course of two weekends (the orchestra did No. 41 last weekend) might not be quite the same as encountering them back to back, but it's something to consider when you go to Powell Hall this weekend.

Each of the upcoming programs opens with an opera overture. Friday it's the lively opener for the 1790 comedy Così fan tutte (an idiomatic phrase that roughly translates as "they're all like that") about a pair of soldiers who decide to test their fiancées' fidelity, with embarrassing results all the way around. Saturday and Sunday it's the more weighty overture to Don Giovanni from three years earlier. Mozart supposedly dashed it off at the last minute, but you'd hardly know that from the neat way it shifts the mood from portentous drama to skipping comedy in its seven-minute length.

The Essentials: David Robertson conducts The St. Louis Symphony Orchestra, with pianist Emanuel Ax, in an all-Mozart program Friday at 10:30 a.m., Saturday at 8:00 p.m., and Sunday at 3:00 p.m., September 29 - October 1. The Friday concert features the Piano Concertos Nos. 14 and 20 and the Symphony No. 39. Saturday and Sunday the program will feature the Concertos Nos. 16 and 17 and the Symphony No. 40. The Performance takes place at Powell Hall in Grand Center. For more information: stlsymphony.org.

Symphony Preview: Merry Mozart, September 23 and 24, 2017

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In a new biography of Mozart, English author and Classic FM presenter John Suchet notes that, despite a life with its share of personal, professional, and financial trials, Mozart was "surely the happiest composer who ever lived."

Mozart, as drawn by Doris Stock, 1789

If you doubt that, just listen to the overture to Mozart's 1786 comic opera Le nozze di Figaro, the work that opens this weekend's (September 23 and 24) St. Louis Symphony concerts-the first in an all-Mozart series of three programs. From the racing eighth notes of its jovial opening to its exuberant coda around four minutes later, this is music that, as René Spencer Saller writes in her program notes, perfectly "conjures up the opera's mood of zany brilliance and pell-mell seduction."

The opera itself was a popular and artistic success but, like far too many of Mozart's projects, a commercial flop. Still, the overture-which was written after the opera was completed and which uses no tunes from the opera itself-never fails to delight.

Up next will be Piano Concerto No. 19 in F major, written towards the end of 1784 when Mozart was in his late 20s. He had just abandoned a secure but unsatisfying gig in Salzburg to make his mark in Vienna, then the musical capital of the Germanic music world. In a not entirely successful attempt to raise funds, the composer wrote and performed a number of piano concertos, including this one, for the public and the court.

In notes for the Los Angeles Philharmonic, John Mangum points out that Mozart "had initially found great success" in Vienna but "[h]e soon discovered that the city's audiences were capricious and fickle, and that no one composer could keep their ears for long." Still, this concerto was a great showcase for Mozart's talent as both a composer and a pianist. "Pitched between exuberance and elegance," writes Ms. Saller, "it requires both technical prowess and a light touch." It also uses counterpoint in a way that reminds us of the fact that Mozart was spending his Saturday afternoons playing Bach scores at the home of Baron van Swieten.

The Piano Concerto No. 27 in B-flat major that comes next in the program was first performed in the last year of Mozart's life, when the composer's physical and fiscal health were both at a low ebb. You wouldn't know that from the music, though. Yes, the opening movement is more lyrical than exuberant and the music does take what the BBCs Linsday Kemp calls "frequent turns to the minor," but overall this doesn't really sound like the resigned farewell commentators thought it was before they found out that it was mostly written three years earlier in 1888.

Emanuel Ax
Photo by Lisa Marie Mazzucco

At the keyboard for this mini-Mozart series will be the renowned Emanuel Ax. As I have noted in the past, Mr. Ax is a musician who can make the piano dance as well as sing, both of which he'll need to do for this weekend's concertos. He has displayed a good rapport with maestro David Robertson on his previous appearances here, which is all to the good.

