Review: Wintry mix

Hannu Lintu
Photo by Veikko Kähkönen

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

Attendance at the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra concert this past Saturday (September 29th) was rather light. Which was a shame, since it brought us a pair of impressive performances by violinist Leila Josefowicz and guest conductor Hannu Lintu.

Maestro Lintu is no stranger to the Powell Hall stage, having made several appearances here over the years, most recently in an all-Russian program this past April. He is a commanding and visually compelling figure on the podium who has a nearly ideal mixture of romantic intensity and intellectual control.

That combination of passion and precision was most obvious in the work that concluded this weekend's concerts, Dmitri Shostakovich's massive Symphony No. 11 in G minor, Op. 103, (subtitled "The Year 1905"), but you could see it in the newer works comprised the first half of the concert as well.

The evening opened with the American premiere "Flounce" by Finnish composer Lotta Wennäkoski (b. 1970). A commission by the BBC for its 2017 Proms concert series, Flounce, which clocks in at a brief five minutes, is something of an audio funhouse in which short phrases leap up like flying fish from (to continue the metaphor) a churning musical sea. The work opens with an exuberant orchestral outburst which soon gives way to more delicate textures that call for a wide variety of unusual techniques from the players before building again to a big and comically abrupt finish.

Among those unusual techniques, as Tim Munro observes in his program notes we see:

Brass players blow tone-less air through their instruments, producing gusts of white noise. Trumpeters slap their mouthpieces with palms, giving a popping sound, while trombonists make clacking noises with their tongue. Clarinetists clutch hard and quickly release the reed with their tongues, producing a sharp noise called a "slap tongue."

The string players get to make their share of odd noises as well by bouncing their bows, pressing them hard against the strings, playing on the "wrong" side of their bridges. "A single bass player," Mr. Munro writes, "makes a breathing sound by playing the wood below their strings (the tailpiece)."

Add a percussion section that includes a slide whistle, a Super Ball (by Wham-O, as seen on TV!), a "U-shaped vibraslap, the descendant of an instrument made from jawbones, emitting a rattle," and "a long tube filled with beans to produce the calming sound of rain" and you have a collection of noisemakers that even Spike Jones might have envied.

All this should be fairly entertaining, and it mostly is, although many of the more outré sounds were, at least in this performance, lost in the overall orchestral din. This is, I suspect, one of those works that will come across better on recordings than it does live. It's certainly easier to hear orchestral details in the BBC recording of the world premiere than it was in Powel Hall.

That said, the musicians of the SLSO did a bang-up job of it all, playing with enthusiasm and precision. Given the difficulty of the score and the quality of the performance, the response from the relatively small audience was disappointingly tepid. I can understand the lack of enthusiasm for the work itself--it's the sort of thing that doesn't much invite repeated hearing--but Mr. Lintu and the orchestra deserved longer and more enthusiastic applause for their hard work.

Leila Josefowick

Up next was the St. Louis debut of the 2009 Violin Concerto by another of Mr. Salonen's fellow countrymen, Esa-Pekka Salonen (b. 1958). Best known as the Music Director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic from 1992 to 2009, Mr. Salonen, like Mr. Lintu, studied conducting with Jorma Panula at the Sibelius Conservatory. This weekend's soloist, Ms. Josefowicz, worked closely with Mr. Salonen during the composition process and gave the work its world premiere.

In notes for the Violin Concerto on his publisher's web site, Mr. Salonen points out that his goal was "to cover as wide a range of expression as I could imagine over the four movements of the Concerto: from the virtuosic and flashy to the aggressive and brutal, from the meditative and static to the nostalgic and autumnal." I'd say he succeeded, although to my ears the work had an undercurrent of neurasthenic anxiety that lent an edge to even the more tranquil moments.

You can hear that nervous energy most clearly in the opening movement, titled "Mirage." Starting almost in midphrase, "as if the music had been going on for some time already" (to quote Mr. Salonen), the solo line dashes up and down in a brilliant "perpetual motion" display and while the emphasis shifts periodically to other parts of the orchestra the violin remains the focus of the movement and, indeed, the work as a whole.

