Symphony Preview: Darkest before the dawn

“The best laid schemes o’ Mice an’ Men,” wrote Robert Burns back in 1785, “Gang aft agley.” Today I might add “and of symphony orchestras as well.”

[Preview the music with my Spotify playlist.]

This weekend, composer/conductor Sir James MacMillan (b. 1959) was originally scheduled to conduct the St. LouisSymphony Orchestra in a program that would have included two of his own compositions: “The World’s Ransoming” for English horn (cor anglais) and orchestra, with SLSO Principal English horn Cally Banham as soloist, and his Violin Concerto No. 2 with Nicola Benedetti, who gave the work its world premiere last fall.

Portrait of Mendelssohn by
James Warren Childe
(1778–1862), 1839
en.wikipedia.org

The good news is that Banham is still on the program. The bad news is that Benedetti is not, due to illness. Replacing the concerto will be “The Hebrides (Fingal's Cave),” op. 26 by Felix Mendelssohn (1809–1847). Given that both MacMillan and the inspiration for Mendelssohn’s overture are Scottish, that seems appropriate.

Last heard here in 2017, Mendelssohn's overture powerfully summons up the wild and brooding Scottish islands that the composer visited in 1829. His specific inspiration was a visit to Fingal’s Cave on the uninhabited island of Staffa. “With its echoing acoustics, which emphasised the sound of rumbling waves,” writes Hannah Neplova of the BBC Music Magazine, “Fingal's Cave made a deep impression on Mendelssohn, who later sent his sister Fanny a postcard, with the work's opening theme, that read: 'In order to make you understand how extraordinarily the Hebrides affected me, I send you the following, which came into my head there.'”

The actual overture would take three years to write, with the final revised version getting its first performance in Berlin in 1833, with the composer at the podium. Given the overture’s enduring popularity, it looks like it was worth the wait.

The dark and stormy atmosphere of “The Hebrides” turns out to be a good prelude to the musical darkness of “The World’s Ransoming.” Composed in 1995/96 on a commission from the London Symphony Orchestra, it is as the composer relates in his program notes, the first of a series of three works related to the events and liturgies of the Easter Triduum—Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, and the Easter Vigil:

The World’s Ransoming focuses on Maundy Thursday and its musical material includes references to plainsongs for that day, Pange lingua and Ubi caritas as well as a Bach chorale (Ach wie nichtig) which I have heard being sung in the eucharistic procession to the altar of repose. The cor anglais part emerges from the orchestra to carry the lamenting ritual through a long, slow and delicately scored introduction and then through a process of metric gear-changes as the music becomes more animated.

Sir James MacMillan
Photo courtesy of the SLSO

The title of the work refers to the final lines of Pange lingua (by St. Thomas Aquinas) which describe Christ’s blood “shed for the world’s ransoming.”

The sense of anxiety and lamentation is strong in this music, enhanced by the dark and melancholy sound of the English horn. The piece opens with angry growling sixteenth notes in the low woodwinds that quickly expand to the flutes and brass sections. Violent interjections from the tympani lead to a massive dissonant outburst that quickly subsides to make way for the elaborately melismatic solo line of the English horn. More violent outbursts pop up as well as a weird setting of the Bach chorale for muted brass, wood blocks, and agogo bells that has an unsettling feel of Shostakovich-style mockery.

It all ends with a flurry of sixteenth and thirty-second notes in the woodwinds, a last despairing solo from the cor anglais, and finally, a few measures of whacks on large plywood cubes. The composer says that these “[set] the scene for the next piece in the cycle, the Cello Concerto.” Heard all by themselves, they bring the work to an oddly enigmatic conclusion.

The Easter theme continues after intermission with the “Russian Easter Overture,” Op. 26, written by Nicolai Rimsky-Korsakov (1844–1908) in 1888, the same year as his Greatest Hit, “Scheherazade”.  Like both “The Hebrides” and “The Ransoming of the World,” this is music that begins in sonic darkness—in this case, the darkness of Passion Saturday, which precedes the unbridled celebration of Easter Sunday, the major holiday of the Orthodox Christian year.

The work is so well-known and so vividly described by the composer in chapter 20 of his autobiography “My Musical Life” (where it title is given as the “Easter Sunday Overture" in the 1923 Judah A. Joffee translation) that I’m going to just refer you there. It’s quite an interesting read, especially the part wherein the composer (who was not a believer) points out that his sonic description of Easter is as much about the holiday’s pagan origins as it is about its importance in the Christian calendar:

And all these Easter loaves and twists and the glowing tapers…. How far a cry from the philosophic and socialistic teaching of Christ! This legendary and heathen side of the holiday, this transition from the gloomy and mysterious evening of Passion Saturday to the unbridled pagan-religious merry-making on the morn of Easter Sunday, is what I was eager to reproduce in my Overture.