This first concert in the Mozart mini-festival will conclude with the composer's last and, as far as I'm concerned, his greatest symphony. "I believe it is the mark of true genius," writes Mr. Suchet, "that when external circumstances are bleak, creativity may not only continue, but soar," and soar is what the Symphony No. 41 in C major (known as the "Jupiter" symphony, although nobody is sure why) certainly does. But don't take my word for it; here's Tom Service, writing for The Guardian in 2014:

For me, this C major symphony is written at the furthest edges of the possible for Mozart, in terms of seeing just how many different expressive and compositional contrasts he can cram into a single symphony. And he's not doing that for the sake of reconciling these opposites or to create a greater unity (the kind of thing that we like to imagine Mozart was up to, because we prefer to think of him as a romantic idealist rather than an 18th century humanist). Rather, I think he's trying to achieve a complexity of emotional experience and richness of invention that is poised - sometimes on this side, sometimes on the other! - of a musical cliff-edge of coherence. A bit like the mixed metaphors of that sentence; what I mean is that this is a symphony of extremes, something that's symbolised in the juxtaposition of the martial and the plangent in the two ideas you hear in the symphony's very first four bars.

Actually, you need not even take his word for it. René Jacobs and the Freiburg Baroque Orchestra have a corker of a recording recommended by Mr. Service that you can hear on that great repository of copyright violations, YouTube. If you haven't had a chance to become acquainted with the remarkable music already, this is a darned good way to do it.

The essentials: David Robertson conducts The St. Louis Symphony Orchestra, with pianist Emanuel Ax, in an all-Mozart program Saturday at 8 p.m. and Sunday at 3 p.m., September 23 and 24. Performances take place at Powell Hall in Grand Center. For more information: stlsymphony.org.

Symphony Review: Emanuel Ax brings down the house at Powell Hall

Emanuel Ax

Who: The St. Louis Symphony Orchestra conducted by David Robertson
What: Music of Elgar, Detlev Glanert, and Brahms
Where: Powell Hall, St. Louis
When: April 25 and 26, 2015

It has been over two and one-half years since renowned pianist Emanuel Ax last appeared on the Powell Hall stage. Based on the stunning performance he and David Robertson gave us of the Brahms Second Concerto this past Sunday, that's at least two years too long. Combined with an impeccable version of Elgar's "Introduction and Allegro" and a new work by Detlev Glanert, it made for a thoroughly satisfying afternoon at the symphony.

Brahms' "Piano Concerto No. 2 in B-flat major," Op. 83, is one of the most formidable of the Romantic piano concerti, although not for the usual reasons. Yes, it's technically challenging, but audibly less so than some of the late 19th-century finger-busters by (say) Rubinstein, Scharwenka, or Medtner.

With the Brahms, though, it’s partly a matter of sheer endurance. With four movements (as opposed to the usual three) and a running time of around fifty minutes, the piece was, at the time of its 1881 premiere, the longest piano concerto ever written. The real challenge, though, is artistic. The pianist who takes on the Second has to have not only technique and stamina but also a grasp of symphonic form—which is not guaranteed, even among some of the world’s most prominent players.

Mr. Ax, however, clearly has all three. The opening of the Allegro non troppo first movement, with Thomas Jöstlein's lovely horn solo and Mr. Ax's graceful reply, was a thing of beauty. But when, only a few pages later, the piano part began to explode in a flurry of runs and octaves, Mr. Ax tore them off with ease.

The Allegro appassionato second movement crackled with energy. The lyrical third movement Andante soared on the wings of the soulful duet between Mr. Ax and the heartfelt cello of Danny Lee. And the following Allegretto grazioso finale, which Mr. Robertson and Mr. Ax elected to play attacca (without pause), demonstrated that Mr. Ax can make the piano dance as well as sing and thunder.

Throughout the performance, Mr. Ax and Mr. Robertson did a marvelous job of clarifying and maintaining the momentum of Brahms' massive and occasionally murky musical architecture. The Brahms Second is a symphonic-weight concerto and it got an exceptionally well thought-out reading when we heard it Sunday afternoon.

