Review: The St. Louis Symphony shows its virtuosity in music by Hindemith, Prokofiev, and Mussorgsky/Ravel

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

For some years now, the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra (SLSO) has been bringing younger guest conductors to town to make their local debuts on the Powell Hall stage. Every one of them has been very impressive, in my experience, leaving me with real hope about the future of classical music.

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

Marcelo Lehninger
Photo courtesy of the SLSO

This weekend was no exception, as Brazilian-born Marcelo Lehninger made his first St. Louis appearance last night (Friday, November 22) with an evening of music that showcased the virtuosity of both piano soloist Simon Trpceski and the members of the SLSO. Despite having to conduct from a chair because of a recently broken foot, Mr. Lehninger was a strong physical presence on the podium, leading the band in dynamic and insightful performances of this highly varied program.

He also had one of the most striking conductor entrances I have ever seen, gliding on stage on a small scooter that supported his temporarily disabled pedal extremity.

The concert opened with work that the SLSO presented for the first and (until this weekend) only time back in 1970: the "Concert Music for Strings and Brass," Op. 10, by Paul Hindemith. Composed in response to a commission by the Boston Symphony Orchestra in 1930, "Concert Music" is a product of what is often called the composer's "neoclassical" phase, although the densely contrapuntal texture really harks back to the Baroque era. Combine that texture with the unusual orchestration of a dozen brass instruments (four horns, four trumpets, three trombones, and a tuba) plus strings, and you have the potential for serious balance issues that could make the individual melodic lines hard to hear.

Happily, that wasn't the case Friday night. The strings got overwhelmed a bit at the beginning, but overall Mr. Lehninger made it easy to discern the individual threads of Hindemith's musical tapestry and got some excellent playing from the orchestra in the process. The SLSO strings were especially adept in their handling of the rapid passages that open the second half of the piece, and some minor intonation issues in the horns aside, the brasses were strong all the way through, with fine solos from Associate Principal Trumpet Tom Drake and Principal Trombone Tim Myers.

At around 17 minutes, the "Concert Music" is a short piece--a trait it shared with the next work on the program, Prokofiev's Piano Concerto No. 1, Op. 10, from 1912. Prokofiev played it as his entry for the prestigious Anton Rubinstein Prize for pianists at the St. Petersburg Conservatory in 1914 (which he won), and there's a kind of cocky, "look what I can do" attitude about the piece. Combined with the composer's trademark mordant sense of humor, it makes for an entertaining experience for the listener and a significant technical challenge for the pianist.

Simon Trpceski
Photo courtesy of the SLSO

And Simon Trpceski was certainly the man for the job. An internationally known artist whose career has taken him to every continent except (as far as I know) Antarctica, Mr. Trpceski played the best Rachmaninoff Third I've ever heard when he was here in 2015. He did an equally fine job with the Prokofiev, delivering every bit of wit and virtuoso flash in the first and third movements with an impeccable sense of style and a mischievous delight while giving full voice to the wistful nostalgia of the second. The result was a performance that was (to quote a Robert Palmer lyric) simply irresistible.

The audience response was warm and enthusiastic, resulting in not one but two Prokofiev encores: the "March" from his "Music for Children" and the "Scherzo Humoristique."

The evening concluded with a work that was no doubt as familiar to the orchestra as it was to the audience: Maurice Ravel's 1922 orchestration of Modest Mussorgsky's 1874 piano suite "Pictures at an Exhibition." Inspired by a visit the previous year to a posthumous exhibition of the works of Russian artist Victor Hartmann, Mussorgsky's original is as colorful and evocative as it is difficult to play. Ravel, who was justifiably regarded as an expert orchestrator, filled his transcription with ingenious touches, like the high woodwinds chirping away in the "Ballet of the Chicks in Their Shells"; the alto sax playing the voice of a troubadour in "The Old Castle"; the hair-raising evocation of "The Hut on Fowl's Legs" (home of the witch Baba-Yaga from Russian folklore); and the triumphant final movement, based on a sketch for "The Great Gate at Kiev".