Portrait of Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov in 1898
by Valentin Serov (detail)
en.wikipedia.org

He went on to add that “in order to appreciate my Overture even ever so slightly, it is necessary that the hearer should have attended Easter morning-service at least once and, at that, not in a domestic chapel, but in a cathedral thronged with people from every walk of life with several priests conducting the cathedral service.” Most of us haven’t had that experience, but at least you can hear a fine performance of it by Yuri Termirkanov and the New York Philharmonic on my Spotify playlist. Or, if you want a closer look, check out the YouTube performance by USSR Symphony Orchestra conducted by Evgeny Svetlanov, which comes with a synchronized score.

Christianity—or at least Dante’s version of it in the “Inferno” section of his “Divine Comedy”—pops up again in the evening’s Big Finish, “Francesca Da Rimini: Symphonic Fantasy after Dante,” op. 32, composed in 1876 by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky (1840–1893). “I wrote it with love and love has turned out pretty well, I think,” he wrote to his brother Modest in October of that year. Audiences have generally agreed; this big, highly charged tone poem is often performed and is well represented on recordings.

Francesca Da Rimini (original name Francesca Da Polenta) was a real noblewoman in 13th-century Italy. The daughter of Guido da Polenta, ruler of Ravenna, Francesca was married off to one Gianciotto Malatesta, whose family ran the show in Rimini, just to the south. As is sometimes the case in marriages of political convenience, this union was not an especially happy one, and Francesca became embroiled in an affair with Gianciotto’s brother Paolo. Giancotto discovered the pair in flagrante delicto and, in a classic display of poor impulse control, murdered them both.

Tchaikovsky circa 1872
en.wikipedia.org

In the medieval moral universe, this meant that Francesca and Paolo were condemned to the second circle of Hell. In Canto V of “inferno” Dante (in the John Ciardi translation) describes this as:

a place stripped bare of every light
And roaring on the naked dark like seas
Wracked by a war of winds. Their hellish flight
Of storm and counterstorm through time foregone,
Sweeps the souls of the damned before its charge.

Here are “those who sinned in the flesh, the carnal and lusty / Who betrayed reason to their appetite.”  This does not, apparently, include guys like Giancotto, who simply betrayed reason for a little casual murder.

But I digress.

Tchaikovsky’s tone poem opens and closes with a vivid depiction of Dante’s “storm and counterstorm” in which strings and winds swirl madly over blasts of brass and percussion. This brackets a lavishly romantic section in which, as in Dante’s original, Francesca tells the story of her ill-fated romance. Dante is so moved that:

I felt my senses reel
And faint away with anguish. I was swept
By such a swoon as death is, and I fell,
As a corpse might fall, to the dead floor of Hell.

Tchaikovsky translates that into an especially violent and impassioned coda, with multiple brass chords and cymbal crashes depicting the poet’s collapse.

The Essentials: James MacMillan conducts the orchestra along with SLSO Principal English Horn Cally Banham in Mendelssohn’s “The Hebrides,” Rimsky-Korsakov’s “Russian Easter Overture,” Tchaikovsky’s “Francesca da Rimini,” and MacMillan’s “The World’s Ransoming.” Performances are Friday at 7:30 pm and Saturday at 8 pm, February 10 and 11, at Powell Symphony Hall in Grand Center. The Saturday performance will be broadcast live on St. Louis Public Radio and Classic 107.3.

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

Symphony Preview: On wings of song

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

Einojuhani Rautavaara

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"Human music making," as music blogger Darren Giddings reminds us, "has been inspired by birdsong throughout history." If you doubt that, take a look at the program Resident Conductor Gemma New and the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra will be presenting this weekend (March 23-25, 2018).

The most obvious example of this is the second work on the program this weekend: "Cantus Arcticus, Concerto for Birds and Orchestra," written in 1972 by Finnish composer Einojuhani Rautavaara. A student of Finland's most celebrated composer, Jean Sibelius, Rautavaara (as René Spencer Saller points out in her program notes) "shared with his mentor a devotion to the natural world and the pleasures of tonality." Sibelius's admiration of the sounds of birdsong never got quite as literal as Rautavaara's does in this piece, though.