Not for Mr. Salonen the alteration of solo and tutti passages of the classic concerto. Here the soloist plays more or less nonstop for the work's entire half-hour run time and employs just about every technique in the book. It's the sort of work that only a true virtuoso would attempt.

Needless to say, Leila Josefowicz is exactly that kind of virtuoso. Her technique was flawless, even in the most demanding passages (of which there are many). More importantly, though, she faithfully conveyed the wide range of moods Mr. Salonen was striving for. That included the somewhat nervous dreaminess of the second movement (titled "Pulse I"), the wild, jazzy excess of the "Pulse II" third movement ("Something very Californian in all this," writes Mr. Salonen. "Hooray for freedom of expression.") and the nostalgic sense of farewell in "Adieu," the final movement.

This time around the audience's applause was sustained and enthusiastic. Ms. Josefowicz's performance had great physical energy, virtuoso flair, and good, close communication with Mr. Lintu. She deserved every bit of the standing ovation she received. Also singled out in curtain call bows for their solo work during the concerto were Associate Principal oboe Phil Ross, Assistant Principal viola Jonathan Chu, and Principal cello Daniel Lee.

The Shostakovich symphony took up the second half of the program. Indeed, at nearly 70 minutes, it was almost twice as long as the entire first half. Written in 1957, this sprawling, cinematic work was, publicly, a memorial to the "Bloody Sunday" massacre of a group of unarmed protestors by the Imperial Guard of Tsar Nicholas II on January 9th, 1905. It was a key event in the 1905 Russian Revolution which led, in turn, to the overthrow of the Tsarist regime in 1917. Privately, though, Shostakovich apparently had a different act of political violence in mind: the bloody repression by Soviet forces of the Hungarian uprising in October of 1957. "Don't forget," he said to choreographer Igor Belsky, "that I wrote that symphony in the aftermath of the Hungarian Uprising." (cited in "Shostakovich: A Life Remembered" by Elizabeth Wilson).

When I saw Mr. Lintu conduct Shostakovich's harrowing Symphony No. 8 back in 2015, I was very taken with the way his perfectly calibrated interpretation honored the composer's every note. I heard that same degree of keen musical insight in his approach this time as well.

There is usually a mix of horror, beauty, tragedy, and triumph in Shostakovich's more mature symphonies, and the Eleventh is no exception. Despite the work's epic length, it grabs the listener's attention from the ominous, wintry string chorale and distant trumpet and horn calls of the opening and doesn't let up until the defiant finale. Yes, the graphic musical description of the massacre in the second movement is the sort of thing that apparently moved British musicologist Robert Layton to describe Shostakovich (in the 1967 Penguin Books edition of "The Symphony") somewhat dismissively as a "documentary composer," but I think Shostakovich transmuted those external experiences into something that transcended external influences.

Mr. Lintu and the musicians delivered that sound with tremendous power. There was a number of striking solos throughout the work, including Cally Banham's mournful English horn and Tzuying Huang's bass clarinet in the final movement.

That final movement, by the way, concludes with a massive G minor chord on the tubular bells, openly contradicting the orchestra's more optimistic G major chord. The combined sound of the bells and gong has a long decay time, and Mr. Lintu clearly intended that chord to slowly die away before lowering his arms and turning to accept the audience's applause. Some of the audience didn't wait for that to happen Saturday night. Mr. Lintu looked bemused. I don't blame him. The enthusiastic ovation was deserved, but giving the work a few seconds to truly end would have been more respectful.

From St. Louis, Mr. Lintu moves on to guest spots in Baltimore, Boston, Tokyo, Singapore, and Cincinnati before returning to Finland and the Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra. He currently has no return engagement scheduled with the SLSO, but given his apparent popularity with both audiences and orchestral management, I expect that we will be seeing him again before too long.

Next at Powell Hall: 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 ("Pastorale") 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.

