Symphony Preview: String theories

The string section is the backbone of the symphony orchestra, but even so, it’s rare to see them dominate a program the way they will when David Danzmayr conducts the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra (SLSO) at 10:30 am and 7:30 pm this Friday (December 1, 2023). The wind and percussion sections don’t show up until after intermission, and even then, there are only a “baker’s dozen” of them. Sounds that are plucked and bowed will be more common than those that are struck and (ahem) blowed.

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

Jessie Montgomery
Photo by Jiyang Chen

The concerts open with "Strum” by Jessie Montgomery (b. 1981), a violinist and composer whose colorful "Starburst" was the first piece to be played on the stage at Powell when it reopened on a limited basis on October 15th, 2020, after a seven-month shutdown due to the beginning of the COVID-19 epidemic. The composer says the title refers to "an upward and downward (back and forth) pizzicato stroke" for the strings that mimics the sound of a strummed guitar. "Drawing on American folk idioms and the spirit of dance and movement," she writes, "the piece has a kind of narrative that begins with fleeting nostalgia and transforms into ecstatic celebration."

It achieves that by employing a wide variety of techniques as the string players pluck, strum, and bow in ways that call to mind everything from Appalachian folk tunes to guitar rock. You can hear that right from the start in the Catalyst Quartet's recording in this week's Spotify playlist, with Ms. Montgomery herself on second violin. Given her participation, we can probably regard that as the definitive performance. It certainly rocks and sings with virtuosity and spirit.

First performed by members of the SLSO in its string quartet version in the fall of 2020, “Strum” will be heard this weekend in an arrangement for full string orchestra that had its first performance on October 14, 2023, by Sinfonia Rotterdam. This will be the local debut of this latest version.

Up next is the Concerto in A minor for Oboe and Strings, written in 1943–44 by Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872–1958). As the date indicates, this was a work written under the shadow of World War II, and in fact, its world premiere had to be postponed for over three months and moved from London to Liverpool because of the Luftwaffe’s bombardment of the British capital with the infamous V-1 flying bomb.

You’d never know that from the mix of moods that characterizes much of the concerto, though. The opening “Rondo pastorale” has a kind of thoughtful nostalgia and a pentatonic melody that evokes images of “England's green and pleasant land,” while the “Minuet and Musette” second movement continues in a bucolic vein with (as the title suggests) a mix of the court and country dances.

Ralph Vaughan Williams

The concluding “Scherzo” expands the emotional scope of the work significantly. It opens in a jaunty enough mood, but soon moves on to moments of longing and even anxiety before returning to the calmer world of the opening movement. It all concludes with a rapid mini cadenza ending on a sustained pianissimo high D that, “continues to strike fear into oboists.” Given that this Friday’s soloist is SLSO Principal Oboe Jelena Dirks, however, I don’t expect that to be an issue.

The concerts conclude with the Symphony No. 2 in D major, op. 36, by Ludwig van Beethoven (1770–1827). Written in 1802, the year in which the composer’s deafness was becoming apparent and in which he composed the famous “Heiligenstadt Testament”—a letter intended for (but never sent to) his brothers documenting his despair and hinting at suicide—the symphony shows not a trace of the anguish that plagued its creator. “In this Symphony,” wrote Hector Berlioz, “everything is noble, energetic, proud.” It’s as though the composer sought release from his dark mood in unstintingly sunny music.

Ironically, that unbridled cheerfulness rankled some stuffy critics at the work’s premiere at the Theater an der Wien on April 5th 1803. The French journal Tablettes de Polymnie grumbled about its “barbaric chords” that suggested “doves and crocodiles…locked up together.” The Vienna Zeitung für die elegante Welt declared it “a hideously wounded, writhing dragon that refuses to die.” Listening to the work now, one wonders what was up with those guys. A bad Schnitzel at the local Gaststätte maybe? In any case, audiences have found the Second Symphony pretty irresistible over the centuries. I expect you will as well.