Commissioned by the University of Oulu to write a work for the school's first doctoral degree ceremony, Rautavaara responded not with the expected pomp and circumstance but rather with a work of lonely, ethereal beauty that uses recordings of bird songs from Oulu and the surrounding area as a major sonic element. You can find a more detailed description of the music by Chris Morrison at Allmusic.com, but rather than just reading about it, I'd like to recommend listening to it on line before you go. There's a performance by the Leipzig Radio Symphony Orchestra on YouTube that includes a synchronized display of the score--which will give you a sense of just how technically challenging this music is.

The other work in which recorded birdsong plays an important role is Ottorino Respighi's "The Pines of Rome," the second in his popular trilogy of tone poems evoking the sights and sounds of his native city--including the recorded song of a nightingale. Here's the composer himself (writing in the third person) describing what he had in mind (quoted in Dr. Richard E. Rodda's program notes for the National Symphony Orchestra):

While in his preceding work, Fountains of Rome, the composer sought to reproduce by means of tone an impression of nature, in Pines of Rome he uses nature as a point of departure, in order to recall memories and visions. The centuries-old trees which dominate so characteristically the Roman landscape become testimony for the principal events in Roman life.

"Pines" opens with children playing boisterously around "The Pines of the Villa Borghese," then changes to "The Pines Near a Catacomb," where a mysterious chant begins and then suddenly stops. Then the moon rises, and the music depicts the peaceful "Pines of the Janiculum" (a hill west of Rome with a spectacular view of the city), complete with the recorded nightingale.

The last (and most spectacular) movement is "The Pines of the Appian Way." "The tragic country is guarded by solitary pines," writes Respighi. "Indistinctly, incessantly, the rhythm of innumerable steps. To the poet's fantasy appears a vision of past glories; trumpets blare, and the army of the Consul advances brilliantly in the grandeur of a newly risen sun toward the Sacred Way, mounting in triumph the Capitoline Hill." It's exceptionally thrilling music that will get the surround-sound treatment in Powell Hall this weekend, with extra brass players sounding forth from the balcony.

Erkki-Sven Tüür
Photo by Ave Maria Mõistlik 

Opening the second half of this weekend's concerts will be a 2017 work by Estonian composer Erkki-Sven Tüür in which nature also plays a major role. Co-commissioned by the SLSO, the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, and the London Philharmonic, "Solastalgia for Piccolo Flute and Orchestra" is described by the composer (quoted in Ms. Saller's program notes) as expressing "the distress that is produced by environmental change impacting on people while they are directly connected to their home environment":

Where I live, the impact of global climate change manifests itself in that winters are no longer winters and summers no longer summers. In my childhood it was ordinary for cars to drive to mainland on a 25 kilometer ice bridge in the winter. There was a lot of snow. And summers were so warm that swimming in the sea was the most natural thing in the world. Today's reality is that the difference between winter and summer equinoxes is often only 4 to 5 degrees. There is no place to hide from the ubiquitous environmental change caused by human activity.

At a time when, at least in this country, a depressingly large percentage of the population continues to loudly deny the reality Mr. Tüür describes in his words and his music, this piece feels very timely.

The piccolo soloist this weekend will be Ann Choomack who, when she's not playing in the SLSO flute section, is a faculty member at the Eastern Music Festival in Greensboro, North Carolina. Solo works for her instrument are not all that common, so it's good to see her take the spotlight.

The concerts will open with Rimski-Korsakov's popular "Capriccio espagnol" from 1887. Its title not withstanding, the work was actually composed entirely in Russia. "It reflects the composer's research and imagination," notes Ms. Saller "more than his travels as an officer in the Imperial Navy." It also reflects the composer's remarkable skill as an orchestrator--an area in which he was largely self-taught. He got so good at it that he went on to write a book on the subject--"Principles of Orchestration." The tome was begun in 1873 and completed posthumously by Maximilian Steinberg in 1912, who would finally publish it in 1922. The book is still available today, in both print and digital editions, from Dover Books.

The "Capriccio" is lively and colorful music, with plenty of opportunities for individual sections of the orchestra to show off, and includes a virtuoso violin solo that leads into the spirited "Fandango asturiano" finale. It should be a good high-energy start for the concert.

The essentials: Gemma New conducts the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra and piccolo soloist Ann Choomack Friday at 10:30 am, Saturday at 8 pm, and Sunday at 3 pm, March 23-25. The concerts take place at Powell Symphony Hall, 718 North Grand in Grand Center.

Symphony Review: Variety is the spice of the St. Louis Symphony's Thanksgiving weekend

Variety was the order of the day Friday night as the St. Louis Symphony livened up the Thanksgiving weekend with classical favorites by Prokofiev and the local premiere of a new contrabass concerto by Chinese composer Tan Dun in a stunning performance by SLSO Principal Double Bass Erik Harris.