Symphony Preview: Points of Departure

Violinist Leila Josefowicz
Photo: Chris Lee

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David Robertson conducts the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra this weekend (Friday and Saturday, September 30 and October 1) in a program consisting of just two big works: John Adams's 1993 Violin Concerto and Beethoven's Symphony No. 3 in E-flat major, op. 55 ("Eroica") from 1803. Despite the 190 years that separate them, they have something in common: they both represent a distinct stylistic departure for their respective composers.

Beethoven's departure came about as a result of a re-evaluation of his life, described in an 1802 document now known as the "Heiligenstadt Testament." It is, as most classical fans will recall, a letter Beethoven wrote to his brothers Carl and Johann at the town of Heiligenstadt (now part of Vienna) in which he told of his despair over his increasing deafness and his struggles with thoughts of suicide. The letter was never delivered (it was found among his papers after his death in 1827) and seems, in retrospect, to have acted as a kind of catharsis for the composer. Before the "Testament" he was a composer/pianist. Afterwards, he would be exclusively a composer.

It also marked the beginning of the emergence of his unique compositional voice. His first two symphonies were clearly in the mold of Haydn and Mozart. But with the "Eroica" Beethoven created, as Paul Schiavo writes in his program notes, "a new musical genre, the Romantic symphony."

And what a symphony! Those first two big chords are almost like a gauntlet thrown down to challenge established notions of what a symphony should be. Indeed this first movement displays, in Mr. Schiavo's words, a "dramatic intensity [which] was unprecedented in symphonic composition and remains rarely, if ever, equaled two centuries and more later."

The drama continues with the heroic funeral march of the second movement, the restless energy of the third movement scherzo, and the towering finale-a set of elaborate variations followed by a powerful coda. It clocks in at around fifty minutes, which no doubt seemed absurdly excessive to audiences accustomed to symphonies half that length. "One early critic," writes Welsh musicologist David Wyn Morris, "described it as 'a very long-drawn-out daring and wild fantasia' which, at least, reveals a response to its emotive power."

Composer John Adams
Photo: Vern Evans

The finale is also a classic example of musical recycling. The theme that serves as the basis for the variations was originally part of a set of twelve "Contredanses" Beethoven wrote between 1791 and 1802. It seems to have been a favorite of his, popping up again in (among other places) his score for the 1802 ballet The Creatures of Prometheus. Composer and writer Drerk Strahan has suggested that Beethoven saw it as a "hero" theme. It certainly becomes heroic in the course of the final movement of the "Eroica."

The departure for John Adams was somewhat less dramatic, and it was the choice of the violin as the solo instrument that initiated it. "A concerto without a strong melodic statement is hard to imagine," recalls the composer. "I knew that if I were to compose a violin concerto I would have to solve the issue of melody. I could not possibly have produced such a thing in the 1980's because my compositional language was principally one of massed sonorities riding on great rippling waves of energy. Harmony and rhythm were the driving forces in my music of that decade; melody was almost non-existent."

"As if to compensate for years of neglecting the 'singing line,'" he continues, "the Violin Concerto (1993) emerged as an almost implacably melodic piece-a example of 'hypermelody.' The violin spins one long phrase after another without stop for nearly the full thirty-five minutes of the piece. I adopted the classic form of the concerto as a kind of Platonic model, even to the point of placing a brief cadenza for the soloist at the traditional locus near the end of the first movement."

Having listened to the concerto, though, I have to say that I'm not sure it's as big a departure from the composer's usual style as his comments suggest. His "hypermelody" does, indeed, unfold as described, but it's ultimately composed of the kind of individual motivic "cells" that characterize so much of the composer's other works. Add up enough minimalism, it seems, and you get a long and winding road of lyricism.

The singing first movement gives way to a second movement based on the old Baroque form of the chaconne, which features a series of increasingly elaborate variations on a simple theme repeated in the bass line. That theme might sound familiar to sharp-eared listeners since it's remarkably close to the little sequence that underscores the words "Space: the final frontier" in the theme of the classic TV show Star Trek. If you doubt me, take a few minutes to view CBC Radio 2 host Tom Allen's tongue-in-cheek video documentary on the lineage of that theme; it's fascinating stuff. I don't know whether Mr. Adams was ever a Star Trek fan or not but he's of the right vintage, so anything is possible.