The Essentials: David Danzmayr conducts the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra and oboe soloist Jelena Dirks in a program of Jessie Montgomery’s “Strum”, the Vaughan Williams Oboe Concerto, and Beethoven’s Symphony No. 2 on Friday, December 1, at 10:30 am and 7:30 pm. The performances take place at the Touhill Center on the University of Missouri—St. Louis campus. The Friday evening concert will be broadcast on Saturday, December 2, at 7:30 pm on St. Louis Public Radio and Classic 107.3 and will be available for streaming for a limited time at the SLSO web site.

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

Review: Get your war on

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

Cristian Macelaru

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War may be, as the classic songs says, good for absolutely nothing, but opposition to it has certainly inspired some great music, as the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra program this past weekend (March 10 and 11, 2018) demonstrated.

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

Guest conductor Cristian Macelaru led the SLSO in two works inspired by the horrors of World War I--Benjamin Benjamin Britten's 1940 "Sinfonia da Requiem" and Ralph Vaughan Williams's "Symphony No. 4" from 1931. Also on the program was the "Violin Concerto No. 3," one of several works Camille Saint Saëns wrote as part of a nationalist response to France's defeat in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71.

The Britten work opened Saturday night's concert with, literally, a bang on the tympani and bass drum. It's the beginning of the ominous tread of the death march that makes up the first movement (titled "Lacrymosa") of the "Sinfonia." Mr. Macelaru placed the percussion section on a platform at the back of the orchestra, which gave added power to their sound. He took that movement a bit on the slow side, which made the contrast with the skittering "Dies Irae" that followed that much more stark. The brass attacks were impressively crisp in the second movement and the concluding "Requiem aeternam," with its majestic plea for peace in the form of a noble and tranquil melody in the strings, had great power. It was, in short, a moving performance of a work that Britten (quoted in an April 27, 1940, piece in the New York Sun) said was intended to be "just as anti-war as possible."

The Vaughan Williams symphony that closed the concert is also fiercely anti-war, but whereas Britten's "Sinfonia" ends with peace, the Vaughan Williams is angry to the very end, expressing the composer's disgust with a world that had not only failed to learn the lessons of the First World War, but was determined to repeat the process.

From the harsh, dissonant opening--cribbed, as the composer would later admit, from the opening of the final movement of Beethoven's "Symphony No. 9"--to the complex fugal march of the finale, this is angry and ultimately nihilistic music. There's a kind of majestic horror to the piece, rather like a Shakespearean tragedy boiled down to its essence, and Mr. Macelaru's intensely committed performance brought out every bit of its drama.

The electrifying first movement had a compelling and savage intensity, with powerful playing by the strings and brasses. The despairing second movement was capped by a pristine performance of the sad flute solo by Mark Sparks, which contrasted strongly with the breakneck pace of the third, played with appropriately violent precision. The ominous transition to the deranged march of the fourth movement was perfectly paced and played with ferocious perfection.

James Ehnes
Photo by Ben Ealovega

I've always liked the Vaughan Williams Fourth, but I'd be less than honest if I didn't admit that listening to it can be emotionally exhausting, at least when it's done this well. It looked like it could be pretty physically taxing for the orchestra as well, but they all played beautifully.

The Saint Saëns concerto closed out the first half of the concert and while it, too, is a dramatic work, it's also elegant and charming. There's plenty of flash in the solo violin part, especially in the Spanish flair of the final movement (a reminder that the concerto was written with Pablo de Sarasate in mind), but there's also lyrical beauty in this music. That's most apparent in the second movement, a gently rocking barcarolle that concludes with a delicate duet for clarinet and violin harmonics.

Soloist James Ehnes is not, as I noted the last time he appeared here, a showy artist. Tall and imposing in white tie and tails, he cut a magisterial figure on stage Saturday night.

