Symphony Preview: Mass in the vernacular

This Friday (January 12), St. Louis Symphony Orchestra (SLSO) Conductor Laureate Leonard Slatkin steps up to the podium in the Touhill Center to present the first of a three-concert series that, as he said in a recent interview with yours truly, “focuses on the intersection between vernacular and, for lack of a better term, classical music.”

[Preview the music with the SLSO's Spotify playlist.]

By “vernacular,” he means pretty much anything that isn’t part of the “classical” canon—jazz, folk, spirituals, theatre, and popular music in general. It’s a broad category but, as anyone who has listened to Slatkin’s radio show “The Slatkin Shuffle” knows, his musical interests are nothing if not eclectic.

Antheil and some Ballet Mécanique "noisemakers"
By Unknown author - Unknown Newspaper
Public Domain 

That’s clear from the very beginning of the program Friday morning, January 12, as the orchestra delivers a jolt of sonic caffeine in the form of the 1955 revision of the 1925 “Jazz Symphony” by American composer George Antheil (1900–1959). Episodic and only twelve minutes long, it’s not really a symphony and not, for the most part, especially jazzy. It is, however, raucous, cheerfully vulgar, and often a bit wacky in a way that anticipates the cartoon soundtracks of Carl Stallings.

First performed as part of a 1927 Carnegie Hall concert that included his infamous “Ballet Mécanique” (the 1925 Paris premiere of which caused riots that may or may not have been staged), the “Jazz Symphony” was performed by the Harlem Sinfonietta under W.C. Handy (composer of “The St. Louis Blues”). The performance went over well with both critics and fellow composers like Gershwin and Copland but was overshadowed in the press by equipment failures during “Ballet Mécanique” that turned what might have been a succès de scandale into something more akin to a Marx Brothers movie

But I digress. The slightly tamer 1955 version of the “Jazz Symphony” is still pretty wild and wooly, but if you’d like to hear what the original sounds like it’s available at Spotify.

Composer Jeff Beal

Up next is “Body in Motion,” a violin concerto by Jeff Beal (b. 1963). As this is the work’s world premiere, I have no idea what it will sound like. So the best I can do is to quote the composer, as cited in this weekend’s program notes:

The first image that came to me when developing the materials for this new violin concerto was one of water. I love the way water presents a visual tension between the hypnotic, peaceful, and—in the case of a windy lake or sea—a sense of constant, fluid motion. I began to think of both the orchestra and soloist as active natural forces.

Beal is probably best known for his music for the TV series "House of Cards," but he also has extensive film and more recently, concert credits. Local audiences may recall SLSO’s world premiere of his song cycle “The Paper-Lined Shack” back in 2019. That was also conducted by Slatkin whom Beal (in a 2019 interview with me) descried as “an important mentor in my life.… His parents were very involved with film music, so he's not afraid to reach out to a film composer to write a piece of concert music. That's very special to me.”

More to the point, as far as Friday’s concert goes, is this quote: “I really feel—and I know Leonard feels this way too—that the more we can break down the barriers between "high" art and "low" art and the more we can have the story telling drive what gets played, I think that's the way music is going. I'm not the only one doing this and it's nice that this is starting to happen.”

Duke Ellington, 1973
By Hans Bernhard (Schnobby)
Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0

Another St. Louis premiere is next: “Three Black Kings,” the last composition by the legendary Edward Kennedy "Duke" Ellington (1899–1974). Left uncompleted at the time of his death, the three-movement suite was described by his son Mercer (who finished the work, along with Luther Henderson) as a musical eulogy to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., who had been assassinated six years earlier. Dr. King is the last of the three titular kings, the first two being “King of the Magi” (specifically Balthazar) and “King Solomon.”

Balthazar’s music is energetic and restless, driven by a four-note xylophone ostinato later taken up by the full orchestra. The prominent role for percussion suggests a kind of primitivism, while the insistent rhythmic drive reminds us of the long journey of the three magi. As the scene shifts to King Solomon, the music becomes more lyrical and romantic, possibly indicating that Ellington was thinking of Solomon’s hundreds of wives and concubines.

