Review: A trio of symphonic losers make for a winning combination at the SLSO

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

Conductor Jakub Hrusa
Photo courtesy of St. Louis Symphony Orchestra

The St. Louis Symphony Orchestra concerts this weekend (March 29-31, 2019) featured three works that critics didn't like much when they were first performed. History has proved the critics wrong, and this critic was very happy with the performances Friday night of Bartók's "The Miraculous Mandarin" ballet suite, Tchaikovsky's Violin Concerto, and Shostakovich's eccentric Symphony No. 9.

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

First performed in Cologne, Germany, in November 1926, "The Miraculous Mandarin" encountered a firestorm of controversy largely because of its sordid and violent scenario about a trio of thugs who force a young woman to lure men to their lair for robbery--until the titular Mandarin proves to be more than a match for them.

The fact that it's a harsh, discordant, and technically challenging score did not help matters. Bartók said his intent was to write "hellish music" that would "sound like pandemonium," and there's no doubt that he succeeded.

This is tricky stuff, with shifting meters, oddly placed accents, complex fugal sections, rapid passages for the strings that span wide intervals, and difficult bits for the woodwinds. The first-chair clarinet, in particular, has a series of increasingly elaborate, melismatic solos that depict the woman's seductive dances. This is, in short, music that requires a skilled orchestra and a conductor who knows his way around Bartók's musical maze.

In his debut with the SLSO, Jakub Hrusa certainly proved to be that kind of conductor Friday night. The frenetic opening passages were precise and incisive, the contrapuntal sections were wonderfully clear, and the entire performance was electrifying in its intensity. Associate Principal Clarinet Diana Haskell really nailed her solos, backed up with equal skill by Benjamin Adler on E-flat clarinet and Tzuying Huang on bass clarinet. Also due for a shout-out are Jelena Dirks on oboe, Cally Banham on English horn, and Peter Henderson on piano.

In fact, the only negative aspect to the performance came not from orchestra but from the audience, when the performance was disrupted by someone's cell phone loudly playing the "Bourée" from Bach's Orchestral Suite No. 4. Mr. Hrusa stopped the music while the offending instrument was silenced. Seriously, people: what part of "turn off your cell phone" is unclear to you?

Violinist Karen Gomyo
Photo courtesy of St. Louis Symphony Orchestra

The performance of Tchaikovsky's 1878 Violin Concerto that followed was interrupted as well, but for far more positive reasons. Soloist Karen Gomyo was so technically pristine and warmly expressive in the first movement that the house burst into a spontaneous standing ovation at the end of it. Her cadenza was especially stunning, with supernaturally clear high harmonics and passionate intensity. Yes, contemporary concert etiquette says you're not supposed to applaud between movements but, as my wife remarked during the ovation, sometimes you just can't restrain your enthusiasm.

Both Ms. Gomyo and Mr. Hrusa found a lot of variety in this well-loved warhorse, with interesting little turns of phrase and well-chosen moments in which the music was allowed to pause and breathe a bit. Ms. Gomyo's tone was big and forceful when needed, but also elegant and intimate in the elegiac second movement. Her bravura rendition of the Allegro vivacissimo finale led to another standing ovation, followed by a darkly dramatic encore: the third of Astor Piazzolla's six Tango-Etudes.

Shostakovich's Symphony No. 9, which concludes this weekend's concerts, actually got some decent notices when it was first performed in 1945, but that quickly changed when Stalin decreed it insufficiently triumphal. He was expecting a grand patriotic celebration of the victory over Hitler. Instead he got a bouncy, snarkily comic, and elegant work just under a half-hour long that sometimes sounded like Haydn on steroids. He was not amused.

But amusing the symphony often is. Yes, the second of its five movements is wistfully sad and the fourth is solemn and agonized, but on the whole this is entertaining music. The perky little march in the first movement would not be out of place in a music hall, and the fifth, with its lumbering march and frenzied finale, could almost accompany a Warner Brothers cartoon.

Shostakovich filled the symphony some wonderful passages for the winds. Ann Choomack executed the piccolo solo in the first movement perfectly, Andrea Kaplan's flute solo in the second movement was lovely, and Andrew Cuneo did full justice to the bassoon's long, agonized star turn in the fourth movement, which magically turns into a comic introduction to the fifth. It's as though, after weeping openly, the instrument turns around and says "never mind, folks, just kidding."

There were nice moments as well from Tom Drake on trumpet, Scott Andrews and Benjamin Adler on clarinets, and Concertmaster David Halen. Roger Kaza and the horns were also in fine form.