The concerto ends in a blaze of virtuoso fireworks with the driving "Toccare" third movement. It's the sort of thing that gives a truly proficient violinist a chance to show off and, as the composer notes, "many violinists have taken on the piece, and each has played it with his or her unique flair and understanding. Among them are Gidon Kremer (who made the first recording with the London Symphony), Vadim Repin, Robert McDuffie, Midori and, perhaps most astonishingly of all, Leila Josefowicz, who made the piece a personal calling card for years."

The soloist this weekend will, in fact, be Ms. Josefowicz. So it looks like we can expect an authoritative performance. Mr. Robertson has also shows a strong affinity for the music of John Adams, so the work will be in good hands.

The essentials: David Robertson conducts the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra with violin soloist Leila Josefowicz on Friday and Saturday at 8 p.m. September 30 and October 1. [The concerts take place at Powell Symphony Hall, 718 North Grand in Grand Center. The Saturday concert will be broadcast, as usual, on St. Louis Public Radio.

Symphony Preview, February 19 and 20, 2016: The Shakespeare celebration begins

Shakespeare has inspired an astonishing amount of music over the centuries, and over the next four weeks the St. Louis Symphony, in partnership with Shakespeare Festival St. Louis, is giving us a wonderfully varied sampler of it.

The "Chandos Portrait" of Shakespeare
en.wikipedia.org

The orchestra's four-concert Shakespeare series begins this Friday and Saturday with a program that spans over a hundred and fifty years, beginning with the overture to Hector Berlioz's 1862 opera "Béatrice et Bénedict," based on Shakespeare's comedy "Much Ado About Nothing."

Berlioz wrote the libretto himself (even though he neither spoke nor read English all that well), considerably condensing the original "battle of the sexes" comedy in the process. Huge swathes of plot were axed, along with great comic characters like Constable Dogberry. Nevertheless, it's still (to quote NPR's "World of Opera") "an appealing and insightful comedy" that combines "the signature brilliance and bombast" of Berlioz with " the sly, comedic insights" of Shakespeare's play. And while it doesn't make the world-wide top 50 at operabase.com, it does come in at number 32 in France, where both it and Berlioz's other big Shakespeare opera, "Romeo et Juliette," remain fairly popular.

The overture quotes extensively from the opera but, Berlioz being the skilled composer that he was, it's more than just a collection of tunes. "The Overture," writes Michel Austin at The Hector Berlioz web site, "is one of Berlioz's most delicate and subtle orchestral pieces, and its allusiveness constantly teases the listener...Though drawn from no less than six different arias or ensembles, the music is seamlessly fused by Berlioz into a coherent symphonic whole, much as Weber had done in his overtures to Der Freischütz, Euryanthe and Oberon." And it manages all that in just around eight minutes.

Harriet Smithson as Ophelia
en.wikipedia.org

Berlioz, as you may recall, became smitten with both Shakespeare and the Irish Shakespearean actress Harriet Smithson at the same time. He wooed her for years and finally won her after convincing her to attend a performance of the work that she inspired, his titanic "Symphonie Fantastique". They were married after Berlioz threatened to kill himself with an opium overdose if she didn't say "yes". Alas, the marriage, unlike Berlioz's fascination with Shakespeare, did not last.

In addition to operas, Shakespeare has inspired his share of great incidental music to accompany his plays. Probably the best-known Shakespearean score was composed by Mendelssohn for a production of "A Midsummer Night's Dream" in 1842. The symphony will be performing that next weekend, but this weekend we get selections from Sibelius's far less familiar score for a 1926 Royal Theatre of Copenhagen production of "The Tempest."