Dr. King’s music is marked as “Slow Gospel, 4 beat,” but the 12/8 rhythm gives it an extra bit of swing that makes me think of the choir swaying back and forth at a church service. It rises to heroic heights, which seems only appropriate for one of the more well-known of the far too numerous martyrs to the cause of racial justice in the USA.

“It’s kind of like three little tone poems,” said Slatkin in our interview.  “I've done it now a couple times. Extraordinary man, extraordinary thinker.” Too true.

Friday’s concert concludes, as does each of the three in the series, with the sounds of George Gershwin. That’s partly a nod to Gershwin’s importance in bringing jazz and other vernacular sounds to the concert hall and partly a tribute to the 1974 recording of Gershwin’s complete orchestral works that Slatkin did with the SLSO. Although these have never been out of print, the ArchivMusic reissue from this past June has been remastered in 192kHz / 24-bit high definition. Whether it’s still in the original surround sound format (or quadraphonic, as they called it Back in the Day), I have no idea.

That said, the work you’ll hear Friday wasn’t part of those historic recordings. It’s “Porgy and Bess: A Symphonic Picture,” written in 1942 by Robert Russell Bennett (1894–1981), who is probably best known for the many orchestrations he did for Broadway and Hollywood musicals. It’s relatively faithful to Gershwin’s own orchestrations of what is arguably his masterpiece, but I’m a bit baffled as to why we’re not hearing the suite that was recorded back in 1974: the composer’s own “Porgy and Bess” suite from 1936.

It's always possible that with two local premiers already on the bill and one work (“Three Black Kings”) that hasn’t been heard here in 1995, Bennett’s more familiar music seemed a better bet. In any case, it’s a great lineup. And you can always listen to Slatkin and the SLSO play "Catfish Row" on Spotify.

The Essentials: Leonard Slatkin conducts the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra and violin soloist Kelly Hall-Tompkins in works by George Antheil, Jeff Beal, Duke Ellington, and George Gershwin on Friday, January 12, at 10:30 am at the Touhill Performing Arts Center on the University of Missouri-St. Louis campus. For more information, visit the SLSO web site.

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

Review: Quintessential Slatkin at the St. Louis Symphony

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

Soprano Hila Plitmann

It's an index of the continuing popularity of St. Louis Symphony Orchestra Conductor Laureate Leonard Slatkin that he got a standing ovation from the crowd as soon as he stepped on to the stage Saturday night (May 4, 2019) for the final performance in a two-week concert series.

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

Granted, SLSO CEO Marie-Hélène Bernard warmed up the crowd with a laudatory introduction, but the audience didn't need much prompting. Fifty years after his first appearance with the orchestra, Mr. Slatkin--who ended his 17-year tenure as SLSO Music Director back in 1996--is as popular as ever.

Saturday night's concert demonstrated why that's the case. It was a quintessentially Slatkin evening, with an infrequently heard American classic, a world premiere by an American composer, and a highly personal take on a concert hall favorite--exactly the sort of thing that has endeared him to local classical music lovers. It was good to have him back.

The concert began with that infrequently heard American work, the Symphony No. 1 by Samuel Barber. Composed in 1935 and 1936 in Rome, the symphony netted him the American Prix de Rome at the ripe old age of 25. Running around 20 minutes, it's expansive, dramatic music with a wide emotional range.

Composer Jeff Beal

Conducting without a baton, Mr. Slatkin delivered a performance that was a perfect combination of big, dramatic gestures and precise details. The brass section was wonderfully clear and powerful in the first movement, the woodwinds danced through the rapid triplet passages in the second movement with ease, and the increasingly elaborate passacaglia of the finale was a model of clarity. There were fine individual performances here as usual, including the rapid bassoon and tympani duet at the end of the second movement (Andy Gott and Shannon Wood, respectively) and Jelena Dirks's plaintive oboe solo at the top of the final movement.

Next was that world premiere, the song cycle "The Paper Lined Shack" by contemporary American composer Jeff Beal. Best known for his film and television work (mostly notably the series "House of Cards"), Mr. Beal has recently branched out into the concert world. If this piece is any indication, he has a promising future there.