He approached the first movement with authority and restraint, but had no hesitation about throwing his whole body into its dramatic final pages. He and Mr. Macelaru gave the second movement a feathery delicacy, especially in the final duet with the clarinet, and they tore into the finale with impressive passion.

The standing ovation that followed was no surprise, but the encore was: Sibelius's "Humoresque No. 3 in G minor" for Violin and Orchestra, op. 89, no. 1. It's unusual to get an encore with orchestral accompaniment, but as Mr. Ehnes pointed out in his tongue-in-cheek introduction, "the maestro didn't think I had enough to do in that last piece." It was a completely charming miniature, conjuring up images of Finnish folk fiddling, and a great way to send us off to the intermission.

Next at Powell Hall: Bernard Labadie conducts the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra and soprano soloist Lydia Teuscher Friday and Saturday at 8 pm, March 16 and 17. The program consists of Haydn's "Symphony No. 99," the "Symphony in C minor" by Henri-Joseph Rigel, and opera and concert arias by Mozart. Resident Conductor Gemma New leads the orchestra in "Pinocchio's Adventures in Funland," a Family Concert on Sunday, March 18, at 3 pm. The concerts take place at Powell Symphony Hall, 718 North Grand in Grand Center.

Symphony Preview: War, what is it good for?

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

Benjamin Britten

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That most pernicious of human inventions, organized warfare, lurks in the background of the three major works that Cristian Macelaru will conduct in this weekend's St. Louis Symphony Orchestra concerts. It was the direct inspiration for one, indirectly responsible for another, and may (or may not) have been the idea behind the third.

The piece that opens this weekend's concerts, Benjamin Britten's 1940 "Sinfonia da requiem," is the most directly related to war. That's because, as Richard Freed points out in program notes for the Kennedy Center, "Britten was a dedicated pacifist, and actually a conscientious objector during World War II. In composing this work he undertook to register his personal feelings about war by calling his symphony a requiem and giving its three movements headings taken from the Roman Catholic Mass for the Dead--looking ahead, in a sense, to the War Requiem he would compose several years after the end of that war." Britten himself left no doubt about this when he was quoted in an April 27, 1940, piece in the New York Sun (quoted in Mervyn Cook's "Britten: War Requiem"): "I'm making it just as anti-war as possible ... I don't believe you can express social or political or economic theories in music, but by coupling new music with well-known musical phrases, I think it's possible to get over certain ideas ... all I'm sure of is my own anti-war conviction as I write it."

That didn't sit well with the Japanese government, which had commissioned the work (along with several others) as part of a celebration of the 2600th year of its reigning dynasty, and they ultimately rejected it. Given that they had already invaded China and would soon ally themselves with Germany and Italy, that's perhaps not too surprising.

It's certainly a powerful piece of music, opening with a dramatic bang on the tympani that sets the pace for the relentless death march of the first movement, subtitled "Lacrymosa" (all three movements take their titles from sections of the Catholic requiem mass). The "Dies irae" second movement is an eerie dance of death, and it's only in the final movement, "Requiem aeternam," that the mood turns to peace and (to quote Mr. Freed again) "balances the outrage and grief of the opening slow movement with a gesture of consolation and peace." We could certainly use some of that right now.

Camille Saint Saëns in 1900

Unlike the "Sinfonia," Saint Saëns's Violin Concerto No. 3 in B minor, op. 61, wasn't written as a response to the horror of war, but it does indirectly owe existence to a particular conflict: the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71. The conflict ended with a French defeat which, in turn, led to a nationalist movement among French composers, as discussed in Aspen Music Festival program notes:

Following the shock of French defeat in the Franco Prussian War (including months of a debilitating siege of Paris in late 1870 and early 1871), Saint Saëns was one of the leaders of a movement to reestablish French art, particularly with the aim of promoting musical forms that seemed to have been dominated for decades by German composers. This meant the abstract instrumental forms of symphony and concerto. Since the early part of Berlioz's career forty years before, there had been virtually no French composers interested in large form concert music, instead the opera and ballet attracted the attention of composers and audiences. Shortly after the Siege of Paris had been lifted, Saint Saëns founded the Société Nationale de Musique, with the motto "ars gallica," to promote new French music, especially in the abstract genres. In addition to Saint Saëns himself, the Society included in its organizing committee Fauré, Franck, and Lalo. Over the years the Society sponsored premieres of important new works by leading French composers.