Emily Ho
stlsymphony.org

The orchestra, as it so often does, played beautifully. I have already commented on the fine work by Mr. Jöstlein and his colleagues in the horn section, but there were also captivating moments from Principal Oboe Jelena Dirks. And, of course, there was Mr. Lee's cello. Mr. Ax shook his hand at least three times during the many curtain calls—a reminder of the real chemistry between them during the second movement.

Sunday's concert opened with another display of solid technique and unimpeachable taste as four members of the SLSO string section—violinists Emily Ho and Nicolae Bica, violist Morris Jacob, and cellist Anne Fagerburg—joined the symphony strings for Elgar's "Introduction and Allegro," op. 47. Written on commission in 1905 to show off the strings of the newly established London Symphony Orchestra, the work follows the form of the Baroque concerto grosso, even including a fugue in the concluding allegro. But it does so with all the profound romantic feeling that can be found in so much of Elgar's music.

Nicolae Brica
stlsymphony.org

Mr. Robertson's approach to this work was wonderfully lush, full-blooded, and intense. It was just lavish enough to be moving without feeling mannered. Every member on the quartet played with warmth and finesse, and the SLSO strings had a rich, deep sound that suited this music well. "Bravi" to all.

The first half of the concert concluded with the St. Louis premiere of "Frenesia" ("Frenzy") by contemporary German composer Detlev Glanert. Commissioned in 2014 to celebrate the 150th birthday of Richard Strauss, the piece was inspired by Strauss’ semi-autobiographical tone poem "Ein Heldenleben."

Morris Jacob
stlsymphony.org

In a video interview with Mr. Robertson played on the Powell Hall movie screen before the performance, Mr. Glanert provided some "Cliff's Notes" for his music, including an interesting explanation of how the work's energetically noisy opening pays homage to the initial measures of "Heldenleben." It was useful information, but didn't change the sense I already had from listening to the work's world premiere performance by Xian Zhang and the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra (now available on YouTube) that this is mostly a flashy package without much inside.

Still, it's rather fun, even if it often sounds like the score for an "Alien" sequel. Like the tone poem that inspired it, "Frenesia" is marked by strong contrasts in which loud, aggressive orchestral outbursts abruptly give way to passages of surprising delicacy. And like Strauss, Glanert pushes the instruments to their limit and uses a variety of unusual performance techniques. The strings, in particular, got quite a workout, with glissandi, harmonics, and various forms of col legno bowing.

Anne Fagerburg
stlsymphony.org

That makes it a challenge for the musicians, I would think, but the SLSO musicians were more than up to it Sunday afternoon with impressively powerful and controlled playing. That included fine work by Cally Banham on English horn, some wonderfully eerie passages from Danny Lee, and a spectacular flute solo about half-way through from Andrea Kaplan. I'm not sure I ever need to hear this music again, but it was fairly enjoyable while it lasted.

Lorrraine Glass-Harris
stlsymphony.org

The performance of "Frenesia" was preceded by an affectionate farewell from Mr. Robertson for second violinist Lorraine Glass-Harris, who is retiring at the end of this season after over four decades with the SLSO. Ms. Glass-Harris has been featured as soloist with the SLSO, on KFUO radio in "From the Garden-Live!," in Chamber Music St. Louis, and with the Compton Heights Concert Band. She's also a Baroque music specialist, with a 1779 Joseph Gagliano violin and 1750 English bow, so I expect we'll continue to hear from her on the local chamber music scene.

Next at Powell Hall: David Robertson conducts the orchestra with harpist Allegra Lilly and tuba player Michael Sanders on Friday at 10:30 a.m. and 8 p.m., Saturday at 8 p.m., and Sunday at 3 p.m., May 1-3. On the program are orchestral selections from "Carmen," Debussy's "Danses sacrée et profane (Sacred and Profane Dances)" for harp and orchestra, Vaughan Williams' 1954 "Tuba Concerto," and the ever-popular "Bolero." The concerts take place at Powell Symphony Hall, 718 North Grand in Grand Center. For more information: stlsymphony.org.