Based on diaries kept by Mr. Beal's great-grandmother Della, the piece reminded me a great deal of "Knoxville: Summer of 1915," written by Samuel Barber in 1947 to a text by novelist James Agee. Both are based on memoirs of family life in the early 20th century--urban middle class in Agee's case and dirt poor rural in the case of Della Beal--and both speak a musical vocabulary that would not have been shocking to audiences a century ago. Mr. Beal's music has a gentle, transparent quality that mirrors the sometimes surprisingly poetic text.

I'm not sure, though, that Mr. Beal writes that well for the human voice. I know he had input from the soloist, soprano Hila Plitmann, in developing the work, but even so the vocal line seems to lie too high a bit too often, and while Ms. Plitmann was in good voice generally, she did not always sound comfortable singing softly at the top of her range.

Still, it was a compelling performance, and a convincingly acted one. Ms. Plitmann made good theatrical use of the stage, entering far right on her first song, "Carefree Girl," and gradually working her way center to finish the cycle sitting at Mr. Slatkin's feet on the podium, as Della speaks directly to her children. I thought she perfectly captured Della's progression from carefree childhood to devastating personal losses in adulthood and, finally, poetic acceptance of her lot in life. The final two songs, "Our Garden" and "My Heart," were especially touching in their evocation of the contrast between the deaths of Della's mother and husband and the life of her garden. "The garden looked the same," Della wrote, "but everything had changed."

Leonard Slatkin
Photo by Nico Rodamel

The concert concluded with Tchaikovsky's popular Symphony No. 6, whose title, "Pathétique," is an example of what the French call a faux ami--a "false friend" that appears to be an English cognate but isn't. So while it looks like it should mean "pathetic", it is more property translated as "moving, touching, or poignant." The dark and dramatic first movement and, in particular, the despairing finale will move the most stony heart, and the absurdly rousing Allegro molto vivace third movement inevitably provokes applause.

Conducting without a score, Mr. Slatkin delivered a riveting, highly personal performance filled with subtle little touches that made it unlike any other performance of the work I have heard. The opening phrases in the bassoons, for example, were hushed and anguished. The first movement coda moved at a deliberate pace that made it feel like a candlelight procession. The tympani ostinato in the central section of the second movement had palpable tension. Small alterations in tempo added nuance to the boisterous third movement. And the yearning second theme of the final movement felt especially powerful.

The orchestra played beautifully, as always. Notable performances were turned in by bassoonists Andrew Cuneo and Felicia Foland, Scott Andrews on clarinet, and Tzuying Huang on bass clarinet. Thomas Jöstlein's horns acquitted themselves very well, and their muted notes in the finale had a truly threatening rasp. The strings had great depth and power, as they so often do.

The final measures faded out in despair, as they should, and would have been followed by a few seconds of silence if some members of the audience had not insisted on bursting into applause before Mr. Slatkin had lowered his arms. You really need a few seconds to exhale at the end of this piece, and Mr. Slatkin was trying to give it to us. As my wife remarked on the way out, people need to remember that the conductor leads the audience as well as the orchestra.

Next at Powell Hall: Music Director Designate Stéphane Denève conducts the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra and mezzo-soprano Rinat Shaham in the final concert of the season Friday and Saturday at 8 pm and Sunday at 3 pm, May 10-12. The program consists of "Nyx" by composer/conductor Essa-Pekka Salonen, Ravel's song cycle "Shéhérazade," and the "Symphonie Fantastique" by Berlioz. Performances take place at Powell Hall in Grand Center.

Preview: "I'm not afraid of going for emotion," a conversation with composer Jeff Beal

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

Composer Jeff Beal

St. Louis Symphony Orchestra Conductor Laureate Leonard Slatkin leads the orchestra in the second of a pair of concerts this weekend, May 3 and 4, 2019. During his tenure with the orchestra, Mr. Slatkin championed new works and infrequently heard pieces by American composers, so it's not surprising that this weekend's concerts features one of each.