By this time Saint Saëns had already composed three piano concertos and two violin concertos, but these early works were relatively light in character with frivolous finales that suited the prevailing mood of the frivolous Second Empire so well characterized by the flippant operettas of Jacques Offenbach. The later concertos--including the last two for piano, the Cello Concerto, and the Third Violin Concerto, are altogether more serious.

The Concerto No. 3 declares its dramatic nature from the first notes, as the soloist enters with a forceful, ascending theme over tremolo strings; no conventional orchestral introduction here! The second theme offers some lyrical contrast, but overall this is a movement that displays what the Aspen Festival notes describe as "a careful gradation of intensity and brilliance that was rare in French scores of the day."

The second movement is a gently rocking barcarolle that concludes with a delicate duet for clarinet and violin harmonics (that flute-like sound produced by lightly touching the strings instead of fully depressing them) that's a classic example of Saint Saëns's skill as an orchestrator. The finale has a Spanish flair that reminds us of the fact that the work was written with the great composer and violin virtuoso Pablo de Sarasate in mind.

It is, in short, a concerto that calls for both technique and artistic sensitivity. I look forward to seeing what Canadian violinist James Ehnes, this weekend's soloist, does with it. Reviewing his 2009 recording of the complete Paganini "Caprices," The Times (London) said that he displayed "playing of phenomenal control, allied to musicianship of the highest order," which certainly bodes well.

Finally, a few words about the Symphony No. 4 in F minor, written in 1931 by Ralph Vaughan Williams. It's a harsh, angry, and unapologetically dissonant work that took many listeners by surprise, particularly when compared with the apparent tranquility of his Symphony No. 3 ("A Pastoral Symphony") from 1921. As World War II began to heat up in the years following its 1935 premiere, some began to see it as a response to the rise of Fascism, although according to Vaughan Williams's biographer Michael Kennedy (in "The Works of Ralph Vaughan Williams," 1980) the composer himself explicitly disavowed that connection.

Ralph Vaughan Williams

Rather than anticipating World War II, many have seen the Symphony No. 4 as a reflection of the composer's experiences in World War I. This point is made tellingly by Byron Adams, in his notes for the American Symphony Orchestra . Pointing out that that "it may take veterans many years to process the horror they have witnessed in combat," he goes on to observe how this apparently played out in music Vaughan Williams wrote after The War to End All Wars:

The returning veteran initially seeks peace and regularity, as the natural response of violent indignation is put off as being too painful. In the case of Ralph Vaughan Williams, his searing experiences as a middle-aged stretcher-bearer and later as an artillery officer in the trenches of the First World War cast a shadow over his life thereafter. In the first years after his demobilization in 1919, he composed a series of scores--the "Pastoral" Symphony, the Mass in G minor and the one-act opera Shepherds of the Delectable Mountains--beneath whose deceptively placid surfaces lies muted but excruciating grief. Only in the1930s, when it seemed as if no one recalled the bitter lessons of the First World War, did Vaughan Williams explode with the controlled fury of his galvanic Fourth Symphony.

The fourth symphony also owes a debt to Beethoven. The composer himself (quoted by Elizabeth Schwartz at WQXR) admitted that he "cribbed ... the opening of my F minor Symphony deliberately from the finale of [Beethoven's] Ninth Symphony." British musicologist Oliver Neighbour, quoted in Mr. Adams's notes, actually suggested that the Vaughan Williams Fourth essentially rewinds the Beethoven Ninth in that "whereas Beethoven is able to dismiss his cacophony and turn to a vision of the brotherhood of man, Vaughan Williams's own Symphony ends where it began."