Symphony Preview: Big Piano, Part Zwei, with Emanuel Ax

April has been Big Piano Concerto Month at the St. Louis Symphony. Last week we had Rachmaninoff's daunting "Piano Concerto No. 3" . This week it's the equally intimidating "Piano Concerto No. 2 in B-flat major," Op. 83, written in 1881 by Brahms.

Johannes Brahms
en.wikipedia.org

The reasons why the two concerti are difficult are somewhat different, though. With the Rachmaninoff, it's mostly a matter of sheer technique. The composer was a virtuoso of the first water who wrote the piece for his use during an American tour, and even though it's now largely part of the standard repertoire, it's still not the sort of thing a performer takes on lightly.

With the Brahms it's partly a matter of sheer endurance. With four movements (as opposed to the usual three) and a running time of around fifty minutes the piece was, at the time, the longest piano concerto ever written. Now that honor probably goes to Ferrucio Busoni's 1904 Piano Concerto (five movements, seventy minutes), which includes a part for male chorus. But it's still the pianistic equivalent of running a marathon and not everybody has the endurance.

The real challenge, though, is artistic. As French pianist Phillippe Bianconi observed in a 2013 interview, the Brahms Second is "not really a concerto – it is really a symphony with principal piano...everything about it — the structure, the texture, the way the piano is integrated into the orchestral fabric, it's very symphonic. And that is what I love about it: I have the feeling I'm playing in a Brahms symphony!... The sheer beauty of this music is simply overwhelming. And I don't know many concertos that have such a great range of moods and emotions...The concerto is like a fabulous journey." At the work's November 1881 premiere in Stuttgart, in fact, the prominent critic (and Brahms partisan) Eduard Hanslick labeled it "a symphony with piano obbligato."

That means the soloist has to have not only technique and endurance but also a grasp of symphonic form—which is not guaranteed, even among some of the world's most prominent players. "The fact that its supreme complexity requires a surpassing executant," wrote Brockway and Weinstock in the 1967 edition of their provocative "Men of Music," "has not helped the B flat, for it is all too often attempted by pianists who find it quite beyond their competence. Even the greatest of ensemble players, Artur Schnabel, though none of it is beyond him, cannot give interest to the unwieldy work for its entire length."

The composer realized that he had written something monumental, in fact, and was not sure how successful it might be. In a letter to Elizabeth von Herzogenberg from Pressbaum on July 7, 1881, Brahms, with tongue firmly in bearded cheek, announced that "I have written a tiny, tiny pianoforte concerto with a tiny wisp of a scherzo. It is in B flat, and I have reason to fear that I have worked this udder, which has yielded good milk before, too often and too vigorously."

He need not have worried. "He was surely vindicated, if unsurprised," writes René Spencer Saller in the SLSO program notes, "when his Second Piano Concerto elicited rapturous applause everywhere except in Leipzig, that die-hard Wagner town." Its popularity continues to this day, when it's seen as one of the core Romantic piano concerti. Indeed, pianist Stephen Hough (who has both Brahms concerti in his repertoire) has said that the Brahms Second is one of his favorites. "For all the grandeur and excitement of the first concerto's youthful flare," he wrote in The Guardian's music blog last January, "the second's older vintage seemed wiser, more fascinatingly complex as I revisited and re-recorded both pieces last year. Its musical arguments seemed more nuanced, more open to exploration, more a search for common ground where, as in life, the sun can shine brightest ... and warmest."

At the keyboard this weekend is Emanuel Ax, a pianist with a long and distinguished career in both the concert and chamber music worlds and an impressively large catalog of recordings (he has been a Sony classical artist since 1987).  He knows the Brahms Second intimately and has performed it four times with the SLSO, including twice with David Robertson. This weekend will mark his 40th anniversary of his first appearance with the orchestra.