That means there are multiple opportunities for individual members and sections of the orchestra to show off, and they certainly did so Friday night. Highlights included (but were not limited to) Principal Tuba Derek Fenstermacher's solo in "Bydlo," which pushes the instrument towards the very top of its register; Tom Drake's flawless delivery of the rapid fire trumpet line in "Samuel Goldenbereg and Schmuyle"; the haunting alto sax of Jeffrey Collins in "The Old Castle"; and the entire woodwind section for playing so precisely in the "Ballet of the Chicks in Their Shells" despite Mr. Lehninger's alarmingly fast tempo.

Speaking of Mr. Lehninger, he was once again a strong physical presence, clearly enjoying every moment of this work and putting his own personal stamp of this very familiar material without taking undue liberties. His take on the opening "Promenade" was magisterial. His "Gnomus" snarled and threatened. His decision to have the alto sax fade out slowly at the end of "The Old Castle" added a touch of sadness to the troubadour's voice. And his take on the closing "Great Gate of Kiev" had a degree of subtlety and marked dynamic contrast not always heard in this exultant finale. It was an altogether winning and captivating reading, garnering enthusiastic "bravos" from the crowd.

Next at Powell Hall: Andrew Grams conducts the orchestra and St. Louis Children's Choirs in a complete performance of Tchaikovsky's "Nutcracker" ballet, with special lighting design by Luke Kritzeck, whose portfolio includes work with the San Francisco Symphony, New World Symphony, and Cirque du Soleil. Performances are Friday and Saturday at 8 pm and Sunday at 3 pm, November 29-December 1.

Concert Review: Louis Lortie and Yan Pascal Tortelier deliver precise passion with the St. Louis Symphony, April 15 and 16, 2016

Louis Lortie
Photo: © Elias, rayfieldallied.com

Share on Google+:

Most folks come back from vacations with snapshots or souvenirs.  The great French composer Camille Saint-Saëns came back from a winter trip to Egypt with a piano concerto, which was performed with an ideal mix of power and style this weekend by Louis Lortie and the St. Louis Symphony under guest conductor Yan Pascal Tortelier.

First performed in May of 1896 with the 60-year-old composer at the keyboard, the Piano Concerto No. 5, Op. 103 quickly picked up the nickname "Egyptian" in part because Saint-Saëns himself wrote that the it "takes us, in effect, on a journey to the East and even, in the passage in F-sharp, to the Far East."  The music is filled with "Oriental" touches, especially in the second movement, the main theme of which Saint-Saëns said he got from boatmen on the Nile.  There are even brief passages where the pianist produces a kind of otherworldly sound by playing major tenths two octaves apart.  You can almost smell the exotic perfume.

Saint-Saëns was clearly a remarkable pianist, and his fifth concerto calls for a daunting combination of raw virtuosity and sensitivity.  Mr. Lortie clearly had plenty of both, delivering a performance with all the flash and power called for in the boisterous finale without short-changing the delicacy of that lyrical second movement.  He is, as I have noted in the past, a very visceral performer, with every emotion etched on his face and visible in his body language.  His emotional commitment to the music could not have been more total.

That makes him an excellent match for Mr. Tortelier, who seems to love the grand musical gesture as much as the intimate detail.  Working without a baton, he uses his very expressive hands to shape phrases one moment and then his entire body to raise a massive orchestral climax the next—which is exactly what he did in the work that opened the program, Paul Dukas's rarely heard Polyeucte Overture from 1891.

Inspired by a Corneille play about a Roman nobleman who converts to Christianity and suffers the usual deadly consequences, Polyeucte is big and dramatic—real Technicolor, wide-screen Romanticism.  Brooding, tragic passages are frequently interrupted by abrupt orchestral outbursts.  Mr. Tortelier attacked this music with real intensity, and the musicians responded with a perfect performance that deserved far more applause than it got from the Friday night audience.  It has been nearly a century since the SLSO last played this piece, so it was effectively new music for them, but they played as though they knew it all by heart.