The concerts will open with the Symphony No. 1 by Samuel Barber. Composed in 1935 and 1936 in Rome, the work netted him the American Prix de Rome at the ripe old age of 25. It's expansive, dramatic music with a wide emotional range--the sort of thing that made some critics dismiss him as "conservative" at a time when serialism was all the rage and actual melodies were seen as somehow déclassé. It's great stuff.

Up next is the new work: "The Paper Lined Shack," a song cycle by contemporary American composer Jeff Beal that's getting its world premiere this weekend. Mr. Beal is probably best known for his music for the TV series "House of Cards," but he also has extensive film and, more recently, concert credits. I talked with him late last week.

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Chuck Lavazzi (CL): I'd like to start off with a little bit about your background. I know you were a jazz trumpeter before you started composing, and that you picked up the trumpet at a very early age.

Jeff Beal (JB): Yes, I was in grade school--probably third or fourth grade--and I went to a school assembly with my dad where musicians were demonstrating different instruments. This guy picked up the trumpet and I pointed and said, "that's the one!" It's funny how your fate might get sealed at an early age, but I love the trumpet. It's a vocal instrument in many ways and it has always been a big part of my voice. When I started composing, I think improvising and being a jazz trumpet player opened the doors for me to be a composer.

CL: So you came to composing from the world of jazz. What was that transition like, moving from the freer atmosphere of jazz to composing for film and the concert hall?

JB: I think when you improvise in jazz, it really is a form of spontaneous composition. Also the other childhood connection that really influenced me was playing trumpet in the Oakland Youth Symphony Orchestra, which is a really fine youth orchestra. I'll never forget, we were playing Stravinsky's "The Rite of Spring," and I was listening to that incredible music, that mind of Stravinsky's, the colorful nature of it, and the fact that it was from a ballet so it had a narrative to it--and I knew that I wanted to write all kinds of music. Not just jazz but for the orchestra, to express my musical urges through composition.

CL: I was reading that you are something of a one-man band. You compose, orchestrate, and even engineer and record your own works. How does it feel to turn your artistic children out into the wild to be performed by others?

JB: That's a great question. Having done film for so long, I really missed that chance to connect back to the world of live performance. And I think I have relaxed a little bit. I'm 55 now and I'm more forgiving of the unpredictable nature of live performance. In fact, I really quite enjoy it.

One of the things I've discovered during these years of recording and producing my own scores is that often I prefer to use the first or second take, which is more like a live performance. So the energy of a live performance is one of the ultimate ways to not only have your work done but to listen to music.

I find myself going to a lot more concerts than when I was in the darkroom writing film scores. I think when you listen to music played live in a room by people something magical happens. For me it's like flying first class, especially with Hila Plitmann singing and Leonard Slatkin conducting. I couldn't be happier.

CL: The piece they're going to do is "The Paper Lined Shack," a song cycle. It's the world premiere. What has the experience been like working on that with the orchestra?

Soprano Hila Piltmann
Photo courtesy St. Louis Symphony Orchestra

JB: I had a session with Hila several weeks ago, and that was really useful. You always have a sense in your mind of what the piece is going to feel like and I do a little mock-up with the computers when I'm writing, but there's always something I learn when it really gets played by the orchestra and the way it lives and breathes in the room. I know I'm going to understand the piece in a different way, which is an enjoyable part of the experience for me. Whenever you're doing something for the first time, it has a life of its own and you're sort of discovering it, even if you wrote it. That's the amazing thing about music for me--it's a performance medium so I'm really looking forward to that.

One of things I like about Hila is that she always memorizes her music and she really takes on the story that she's singing. What she brings to it as a performer will be a powerful part of the piece.

CL: The text for "The Paper Lined Shack" is based on a diary by your great-grandmother Della that you found while unpacking some boxes.

JB: Yes, this was 20 years ago. My wife and I discovered it and she started reading it. I knew the general outline of what her story was, but reading it we thought "this is really special." There's some really beautiful writing, especially in the way she describes that crucial moment in her life when she was in Idaho pregnant with her sixth child and her husband got sick and died suddenly. She ended up raising these six kids on a farm by herself.