Written late in Shakespeare's career (it may, in fact, be the last thing he wrote without a collaborator) "The Tempest" has an autumnal feel to it. As Wikipedia notes, "early critics saw Prospero as a representation of Shakespeare, and his renunciation of magic as signaling Shakespeare's farewell to the stage." In this respect, Prospero's speech in Act IV becomes especially poignant:

Our revels now are ended. These our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits and
Are melted into air, into thin air;
And—like the baseless fabric of this vision—
The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve,
And like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep

Sibelius in 1923
Photo by Henry B. Goodwin
en.wikipeida.org

It seems only fitting, then, that Sibelius's score for "The Tempest" was one of the last things he wrote before the great compositional silence that marked the last three decades of his life. As Prospero put down his books, so Sibelius put down his pen—but not before creating a big, impressive score of 34 pieces (plus an Epilogue written a year later), for vocalists, mixed-voice choir, harmonium, and a large orchestra.

The composer would later reduce the music to two suites, but for this St. Louis premiere performance Maestro Robertson has pulled selections together from both suites and combined them with readings from the play by actors whose names and voices will likely be familiar to St. Louis theatre lovers. St. Louis stage veteran Joneal Joplin will play Prospero, with the versatile Ben Nordstrom and Webster Conservatory student Sigrid Wise and the lovers Ferdinand and Miranda. The sprite Ariel will be played by another Webster Conservatory student,t August Stamper. They'll be directed by Shakespeare Festival of St. Louis Associate Artistic Director Bruce Longworth and dressed by Festival costumer Abby Dorning. Michael B. Perkins, whose work has enhanced local theatre and opera productions, will be providing video design.

After intermission, Shakespeare takes a back seat to the "Thousand and One Nights" as violinist Leila Josefowicz joins the orchestra for John Adams's "Scheherazade.2." First performed last March by Ms. Josefowicz and the New York Philharmonic under Alan Gilbert, this "Dramatic Symphony" was inspired by a visit to an exhibit at the Institute du Monde Arabe in Paris, the theme of which was the history of the Arabian Nights stories.

What Mr. Adams took away from the exhibit, however, was not the exotic orientalism that inspired Rimsky-Korsakov's famous "Scheherazade," but—as he writes on his web site—something much darker:

The casual brutality toward women that lies at the base of many of these tales prodded me to think about the many images of women oppressed or abused or violated that we see today in the news on a daily basis. In the old tale Scheherazade is the lucky one who, through her endless inventiveness, is able to save her life. But there is not much to celebrate here when one thinks that she is spared simply because of her cleverness and ability to keep on entertaining her warped, murderous husband...

So I was suddenly struck by the idea of a "dramatic symphony" in which the principal character role is taken by the solo violin—and she would be Scheherazade. While not having an actual story line or plot, the symphony follows a set of provocative images: a beautiful young woman with grit and personal power; a pursuit by "true believers;" a love scene which is both violent and tender; a scene in which she is tried by a court of religious zealots ("Scheherazade and the Men with Beards"), during which the men argue doctrine among themselves and rage and shout at her only to have her calmly respond to their accusations); and a final "escape, flight and sanctuary" which must be the archetypal dream of any woman importuned by a man or men.

John Adams
Photo: Lambert Orkis, earbox.com

You can find a more detailed description of the work in René Spencer Saller's program notes and a complete performance on YouTube. Mr. Adams's music has become quite challenging lately, so I'd recommend taking the time to read the former and hear the latter. This is a highly dramatic and emotionally charged piece, often quite intense and even disturbing. You will want to be prepared.

Ms. Josefowicz is not the only soloist in " Scheherazade.2," by the way. The work also features a prominent role for the cimbalom, a hammered dulcimer commonly used in Hungary and nearby nations like Poland, Croatia, the Czech Republic, and Greece. The cimbalom is featured prominently in Zoltán Kodály's "Háry János" suite as well as in works by Stravinsky, Liszt, and Bartók. Adams uses it for a variety of atmospheric effects, including a somewhat delirious duet with the violin in the second movement, "A Long Desire (Love Scene)". The cimbalom soloist this weekend is Chester Englander.

The essentials: David Robertson conducts the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra and violin soloist Leila Josefowicz in music by Sibelius, Berlioz, and John Adams at 10:30 a.m. and Saturday at 8 p.m., February 19 and 20. There will also be a special " Tales from Shakespeare" Family Series concert on Sunday at 3 p.m. Performances take place at Powell Symphony Hall, 718 North Grand. For more information: stlsymphony.org.