Review: Do I hear a waltz?

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

Pianists Christina and Michelle Naughton

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

In his remarks from the podium before the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra concert Saturday night (February 3, 2018) Stéphane Denève (who was named as the SLSO's 13th Music Director last summer) said that although he had conducted the orchestra many times in the past "tonight is my last time I will do so (pause) as a guest conductor."

It got a good laugh, and demonstrated an attitude of charming good humor that bodes well for his tenure, which begins with the 2019-2020 season.

Mr. Denève's performance was a good omen as well. He conducted an all-French (and mostly Ravel) program with a passion and authority that demonstrated his love for the music and his desire to communicate that love to his audience.

The concert began with a nuanced and sensitive reading of Ravel's Ma mère l'oye (Mother Goose) Suite from 1911. Mr. Denève showed considerable flexibility in his choice of tempos and dynamics, often with striking results. In the final movement, Le jardin féerique (The Enchanted Garden), for example, his choice of a very deliberate tempo made the gradual build to the section's shimmering finale tremendously effective.

Based on a collection of piano works for children from the previous year, the suite is a treasure trove of auditory delights that showcases Ravel's skill as an orchestrator and offers many opportunities for members of the band to show just how good they can sound. Needless to say, the members of the SLSO did just that. The strings positively glowed in Petit Pouchet (Tom Thumb), the percussion section reveled in the Chinoiserie of Laideronnette, Impératrice des pagodes (Laideronnette, Empress of the Pagodas), and the duet between Vincent Karamanov's contrabassoon and Diana Haskell's clarinet in Les Entretiens de la Belle et de la Bête (Conversations of Beauty and the Beast) was a real charmer. There was also excellent work here by Principal Flute Mark Sparks and Associate Principal oboe Phil Ross.

Next was Francis Poulenc's sublimely silly Concerto in D minor for Two Pianos and Orchestra from 1932 in a completely winning performance by identical twins Christina and Michelle Naughton. Graduates of Julliard and the Curtis Institute, the Naughton sisters have been getting rave reviews around the world, and after seeing their impressive mix of technical skill and theatrical savvy, I understand why. They romped through the composer's big, noisy musical playground with a cheerful give and take that was a joy to watch, and they handled the technical challenges with ease. Watching them play the ethereal Gamelan-inspired final section of the first movement, for example, was like seeing anti-gravity in action, as their fingers seemed to barely touch the keys.

Multiple curtain calls and a standing ovation led, inevitably, to an encore that was a bravura exercise in virtuosity: Boogie for piano four hands by contemporary American composer and pianist Paul Schoenfeld. The same playful interaction that distinguished their performance of the Poulenc was evident here as well as their hands flew up and down the keyboard with a speed that often made it impossible to tell which twin was playing what.

After intermission, it was time for a new work, Guillaume Connesson's 2012 Flammenschrift, a piece that Mr. Denève aptly described as having "a punch in your face energy."

Inspired by (and using the same instrumentation as) Beethoven's Symphony No. 5, Flammenschrift can perhaps best be described as Beethoven sped up and stuffed into a nine-minute vitamin pill. The opening five-note theme is deliberately imitative of the famous opening of Beethoven's symphony, while the second theme called to mind the triumphal transformation of the symphony's final movement. There is also a contrasting lyrical second section, but mostly Flammenschrift is an energetic rollercoaster of a piece with a harmonic palette which, while obviously contemporary, is still fairly listener friendly.

Stéphane Denève
Photo by Jessica Griffin

In his introductory remarks, Mr. Denève noted that he wants to present newer works which musicians like to play and listeners are likely to want to hear more than once. If Flammenschrift is any indication, I'd say he's on solid ground.

The concert concluded with two waltz-themed works by Ravel: the Valses nobles et sentimentales from 1911 and the 1920 "poème choreographique" ("choreographic poem) La valse. The latter was played after the former without pause--an interesting choice that highlighted both their similarities (including some identical thematic material) and their differences.

Originally composed as a solo piano work, Valses nobles et sentimentales was intended by Ravel as an homage to a set of piano pieces Shubert had written nearly a century earlier: the Valses sentimentales from 1823 and the Valses nobles from 1826. As such, it's a graceful and often tender tribute to the classic Viennese waltz, and it got an appropriately loving performance from Mr. Denève. The Épilog, which recapitulates themes from the previous seven short sections, had an almost dreamy quality, as though the composer had fallen asleep with the waltzes spinning around in his head.