It was always in the back of my mind that it would be great to do something with this. I knew I wanted to have a strong female character for Hila because of her acting ability, something that really had dramatic weight, and that's when this came back to me. I read it with my wife Joan who helped me craft parts of this diary into a libretto. We both had similar ideas about the important images and parts of her life that we wanted in the song cycle.

CL: What made you think of this as a good choice for Leonard Slatkin and the SLSO?

JB: To me the St. Louis Symphony and Leonard Slatkin represent a very American take on culture and the part of the country that's dependent on the pioneer spirit, because anybody that didn't start on the East coast was a pioneer of some sort. Even though I grew up in San Francisco, I always felt that the West was part of the mythology of how I identified.

CL: I like the way your great-grandmother Della talks about her garden as part of the cycle of life.

JB: Yes, we bring that back in the last movement. I realized that's a really important part of my story as well. There's a documentary film I scored called "The Biggest Little Farm" opening May 10th. It's about a husband and wife that took over this farm in southern California, and I realized there's something powerful about that connection to the earth. There's something spiritual and mythical about it in a way, tapping into that universal part of the story.

This is a very personal text for me, but my hope is that, as a concert piece, it won't just be about my story. I hope that everybody will find something in Della that they can relate to. She was the only girl in a family of four brothers, so she was a kind of tomboy. This is the story of how she found her identity and a woman and became who she was. It's wonderful the humility she had and the lack of self-pity. It's a sort of Midwestern, Protestant work ethic that I find quite beautiful, hopeful, and not cynical.

I think we're living in such a horribly cynical time, politically and otherwise, so to me this isn't nostalgia. It's about values and celebrating the best we can be. The best of us.

CL: I think it also touches on something we seem very blind to in this country, which is our debt to the past. Americans seem to have this belief that the past doesn't matter and that we can reinvent ourselves every day, and that's just not real.

Della's paper lined shack

JB: I think that's a great point. I think inventiveness is great, but there's a danger in that. In fact, I rediscovered myself writing this.

I came up with the title based on a description of the house. It's really startling when you live in the modern era in a relatively wealthy country, it's a reality check to be reminded how so many people had so little and got by with so little and made it work.

CL: There's a picture of it in the program, so people will see it when the come.

JB: It has a kind of Ken Burns iconic look.

CL: Let's talk about the music. What are people going to hear when they experience "The Paper Lined Shack"?

JB: The music follows the beats of Della's life. It's somewhat chronological. So you first meet her as a young girl and the music has a childlike, playful character. There's energy and a definitely American sound. I'm really honored to be on the same program as Samuel Barber because his musical language is part of what I love.

The garden movement is much more lyrical and bittersweet. When Hila and I were rehearsing it we both started crying at a certain point because those are powerful words. I love music like that, that's cathartic. That probably goes back to my roots as a film composer. I'm not afraid of going for emotion in what I do. That part of what I love about being a composer, trying to communicate the feelings of an experience with somebody.

CL: I love these final words in the text: "It was love that we planted in the garden / There our hearts bloomed, / Our hearts opened. / Carry my heart." That feels like a wonderful way to close it.

JB: Thank you. I certainly hope people are moved by it.

CL: Is there anything more you want to communicate to the listeners?

JB: Well, Leonard Slatkin has been an important mentor in my life and I'm grateful to have him as a partner. His parents were very involved with film music, so he's not afraid to reach out to a film composer to write a piece of concert music. That's very special to me.

And I really feel--and I know Leonard feels this way too--that the more we can break down the barriers between "high" art and "low" art and the more we can have the story telling drive what gets played, I think that's the way music is going. I'm not the only one doing this and it's nice that this is starting to happen.

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The Essentials: Leonard Slatkin returns to conduct the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra and soprano soloist Hila Plitmann Friday at 10:30 am and Saturday at 8 pm, May 3 and 4 at Powell Hall in Grand Center. In addition to the Barber and Beal works, the concert features Tchaikovsky's Symphony No. 6 ("Pathetique"). In an interview with me last week, Mr. Slatkin said his interpretation "will perhaps remind audiences, sonically, of what that collaboration [with the SLSO] was like in the earlier days when I was music director. It has changed over the years, but for the next couple of weeks we old timers will show the kids how we used to play."