Edward Elgar, circa 1900
en.wikipedia.org

The concerts will open with a work of more modest proportions: Edward Elgar's 1905 "Introduction and Allegro," op. 47, scored for string orchestra with a solo string quartet, much in the manner of the Baroque concerto grosso. It was was written on commission to show off the strings of the newly-established London Symphony Orchestra and contains some wonderful stuff, especially for the solo quartet. "It's really beautiful, and kind of strange," says viola soloist Morris Jacob in an interview in the program. "It's Elgar at his best. He writes so well for strings, with beautiful, intimate moments, some of which are just majestic."

Elgar prefaced the score with the following lines from Act IV, Scene 1 of Shakespeare's oddball tragicomedy "Cymbeline" describing the decidedly mixed emotions displayed by one of the key characters:

Nobly he yokes
A smiling with a sigh, as if the sigh
Was that it was, for not being such a smile; The smile mocking the sigh, that it would fly From so divine a temple, to commix
With winds that sailors rail at.

"Shakespeare reveled in paradox," writes Ms. Saller, "the conjoining of apparent antitheses. Elgar did too, but in a different idiom." The Introduction begins wistfully in G minor but soon waxes lyrical with a tune that Elgar said was inspired by a song he heard sung by a distant voice during a vacation in Wales. The Allegro concludes with an energetic fugue. "The work," concludes Ms. Saller, "is at once Romantic and Baroque, ecstatic and exact. Like the Bard of Avon, Elgar loved the mongrels best."

Between the Elgar and the Brahms is the St. Louis premiere of "Frenesia" ("Frenzy") by contemporary German composer Detlev Glanert. Composed on commission to celebrate the 150th birthday of Richard Strauss (of "Also Sprach Zarathustra" fame), the piece was inspired by Strauss' tone poem "Ein Heldenleben" ("A Hero's Life").

Detlev Glanert
boosey.com

"Ein Heldenleben," for the benefit of those of you who came in late, is a supreme example of musical egotism. Despite the composer's disclaimer that the work was only party autobiographical and that it was intended to be "a more general and free ideal of great and manly heroism," there's not much doubt that Strauss' hero was Strauss. The work is chock full of quotes from Strauss' music and its portrayal of music critics by a gaggle of chattering woodwinds provoked the expected outrage from the composer's detractors.

That sort of thing would be easy to parody, but Mr. Glanert isn't interested in satire. "Although Glanert admires Strauss's last great tone poem too much to mock it," reports Ms. Saller, "he recognizes that it was a product of its time. Frenesia is the ‘anti-Heldenleben,' he explains, "because the piece is against the traditional Romantic view of grand heroism, which I think is no longer possible after historic events leading to 1945.'"

"Frenesia" was given its world premiere by Xian Zhang and the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra last January—a performance that was recently made available on YouTube. It's a piece marked by strong contrasts in which loud, aggressive orchestral outbursts that sound like science fiction film music abruptly give way to passages of surprising delicacy. About two-thirds of the way through, the music begins a slow build to a massive final climax before slowly dying away, like "Neptune" from Holst's "The Planets," into silence. Overall, I'm left the impression that Mr. Glanert sees "grand heroism" as being mostly sound and fury, signifying nothing.

"Frenesia" will, in any case, make serious demands on the members of the orchestra. It will be interesting to see what they make of it.

Mr. Glanert is no stranger to the "old wine in new bottles" thing, by the way. Last October he uncorked a re-distillation of some vintage Brahms at Powell Hell in his "Vier Präludien und ernste Gesänge" ("Four Preludes and Serious Songs"), an arrangement of Brahms's op. 121 "Four Serious Songs" for baritone and orchestra. You can see my colleague Gary Liam Scott's review of that concert (which I missed because I was on stage elsewhere) at the KDHX web site.

The essentials: David Robertson conducts the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra with pianist Emanuel Ax on Saturday at 8 p.m. and Sunday at 3 p.m., April 25 and 26. The concerts take place at Powell Symphony Hall, 718 North Grand in Grand Center. For more information: stlsymphony.org.