To me, the Vaughan Williams Fourth has always felt like a kind of aural afterimage of Beethoven's Fifth in that where Beethoven moves, over the course of his four movements, from aggression to triumph, Vaughan Williams proceeds to nihilistic despair. You can hear this most obviously in the transition from the third to the fourth movements. In both cases, the Scherzo fades to a ghostly end and then gradually builds to a big, imposing finale, but while Beethoven's final movement builds to a blaze of glory, Vaughan Williams's finale exhausts itself in what Mr. Adams describes as "a minatory parody of a triumphal march."

Both works are big, dramatic, and compelling, but after listening to the Vaughan Williams, I feel like I have just seen a Shakespearean tragedy in which (to quote Edgar Allan Poe) the hero is "the conqueror worm." That's why my favorite recording of the work is the live 1962 performance by Leonard Bernstein and the New York Philharmonic, which follows up the final angry notes of the symphony with Vaughan Williams's beautiful "Serenade to Music" for vocal soloists and orchestra. With a text taken from the discussion of music from Act V of "The Merchant of Venice," it's the ideal antidote.

The Essentials: Cristian Macelaru conducts the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra and violin soloist James Ehnes Saturday at 8 pm and Sunday at 3 pm, March 10 and 11. Also at Powell Hall this weekend: Grammy Award-winning singer and rapper Wyclef Jean joins the orchestra for "A Night of Symphonic Hip-Hop" on Friday, March 9th, at 7:30 pm. The concerts take place at Powell Symphony Hall, 718 North Grand in Grand Center.

Symphony Preview: Hit and Miss

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Unless you've sung in a choir or played in a concert band, you probably know Gustav Holst (1874-1934) only as the composer of his popular orchestral suite The Planets, Op. 32, a performance of which concludes the St. Louis Symphony's regular season this weekend, May 6-8, 2016. Singers will probably know Holst's many choral works, and recovering band geeks like yours truly are likely to be familiar with his two suites from 1909 and 1911, or his Hammersmith: Prelude and Scherzo from 1930. For everybody else, it's The Planets.

Gustav Holst in 1921
Photo: Herbert Lambert

Written between 1914 and 1916, The Planets was an immediate hit and made the previously unknown Holst something of a celebrity. This was not, as it turned out, a welcome development for the rather shy and retiring composer. Indeed, like many composers who became known for a single work, Holst eventually came to actively dislike his Greatest Hit. "Holst never wrote another piece like The Planets again," writes Kenric Taylor at gustavholst.info. "He hated its popularity. When people would ask for his autograph, he gave them a typed sheet of paper that stated that he didn't give out autographs."

If you've never heard The Planets before, you're in for a treat. I remember my delight the first time I heard this wonderfully cinematic seven-movement suite performed by the Vienna Philharmonic under Herbert von Karajan on a 1961 London Records disc. Back then my stereo wasn't much to brag about and the recording itself was a bit murky, but even so, from the first aggressive measures of "Mars, the Bringer of War"--an alarmingly mechanistic march in 5/4 time--I was hooked.

Inspired by the mythological and astrological aspects of the planets, the seven movements turn the heavenly bodies into characters and provide musical portraits of each one. "Mars" is all futile violence and dissonant brass. "Venus, the Bringer of Peace" floats in on a gentle horn solo, wafted along by flutes and strings. "Mercury, the Winged Messenger" zips along its triplets tossed around by the harp, strings, woodwinds, and celesta. And so it goes. Pluto hadn't been discovered yet and earth, of course, doesn't count in astrology, hence the seven movements instead of nine.

Ralph Vaughan Williams
in 1922

Holst actually got two hits out of The Planets, as it happens. The big, noble second theme from "Jupiter, the Bringer of Jollity" proved to be so popular that Holst later used it as a setting for Cecil Spring-Rice's poem "I Vow to Thee My Country." That version of the tune became a kind of second national anthem in England, along the lines of "America the Beautiful" over here.