Yan Pascal Tortelier
imgartists.com

The concert concluded with music the musicians probably do know by heart, Maurice Ravel's popular orchestration of Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition.  Inspired by an 1874 visit to a posthumous exhibition of the works of Russian artist Victor Hartmann, the piano original is colorful and evocative stuff, made all the more so by Ravel's expansion.  Justifiably regarded as an expert orchestrator, Ravel's work here is filled with ingenious touches, like the high woodwinds chirping away in the "Ballet of the Chicks in Their Shells", the alto sax playing the voice of a troubadour in "The Old Castle", the hair-raising evocation of "The Hut on Fowl's Legs", (home of the witch Baba-Yaga from Russian folklore) and the triumphant finale, based on a sketch for "The Great Gate at Kiev". 

That means there were multiple opportunities for individual members and sections of the band to show off, and they made the most of it.  For the first curtain call, Mr. Tortelier singled out Principal Horn Roger Kaza for his exemplary work as well as Principal Trumpet Karin Bliznik, whose ringing declamation of the recurring "promenade" theme got things off to such a stirring start and whose entire section performed with such impressive precision in the tricky "Samuel Goldberg and Schmuyle" movement. Principal Trombone Tim Myers on euphonium and Nathan Nabb on alto sax also got solo bows for their fine playing in the "Bydlo" and "Old Castle" movements, respectively.  Every section of the orchestra sounded stunning, in fact, and the strings had the wonderful richness that has come to typify their work.

Conducting without a score, Mr. Tortelier brought the same sense of high drama and nuance to this music that he had demonstrated throughout the evening.  His "Gnomus" had real menace, his "Ballet of the Chicks in Their Shells" was a masterpiece of brisk precision, and his powerful "Great Gate at Kiev" brought down the house.  The applause was loud, long, and entirely justified.

There is one more performance of this program at Powell Hall Saturday, April 16, at 8 p.m.  The St. Louis Symphony season continues next weekend, April 22 – 24, as Nathalie Stutzmann conducts the orchestra with violin soloist Karen Gomyo in music by Mendelssohn, Sibelius, and Dvorák.  Performances take place at Powell Symphony Hall, 718 North Grand.

Symphony Preview, April 15 and 16, 2016: Saint-Saëns's selfies

My wife and I have become dedicated travelers over the last couple of decades, but we can't hold a candle to the French composer Camille Saint-Saëns. Over the course of his long (1835-1921) and prosperous life, his peregrinations took him all over Europe as well as to England, the United States, and even (in 1896) to Algeria and Egypt.

Saint-Saën in 1900
By Petit, Pierre (1831-1909)
Photographer Restored by Adam Cuerden

A musical souvenir of the latter trip closes the first half of this weekend's St. Louis Symphony concerts as pianist Louis Lortie joins guest conductor Yan Pascal Tortelier for the Saint-Saëns Piano Concerto No. 5 in F major, op. 103. As Michael Steinberg writes in his program notes for the San Francisco Symphony, the concerto picked up its nickname, "Egyptian", from the composer's own comments about the piece:

Saint-Saëns had written the concerto during a winter vacation at Luxor in Egypt, which has some bearing on the second movement and perhaps the third as well. One of the more notable features of the amiable and unpressured first movement is an allusion to Dalila's gorgeous aria "Mon coeur s'ouvre à ta voix" from Samson et Dalila. Of the second movement, Saint-Saëns himself wrote that "it takes us, in effect, on a journey to the East and even, in the passage in F-sharp, to the Far East." First comes an extended introductory section, much of it like recitative, and then the music settles into a pleasant and serene song for piano and strings. Saint-Saëns said that it was "a Nubian love song which I heard sung by boatmen on the Nile as I myself went down the river in a dahabieh." The F-sharp major music to which he refers is the pentatonic melody, delicately scored and including the occasional distant vibration of the tam-tam. Some of the orchestral detail in this colorful piece will remind us of the most famous of all "Egyptian" compositions, the Nile scene in Aïda.

