Symphony Preview: Twilight time

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

This weekend (October 18-20) Stéphane Denève returns to conduct the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra (SLSO) in an early 20th century program that moves from light to darkness (or at least twilight) with a lyrical pause in between.

The light comes first, in the form of a suite from Francis Poulenc's 1923 ballet "Les Biches." Written for the Ballets Russe and choreographed by the Polish dancer Bronislava Nijinska, it's an immediately appealing piece. Its fusion of classical and then-contemporary pop influences can easily be enjoyed without much concern about its original minimalist scenario or cultural references.

Francis Poulenc in 1922
Photo by Joseph Rosmand

That said, all that stuff makes pretty intriguing reading. This week's program notes by Tim Munro provide an excellent summary of the action accompanying each of the six selections of the suite, while the Wikipedia article on the ballet goes into considerable depth about the origins of the music and the contents of the full-length score. That full score consists of nine numbers, including three for mixed chorus with what, according to the University of Ottawa's Christopher Moore, the composer called "beautiful but slightly obscene texts (from the 18th century)".

And if that's not enough, conductor/scholar Leon Botstein has a fascinating article on the ballet's connections to the Surrealist movement in a program note for his 1992 performance of the suite with the American Symphony Orchestra at Carnegie Hall.

Even the title requires some footnotes. According to Poulenc's biographer Carl Schmidt (in "Entrancing Muse: A Documented Biography of Francis Poulenc") the composer acknowledged that biche, with its multiple possible meanings, is not really translatable into any other language. Wordreference, for example, will tell you it means "doe" ("a deer, a female deer...") as well as "darling" or "honey." Wikipedia adds that "it was also used as a slang term for a coquettish woman." Moore, in an article for the "Musical Quarterly," takes it a step farther, noting that "the word biches is itself pregnant with double entendre, referring most obviously to does, but also, in the underworld of Parisian slang, to a woman (or ironically, a man) of deviant sexual proclivities."

That synchs up with Mr. Munro's suggestion that the subtext of "Les Biches" includes veiled references the composer's sexual identity. "As a gay man in post-World War I France," he writes, "he masked the truth of his sexuality. A work like 'Les biches' allowed him to hint at topics and relationships otherwise taboo in polite society: the game of sexual courtship, gender fluidity, same-sex partnerships."

If that looks like a lot of heavy baggage for around 20 minutes of consistently beguiling music (or if your eyes just started to glaze over a couple paragraphs ago), here's a far more pithy summary by Maestro Denève from this week's program notes:

"Les biches" has something to do with Mozart. There is a saying: "Humor is the politeness of despair." In Mozart, you have music in a major key, which appears very light, but there is such sadness and melancholy behind it. Poulenc has this elegance--he was a dandy who would never complain--but you get hints of an internal despair. I programmed it to show that depth and lightness can go together.

Prokofiev in New York, 1918
Photo by Bain News Service

Up next is Prokofiev's Violin Concerto No. 1 in D major, op. 19, composed in 1917 but, because of the Russian revolution, not actually performed until 1923 when Serge Koussevitzky conducted the premiere in Paris. It wasn't particularly well received, partly because it's overall lyricism seemed tame compared to the kind of sarcastic and savage music for which the composer was known at the time.

I have quite a bit more to say about the Prokofiev concerto, but since I already said it in a preview article back in 2016, there's no need to plagiarize myself here. I merely note that its lyrical qualities don't make it any easier to play, so our soloist this weekend, Karen Gomyo, has her work cut out for her.

Fortunately, Ms. Gomyo is no stranger to Powell Hall, and has impressed the hell out of me every time I have seen her here. This past April, for example, I called her Tchaikovsky violin concerto "technically pristine and warmly expressive." I look forward to seeing what she does with this very different music.

This weekend's concerts conclude with Rachmaninoff's "Symphonic Dances," a work I have found oddly compelling since I first heard it on a 1961 LP recording by the Philadelphia Orchestra under Eugene Ormandy, who conducted the work's first performance in 1941. I was immediately struck by the "late night" feel of the piece--and not just because of the chimes in the last movement. It was only later that I learned that Rachmaninoff had, in fact, originally titled the three sections "Noon," "Twilight," and "Midnight." The composer dropped the titles, preferring the let the music speak for itself, and it does so eloquently.

Rachmaninoff in 1921
Public Domain, Wikimeida Commons

The work is filled with evidence of Rachmaninoff's genius as an orchestrator, with elaborate and complex string writing, inventive use of brasses and winds (including a short but poignant solo for alto sax), and an effective but never overwhelming use of the large percussion battery. This is dramatic music that is nevertheless steeped in autumnal melancholy--very appropriate now that fall seems to have finally arrived here.

The "Symphonic Dances" is the composer's last completed work (he died two years after its premiere), and there's a sense throughout of a life approaching its conclusion. "'Symphonic Dances'" writes Maestro Denève in this week's program notes, "is redeeming--it's a piece of hope. The ending is an Alleluia, a triumph over death. It was his last work, and maybe, because he composed this piece, he felt he could die."

The Essentials: Stéphane Denève conducts The St. Louis Symphony Orchestra along with violin soloist Karen Gomyo in Prokofiev's Violin Concerto No. 1, a suite fro Poulenc's ballet "Les Biches," and Rachmaninoff's "Symphonic Dances." Performances are Friday and Saturday at 8 pm, and Sunday at 3 pm October 18-20. Performances take place at Powell Symphony Hall in Grand Center.

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.