Opening the concert will be a pair of works that are likely to be much less familiar: Ralph Vaughan Williams's Flos campi (Flower of the Field) from 1925 and Alban Berg's Fünf Orchesterlieder nach Ansichtskarten-Texten von Peter Altenberg (Five Orchestral Songs to Picture-Postcard Texts by Peter Altenberg), Op. 4 (a.k.a the Altenberg Lieder), from 1912. Both have been performed by the SLSO only once--the former in 1975 under Leonard Slatkin and the latter in 1966 with Eleazar de Carvalho at the podium--and neither one has exactly been on the "Top 40" with orchestras elsewhere.

In the case of the Vaughan Williams, it's partly a matter of the forces involved. In addition to the orchestra, Flos campi is scored for solo viola and mixed chorus--an unusual enough pairing to make programming it problematic. And the piece itself is a bit of an oddity in the composer's output. Cast in six movements and played without pause, it's a series of reflections on texts from one of the most openly sensual bits of the Bible, the Song of Solomon. By turns lyrical, sensuous, pastoral, and even cinematic, it's quirky stuff. Composer Phillip Cooke has called it "one of the silliest, most baffling and (in some parts) most un-Vaughan Williams piece that RVW ever wrote; it is part pastoral elegy, part crazy pagan party." But he then goes on to confess, "I love it."

The score is dedicated to the noted English violist Lionel Tertis and was, in fact, first performed with Tertis as the soloist in 1925 with Sir Henry Wood at the podium. Like Tertis, Vaughan Williams dearly loved the rich, dark sound of the viola and loved writing for it. Discussing the origins of Flos campi, Vaughan Williams's wife Ursula noted that "The viola with its capability of warmth and its glowing quality was the instrument he knew best."

Alban Berg

A different kind of darkness figures prominently in the Berg song cycle, which takes as its text the elliptical and eccentric poems of Peter Altenberg (real name: Richard Engländer). Engländer/Altenberg was an odd duck. "He is reputed to have spent most of his adult waking hours in coffeehouses," writes James Guida in a profile of the poet in The New Yorker, "and the sleeping ones in a hotel that was little more than a brothel. As for writing, his chosen medium was a feuilleton-style prose poem of anywhere from a sentence to a few pages in length, and he did wonders with it." He sent some of those little poems to his friends on postcards, and it's five of those that Berg set to intense and cryptically passionate music.

Like all of Berg's music, the Altenberg Lieder cram a lot of information into a very small amount of time--ten to twelve minutes in most performances. "Each of the songs is symmetrically conceived," writes Alexander Carpenter at allmusic.com, "that is, each begins and ends with similar, if not identical, harmonic or motivic gestures. The songs make considerable use of canon, passacaglia, and variation form." It was all apparently too much for the Viennese audience at the work's 1913 premiere, who booed and hooted like the Paris audiences at the first performance of Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring that same year.

Alas, Berg lacked Stravinsky's massive ego and talent for self-promotion, so instead of turning the audience reaction to his advantage, he retreated from composing songs entirely, choosing instead to concentrate on his orchestral works and his celebrated operas Wozzeck and Lulu. He might have achieved even greater things, but when the Nazis came to power he was denounced as a composer of entartete music ("degenerate music") and then had the misfortune to die in 1935 at the age of fifty from an infected insect bite. Such is the impact of dumb luck on human affairs.

The Essentials: David Robertson conducts the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra and Chorus along with soloists Christine Brewer, soprano, and Kathleen Mattis, viola, on Friday and Saturday at 8 p.m. and Sunday at 3 p.m., May 6-8. The program consists of Vaughan William's Flos Campi, Berg's Altenberg Lieder, and Holst's The Planets. Performances take place at Powell Symphony Hall, 718 North Grand.