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.

Symphony Preview, March 5 and 6, 2016: More clouds of gray than any Russian play could guarantee

This weekend Gilbert Varga conducts the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra in the third of their four Shakespeare Festival programs with a concert that's around 70% Shakespeare and 100% Russian. Which isn't as unusual as you might think.

Portrait of Tchaikovsky by Nikolai Kuznetsov
en.wikipedia.org

As I noted a couple weeks ago, the Bard of Avon has inspired quite a lot of music over the centuries, much of it by composers who knew his works only in translation and in some cases (Ambroise Thomas's operatic treatment of "Hamlet" comes immediately to mind) only in fairly free adaptations by other writers. But no matter how far removed they were from the original plays, many of history's greatest composers have found themselves fascinated by Shakespeare's characters and themes.

The great Russian composers were no exception. Tchaikovsky found inspiration in the Bard for one of his Greatest Hits, the "Romeo and Juliet Fantas-Overture," as well as for his less well known overtures "The Tempest" and this weekend's opener, "Hamlet."

For Tchaikovsky, the dominant theme of "Hamlet" was the implacable hand of fate. "There's a divinity that shapes our ends," observes Hamlet in Act V, "Rough-hew them how we will." First performed in 1888, Tchaikovsy's "Hamlet" overture is a late work (the composer died in 1893) and shows the obsession with fate that permeates both his "Symphony No. 4" from 1878 and his "Symphony No. 5," which first saw the light of day in the same year as "Hamlet".

The "fate" theme shows up in the opening lento lugubre in the violas and cellos, announced by a portentous roll of the tympani. Hamlet broods in the strings until muted horns strike midnight and the ghost appears amid brass and percussion. Ophelia shows up briefly as a sad little melody for the oboe about of third of the way in, but overall the mood is one of high drama and tragedy until (to quote critic Herbert Glass), "the piece ends in the F-minor gloom of its misty beginnings."

"Hamlet" was originally intended to be part of a complete set of incidental music for a French-language production of the play that the actor/impresario Lucien Guitry was preparing for a tour. That project fell through, and by the time Guitry asked Tchaikovsky to revive it in 1891 (this time for a farewell performance at the Mikhaylovsky Theatre in Saint Petersburg) the composer was suffering from exhaustion and other health problems. He recycled a shortened version of the concert overture as the curtain raiser for the play and cobbled together a mix of old and new material for the other 16 numbers. However, he reportedly didn't think much of the results, and the complete score is rarely heard, although you can find it on CD.

Maxim Shostakovich
By Koch, Eric / Anefo - Dutch National Archives,
The Hague, Fotocollectie Algemeen Nederlands
Persbureau, 1945-1989
en.wikipedia.org

This weekend's non-Shakespeare piece, Shostakovich's "Piano Concerto No. 2" is considerably brighter in its outlook. The product of a short-lived thaw in artistic repression the USSR in 1957, the concerto is an unambiguously (and uncharacteristically) happy work. Written for the composer's son Maxim and first performed by Maxim on his 19th birthday, the piece zips through three short movements in around 20 minutes, concluding with a slightly satirical nod to the Hanon finger exercises that Maxim undoubtedly knew well from his years at the Moscow Conservatory. It is, in short, an irresistible work.

The soloist for the concerto will be the young (born in 1986) Russian pianist Denis Kozhukhin, whose star began rising when he claimed First Prize in the 2010 Queen Elisabeth Competition in Brussels at the age of 23. A month later, the New York Times critic Anthony Tommasini praised his "accomplished performance" of Schumann's challenging "Symphonic Études" in a solo recital, and other critics have been similarly impressed. "Kozhukhin possesses an impeccable technique," wrote Lawrence Bumden for the Miami Herald in 2010. "He can play with total accuracy at extreme speeds and tricky passages seem to bring out extra dynamism in his performances. Kozhukhin matches his remarkable technical arsenal with acute musicianship and interpretive depth." This will be his debut appearance with the SLSO, so I look forward to seeing what he and Mr. Varga do with the piece.

The main event this weekend is a suite from Prokofiev's score for the ballet "Romeo and Juliet," first performed in 1938. It's among his most popular compositions, but Prokofiev paid a price for it that's almost as tragic as the story it tells.

Lured back from Paris to Leningrad in 1934 with promises of lucrative commissions and a relatively free hand in composing the ballet for the Bolshoi Theatre, he soon discovered that the hand of ideologically motivated censorship was as heavy as that of fate in "Hamlet." As Princeton University scholar Simon Morrison (author of The People's Artist: Prokofiev's Soviet Years) noted in a paper at a Columbia University symposium:

Prokofiev suffered more than his share of disappointments in his career, and upon relocating from Paris to Moscow in 1936, had more than his share of unpleasant encounters with cultural officials. He adapted to the constraints imposed on him by the Stalinist regime as best he could. His talent overcame—even benefited from—outside control, a phenomenon that undermines the Western musicological assumption that Soviet artists were passive victims of brutal, crude, and rigid politics. Yet from the start, Romeo and Juliet had a particularly hard time of it, enduring second-guessing, reworking, and censorship. In his final years, Prokofiev was able to take pride in its success, but he spent many years resenting the changes that had been imposed on it to the ending, the dramatic structure of the first and second acts, the relationship between solo and ensemble numbers, and the orchestration.

Prokofiev in 1918
en.wikipedia.org

And it wasn't just the music that suffered. As Linda B. Glaser writes in the March 21, 2011, Cornell Chronicle, "the bureaucrat who commissioned 'Romeo and Juliet' was executed, as was the Central Committee flunky who approved the ballet's original happy ending. Even the scenarist who inspired Prokofiev to write the ballet ended up dead. Authorities exiled Prokofiev's first wife to the Gulag, and in 1938 confiscated Prokofiev's passport, determining that he needed 'ideological correctin' for too much Western influence."

None of this takes away from the greatness of the music you'll hear this weekend, but it does illustrate how difficult it can be to hold on to artistic integrity (or even basic human dignity) in the face of implacable autocracy. It's something we should perhaps bear in mind during the current round of national elections.

Gilbert Varga conducts the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra and piano soloist Denis Kozhukhin in music by Tchaikovsky, Prokofiev, and Shostakovich Saturday at 8 p.m. and Sunday at 3 p.m. March 5 and 6. The program also includes Tchaikovsky's tone poem Hamlet. Performances take place at Powell Symphony Hall, 718 North Grand. For more information: stlsymphony.org.