The sound of that second movement is so exotic that pianist Steven Hough once wrote a tongue-in-cheek explanation of how to achieve it for the April Fool's Day, 2012, edition of his blog at the Daily Telegraph. It's worth reading.

The "Egyptian" concerto hasn't been heard on the Powell Hall stage since 1977, by the way, so this is a rare opportunity for local classical music lovers to catch it live.

The other big work on this weekend's bill is an old favorite: Modest Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition, last performed here in January of 2013. It, too, was inspired by a trip, but in this case it was just to an exhibit of work by the Russian artist and architect Victor Hartmann.

Mussorgsky in 1870

Hartmann may only have been 39 when he died in 1873, but he had already gained considerable fame for his inventive uses of Russian folk traditions in his work. He might have remained unknown outside Russia, however, had he not become friends with the equally innovative composer Modest Mussorgsky. Attending an exhibition of Hartmann's works a year after the artist's death, Mussorgsky was so moved that he immediately dashed off a piano suite based on ten of the pictures at that exhibition. Unfortunately, Mussorgsky himself died—at the age of 42—before the suite could be published.

And there it might have rested had not Maurice Ravel been commissioned by Serge Koussevitzky to produce an orchestral version of Pictures at an Exhibition in 1922. The work was a rousing success that guaranteed Hartmann a prominent place in musical history and Mussorgsky a larger share of concert programs than he might have gotten otherwise.

Ravel was not, of course, the first to orchestrate Mussorgsky's suite; that honor fell to fellow Russian Michail Tuschmalov in 1886, the year in which the suite was first published. But he only arranged seven of the ten pictures and the next attempt—by Britain's Sir Henry Wood in 1915—eliminated some of the reoccurrences of the unifying "Promenade" theme, which represents Mussorgsky wandering through the exhibition. Ravel wasn't even the first to orchestrate the entire piece; the Slovenian Leo Funtek pulled that one off in the same year as the Frenchman. Ravel's has, however, remained the most popular of the over two dozen arrangements of the original, for everything from full orchestra to jazz band to (oddly enough) solo guitar.

This weekend it's the familiar Ravel orchestration that Mr. Tortelier and the band will be performing. If you have never heard it before, I think you'll be delighted by the many opportunities it offers for individual musicians to take the spotlight. Ravel is justifiably regarded as an expert orchestrator, and his expansion of Mussorgsky's original is filled with ingenious touches, like the high woodwinds chirping away in the "Ballet of the Chicks in Their Shells", the alto sax playing the voice of a troubadour in "The Old Castle", and the hair-raising evocation of "The Hut on Fowl's Legs", home of the witch Baba-Yaga from Russian folklore. This is music that never fails to please.

Paul Dukas

The concerts open with a work that hasn't been performed by the SLSO since 1920: the concert overture Polyeucte, written in 1891 by Paul Dukas. Inspired by a Corneille play about a Roman nobleman who converts to Christianity and suffers the usual deadly consequences, it was the composer's public debut, written the year he graduated from the Paris Conservatory. So it's probably not surprising (as Renée Spencer Saller writes in her program notes) that it shows the influence of someone who threw a very long shadow back then, Richard Wagner:

The overture opens with a threnody of low strings and moody woodwinds. Out of this luxuriant gloom, violins scurry; timpani rumble and roar. Piercing silences puncture orchestral swells. Plangent winds hint at the tragedy's romantic subplot. The subtle harmonic shifts and haunting timbres make the Wagner comparisons inevitable, but who cares? Fin-de-siècle Wagneriana doesn't get any better than this.

Too true. It's big, dramatic stuff: real Technicolor, wide-screen Romanticism and, at only a little over 15 minutes, considerably shorter than Corneille's five-act tragedy.

The Essentials: Friday and Saturday at 8 p.m., Yan Pascal Tortelier conducts the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra with piano soloist Louie Lortie in Saint-Saëns's Piano Concerto No. 5, Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition, and Dukas's Polyeucte Overture. Performances take place at Powell Symphony Hall, 718 North Grand. For more information: stlsymphony.org.