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

Erik Harris

Tan Dun is probably best known here in the USA for his film and multimedia work—most notably his score for "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon" in 2000—but his musical interests are wide-ranging and heavily weighted toward the theatrical. Some of his earliest works were written for the stage and even his concert pieces often have extra-musical reference points.

In the case of his "Contrabass Concerto: The Wolf" the inspiration was the Chinese novel "Wolf Totem" by Jiang Rong. According to the composer's web site the novel "resonated deeply with Tan Dun’s personal connection and fascination with the spirits of the natural world and the sounds and customs of the ancient cultures along the Silk Road. The symbol of the Mongolian wolf and its life in the grasslands for Tan Dun is a mirror of the human spirit and our relationship to the natural world."

The concerto starts mysteriously with high harmonics in the basses and soft tones from Tibetan singing bowls suggesting a vast, empty landscape. That Largo melancholia introduction soon gives way to an Allegro depicting (to quote the web site again) "the running of the wolves and wild horses across the Mongolian grasslands." An elegiac Andante molto second movement suggests "the loneliness of a young wolf missing its mother; missing the sky and grasslands of its home" while the final Allegro vivace "returns us to the scene of the running horses, heard in the galloping rhythms of the orchestra while the soloist alternates between the lyrical and percussive capabilities of the instrument."

It's all very dramatic—I might even say cinematic—as well as tremendously appealing. As Mr. Harris points out in an interesting video interview with Mr. Robertson that's shown during the stage change preceding the concerto, it also poses some stiff challenges for the soloist, with lots of rapid passages and extended sections calling for bowing and fingering techniques more typical of the Chinese erhu. Mr. Harris, I'm happy to report, appeared to have completely embraced those challenges, delivering a performance that combined impressive technique with artistic sensitivity. Spontaneous applause broke out after the exhilarating first movement and the entire piece got a standing ovation.

Preceding the concerto is Prokofiev's "Symphony No. 1 in D major," op. 25, ("Classical"). One of the composer's most popular works, it takes classical style and gives it a distinctly 20th-century twist, with harmonies and key changes that would probably have astonished Haydn or Mozart. It relies heavily on the strings (especially the violins) to produce an exceptionally light and transparent sound, and the SLSO players did quite well by it. The violins sounded a bit more astringent than they usually do, which worked quite well for this music.

Mr. Robertson, for his part, brought out a wealth of orchestral detail in a superbly balanced and subtly shaded performance. As often as I've heard this music, there were still facets of the score that came through here in ways that I hadn't noticed in the past.

Lara Teeter

The second half of this weekend's concerts opens with a short suite from Rimsky-Korsakov's 1882 opera "The Snow Maiden". The piece is a real rarity—the SLSO hasn't performed it since 1926. Which is rather a shame as it's filled with some vivid music, colorfully evoking the fairy tale world of the opera. The "Dance of the Birds," with its inventive writing for the woodwinds, was especially delightful, especially when played with the kind of precision I heard Friday. Mr. Robertson and his forces brought out all the loopy comedy of the "Coretge," and the concluding "Dance of the Tumblers"—undoubtedly the best-known piece from the opera—was fittingly energetic.

The concerts conclude with another of Prokofiev's greatest hits, the 1936 children's story for narrator and orchestra, "Peter and the Wolf," about a brave lad who outsmarts a nasty predator. The SLSO has taken a variety of approaches to this piece in the past, but this one was perhaps the most remarkable in that it used fanciful watercolor-inspired animation and not one but two narrators: Webster Conservatory acting student Annie Barbour and Webster faculty member Lara Teeter.

A familiar figure from both the local and Broadway stages, Mr. Teeter handled the bulk of the narration in a slightly arch and humorous style, while Ms. Barbour was a bit more straightforward. I thought it worked quite well, especially in combination with Natalie Arco's charming animation, but I'm not sure splitting up the narration added anything much. The orchestral playing was excellent, in any case, with fine work by Principal Clarinet Scott Andrews as the cat, Associate Principal Flute Andrea Kaplan as the bird, and Principal Oboe Jelena Dirks as the unfortunate duck who gets swallowed whole by the wolf.