Paired with La valse, though, the dream eventually turns into a nightmare.

Like the earlier work, La valse started out life as a loving tribute to life in three-quarter time, with the simple title Vien (Vienna). But before it could be completed, World War I and the death of the composer's mother intervened. Vien had now become La valse, a work that begins in darkness in the bassoons and low strings, rises to ecstatic heights, and finally crashes to the ground in what has always sounded to me like the musical depiction of the collapse of the complex structure of 19th-century Europe in the so-called "war to end all wars".

Mr. Denève's La valse was dramatic, subtly shaded and exceptionally effective. I liked the way he slowed Ravel's machinery down just a bit before the final moments; it made that crashing finale that much more sinister. The orchestra sounded splendid and the entire performance was, for me, a huge success.

Stéphane Denève is, as I noted when I first saw him perform back in 2011, a very charismatic conductor who takes an obvious joy in his work. His combination of precision and vigor on the podium will, I think, make him a worth successor to (as the Brits might say) our right trusty and well-beloved David Robertson.

Next at Powell Hall: Bramwell Tovey conducts the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra, Chorus, and Children's Chorus Friday and Saturday at 8 pm and Sunday at 3 pm, February 9 - 11. The program consists of Leonard Bernstein's Chichester Psalms and Orff's Carmina Burana. The concerts take place at Powell Symphony Hall, 718 North Grand in Grand Center. More information is available at the SLSO web site, as always.

Symphony Preview: French connections

Maurice Ravel in 1925

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This weekend's St. Louis Symphony Orchestra concerts (on Friday and Saturday, February 2 and 3) mark the first appearance here by conductor Stéphane Denève since his appointment as the orchestra's 13th music director last July. Appropriately enough, it's an all-French program that mixes the familiar with less the well-known and just a splash of the new--rather like the 2018-19 program, details of which were released earlier this week.

Maurice Ravel (1875-1937) is heavily favored, contributing three of the five works we'll hear this weekend. As someone who has always been a great admirer of Ravel's work in general and his orchestrations in particular, I view that as a very good thing.

The concerts will open with the Ma mère l'oye (Mother Goose) Suite, based on a two-piano suite originally written for Mimie and Jean, the two children of Ravel's friend Cipa Godebski, an expatriate Polish artist, and his wife Ida. They were supposed to give the work its first performance at the Société Musicale Indépéndantes in 1910 but stage fright got the better of them and two other kids got the opportunity.

The work proved popular enough to merit an orchestration in 1911 and later even a full-length ballet, but it's the former that we'll hear this weekend. Inspired by the fairy stories of Charles Perrault as well as anonymous folk sources, the five movements make up a veritable musical toy box brimming with auditory delights.

The suite opens with the brief, tranquil Pavane de la Belle au bois dormant (Pavane of the Sleeping Beauty) with its placid flute melody. Next is Petit Poucet (Tom Thumb), who gets lost in a forest of wandering strings while chirping birds in the woodwinds and violins eat his breadcrumbs. Laideronnette, Impératrice des pagodes (Laideronnette, Empress of the Pagodas) is a brilliant exercise in pentatonic Chinoiserie complete with tam-tam, cymbals, and xylophone.

Les Entretiens de la Belle et de la Bête (Conversations of Beauty and the Beast) is one of the most charming inspirations, with the serene Beauty on clarinet answered by the growling Beast on contrabassoon. The final Le Jardin féerique (The Enchanted Garden) is a long, romantic build to a shimmering finale that is quintessential Ravel.

Francis Poulenc in 1922
Photo by Joseph Rosmand

This is a true showpiece for the orchestra, with lots of opportunities for solo and small ensemble work.

Up next is the exuberant Concerto in D minor for Two Pianos and Orchestra by Francis Poulenc (1889-1963), first performed in 1932 by the composer himself and Jacques Février as soloists with Désiré Defauw conducting the La Scala Orchestra. Like so much of Poulenc's orchestral works, the concerto is chockablock with appealing musical ideas, including what Roger Dettmer at AllMusic.com describes as "bits of once-popular chansons (like croutons in salad)" to complement Poulenc's own themes.