Next at Powell Hall, Bernard Labadie conducts the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra and Chorus, with soloists Lydia Teuscher, soprano; Allyson McHardy, mezzo-soprano; Jeremy Ovenden, tenor; and Philippe Sly, bass-baritone, in Handel's "Messiah." Performances are Thursday through Saturday at 8 p.m. and Sunday at 3 p.m., December 3-6. For more information: stlsymphony.org

Symphony Preview: The St. Louis Symphony cries "wolf" twice the weekend of November 27, 2015

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David Robertson and the St. Louis Symphony have a heavily lupine program for you this weekend, with Prokofiev's musical fairy tale "Peter and the Wolf" (in a collaboration with Webster University) as well as Tan Dun's new contrabass concerto, subtitled "The Wolf." There's also music from "The Snow Maiden," a fairy tale opera by Rimsky-Korsakov, along with one of Prokofiev's most popular pieces, "Symphony No. 1," Op. 25 ("Classical").

Prokofiev in New York, 1918
en.wikipedia.org

The "Classical" symphony, which opens the program, came about in part as a reaction by the composer to his growing reputation as an aggressive modernist—said reputation springing from his spiky "Piano Concerto No. 2" and his electrifying "Scythian Suite". He also felt that he was becoming too dependent on the piano as a compositional medium. So in 1917, with the socialist revolution exploding around him, he retreated, sans piano, to a village outside of St. Petersburg and completed the symphony he had begun the previous year.

"I had been playing with the idea of writing a whole symphony without the piano," wrote Prokofiev in his autobiography, "thinking that such a piece would have more natural and transparent colours. So that is how the project for a symphony in the style of Haydn came about. I had come to understand a great deal about Haydn's technique from Tcherepnin [his teacher at the St Petersburg Conservatory] and thought it would be less scary to embark on this piano-less journey if I were on familiar stylistic ground."

The result is a work that takes classical style and gives it a distinctly 20th-century sound. It will also give our orchestra's string section something of a workout as it demands a lot from them, with rapid passages in the first movement and a high soft entry in the second, and generally requires players that can handle the lightness and transparency of the orchestration.

The Tan Dun concerto is next. A joint commission among the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra Amsterdam, Royal Liverpool Philharmonic, Taiwan Philharmonic (NSO), the Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra, and our own SLSO, the concerto, according to the composer's web site, "richly gives voice to both the velvety expressive sound and also the virtuosic propulsive percussive abilities of the contrabass."

"At the time when Tan Dun began conceptualizing this concerto," the site continues, "he had recently finished reading the Chinese novel "Wolf Totem" by Jiang Rong...The symbol of the Mongolian wolf and its life in the grasslands for Tan Dun is a mirror of the human spirit and our relationship to the natural world."

For a more detailed description of the music along with some interesting background video, check out Tan Dun's site. His description of the unorthodox fingering techniques required for the music—based on the styles of ancient Mongolian Horse Fiddle playing—suggest that this piece will be a real challenge for the soloist, SLSO Principal Bass Erik Harris.

Rimsky-Korsakov in 1892
Painting by Ilya Repin

The second half of the concert kicks off with a suite from Rimsky-Korsakov's 1882 opera "The Snow Maiden". Based on Alexander Ostrovsky's 1873 play of the same name, the opera's basic plot is a familiar one about a supernatural creature—the Snow Maiden of the title—who falls in love with a mortal. If you know your Hans Christian Andersen, you know that can't end well—and it doesn't. The story is told with a sophisticated score that includes the Wagnerian technique of assigning different melodies (leitmotifs) to individual characters as part of the dramatic structure. You'll hear a number of them in the colorful suite's four movements.

The concerts conclude with Prokofiev's 1936 children's story for narrator and orchestra, "Peter and the Wolf," about a brave lad who outsmarts a wolf. This is a piece I first encountered as a child, in the 1946 animated version by Walt Disney with the gravel-voiced Sterling Holloway as the narrator. It changes the story a bit but generally sticks fairly close to the composer's original scenario.

"Peter and the Wolf" has been popular with the symphony lately. The most recent performance, for example, was this past February with Resident Conductor Steven Jarvi. In 2009 the SLSO performed a semi-staged production with former Resident Conductor Ward Stare at the podium and several local actors (including yours truly) playing the narrator, Peter, the wolf, and Peter's animal friends. This time around the orchestra is using a creative team from Webster University that includes acting student Annie Barbour and Webster faculty member (and well-known local singer/actor) Lara Teeter as the narrators. There will also be video projections, so expect a multi-media experience.

The essentials: David Robertson conducts the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra, with double bassist Erik Harris, on Friday and Saturday at 8 p.m. and Sunday at 3 p.m., 27-29. The concerts take place at Powell Symphony Hall, 718 North Grand in Grand Center. For more information: stlsymphony.org.