There's a bit of Javanese gamelan-inspired music at the end of the first movement (Poulenc had heard some at the Paris Colonial Exhibition a year earlier), a Mozartian second movement that slowly morphs into a major romantic climax, and a final Rondo that Mr. Dettmer describes so picturesquely that I find myself obliged to quote him in full:

Returning to the mood of the first movement, the Allegro molto finale begins with percussive flourishes before it takes off like an Alfa-Romeo in a Grand prix through the avenues and allées of day-and-night Paris, past marching bands and music halls. There is, however, an interlude lyrique et romantique when the Alfa stops for a bedroom tryst, where perfume and perspiration mix with the smoke from Gauloises, after which the race resumes, even more racily.

If that doesn't make you want to hear Christina and Michelle Naughton perform the concerto this weekend, I don't know what will.

Guillaume Connesson
Photo by Fanny Houillon

The second half of this weekend's program opens with the St. Louis premiere of Flammenschrift, written in 2012 by Guillaume Connesson (b. 1970). Written in response to a commission for a Beethoven-related work from the conductor Daniele Gatti and the Orchestre national de France, Flammenschrift uses the same orchestration as Beethoven's Fifth Symphony but also, if Connesson's other works are any indication, a very contemporary harmonic palette and a flair for orchestral color that Ravel would probably approve of. Here's the composer himself describing the piece (by way of René Spencer Saller's program notes for the SLSO):

Flammenschrift, or "fire-letter," is a word that Goethe used in his poem "Marienbad Elegy." I wished to compose a "Furies' tune" that draws a psychological portrait of Beethoven and, more generally, pays homage to the music of Germany. For Beethoven, I portray an angry, seething, impetuous man, whose interior violence shows through in numerous pages of his music. In his works, Beethoven constantly celebrated the fraternity of man, but he was often harsh with his loved ones and domestic servants. My desired musical portrait originates in this paradox. This misanthropic Beethoven-seen walking down the street looking disheveled, with his misshapen hat, this loner cursed by destiny but sanctified by genius-has always fascinated me: he constructed a very significant image of the artist in the 19th-century imagination that endures to the present day.

This weekend's concerts will conclude with Ravel's La Valse, a work that began in 1911 with the title Wein (Vienna). And, in fact, a bit of it shows up in a piece from that same year that will be played immediately before La Valse at these concerts, the Valses nobles et sentimentales. Before it could be completed, however, World War I (in which the composer served as an ambulance driver) intervened, and by the time La Valse was submitted to (and foolishly rejected by) Diaghilev for the Ballets Russes in 1919, it had become something far more profound.

Stéphane Denève
Photo by Jessica Griffin

"At the close of World War I," writes Carl E. Schorske in Fin-De-Siecle Vienna: Politics and Culture, "Maurice Ravel recorded in La valse the violent death of the nineteenth-century world. The waltz, long the symbol of gay Vienna, became in the composer's hand a frantic danse macabre. Ravel wrote: 'I feel this work a kind of apotheosis of the Viennese waltz, observed Ravel, "linked in my mind with the impression of a fantastic whirl of destiny'".

That about sums it up. I can't hear it without envisioning a huge, ornate machine spinning faster and faster until it hurls itself to pieces-as the complex structure of 19th-century Europe did in the so-called "war to end all wars". The piece is, needless to say, brilliantly orchestrated, and its crashing finale is thrilling-but also a bit unnerving. It reminds me of the old joke about the problem with history being that every time it repeats itself, the price goes up.

To circle back to the Valses nobles et sentimentales, the title (usually translated as "Noble and sentimental waltzes," although "romantic" might be more a better translation than "sentimental") was intended by Ravel as an homage to a set of piano pieces Shubert had written nearly a century earlier: the Valses sentimentales from 1823 and the Valses nobles from 1826. Indeed, Ravel claimed that he was "intent on writing a set of Schubertian waltzes." Personally, I don't see how anyone could mistake the bracing, elegant, and brilliantly orchestrated set of seven short waltzes and an epilogue as anything but pure Ravel.

The Essentials: Music Director Designate Stéphane Dèneve conducts the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra and duo pianists Christina and Michelle Naughton on Friday at 10:30 am and Saturday at 8 pm, February 2 and 3. The concerts take place at Powell Symphony Hall, 718 North Grand in Grand Center. For more information: stlsymphony.org.