On the podium, Mr. Hrusa appeared to always be fully in command of this symphony's mercurial moods, which range from solemn to silly over relatively short time spans. It was an expertly structured and perfectly paced performance, bringing Friday night's concert to an entertaining conclusion.

Next at Powell Hall: Gemma New conducts the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra in a program of new music by students of the Missouri University composition program on Wednesday, April 3, at 8 pm. She will also conduct the orchestra along with soloists Mark Sparks, flute, and Allegra Lilly, harp, on Friday at 10:30 am, Saturday at 8 pm, and Sunday at 3 pm, April 5-7. The program consists of music by Benedetto Colagiovanni, Libby Roberts, and Mikkel Christensen. The concert takes place at Powell Symphony Hall, 718 North Grand in Grand Center.

Preview: Tchaikovsky's fairy tale ballets dominate the stage at Powell Hall this week

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If there's one thing you can count on at Christmas time, it's that someone somewhere will be putting on a production of Tchaikovsky's popular 1892 ballet The Nutcracker. This weekend (December 2-4, 2016), that includes the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra. But their Nutcracker is probably going to be unlike any other you might have seen.

Tchaikovsky in 1906

That's because, to begin with, it will only be half a Nutcracker—specifically, the second half, which takes place entirely in the fanciful Kingdom of Sweets. And, since it's a concert performance, it will be a Nutcracker without dancers. What it will have, though, is "visual design" by Webster University's Leigh Gerdine College of Fine Arts.

Your guess is as good as mine as to what that will mean, but I can tell you that in the past the SLSO has found some fairly ingenious ways of using projected images to enhance works written for the stage, from a performance of Copland's Appalachian Spring ballet suite accompanied by watercolors inspired by the ballet to vivid projected scenery for a complete performance of Verdi's Aida.

The second act of Nutcracker certainly offers plenty of colorful scenes. There are the various "national" dances (Chinese, Arabian, Spanish, and the Russian Trepak) along with the dance of the mirlitons (a 19th-century cousin of the common kazoo as well as a type of cake). There's also the popular "Waltz of the Flowers," the "Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy" with its famous celesta solo, and the dramatic "Pas de Deux" for the Sugar Plum Fairy and her Cavalier.

Mother Gigogne and her children

Act II also has one of the odder numbers, at least for contemporary American audiences: "La mère Gigogne et les polichinelles" (roughly: "Mother Gigogne and the puppets"). A character whose origins lie in French marionette theatre, she's usually portrayed as a woman (although often danced by a man) with a huge skirt out of which bursts a collection of tumblers and/or clowns. She would have been recognizable to Tchaikovsky's audiences. These days, not so much. The SLSO program describes the number as "Polchinelle (The Clown)," which has the advantage of being less obscure.

All of this, in any case, means that the Webster artists should find a cornucopia of visual inspiration in Tchaikovsky's music.

UPDATE: According to a press release today, December 2nd, from the SLSO: "Due to technical difficulties beyond our control, the visuals planned in partnership with Webster University Leigh Gerdine College of Fine Arts will not be displayed for this weekend's performances. However, there is no change to the pieces performed on the program."

Tchaikovsky dominates this weekend's concerts, in fact. Most of the first half of the evening will be taken up with a suite consisting of six selections from Swan Lake (1876) and two from Sleeping Beauty (1889) that will feature concertmaster David Halen's violin, along with Principal Cello Daniel Lee and Principal Harp Allegra Lilly. The Swan Lake numbers include dances for both the White and Black Swans and a couple of "national" dances (Russian and Hungarian). From Sleeping Beauty we get the "Entr'acte symphonique" from Act II, a piece written expressly for the noted Hungarian violinist Leopold Auer, along with music from the following scene, in which Prince Désiré discovers the sleeping Princess Aurore.

The program will open with the overture to Alexander Borodin's patriotic opera Prince Igor. Left unfinished at the time of the composer's death in 1887, Prince Igor was eventually completed by Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov and Alexander Glazunov. The overture was cobbled together by Glazunov, who based on themes from the opera and some sketches Borodin left behind, so in a way it's as much his work as it is Borodin's.

Alexander Borodin, 1865

No matter; it's vibrant and dramatic music, filled with memorable themes-including one that, along with many other Borodin melodies, made its way into Wright and Forrest's 1953 musical Kismet. It pops up repeatedly, but you'll hear it for the first time early in the overture, following the big brass fanfares that come right after the slow introduction. In Kismet it's the basis for the song "The Olive Tree," in which the poetic beggar Hajj realizes life might have great things in store for him.

At the podium will be former SLSO Resident Conductor Ward Stare, whose star has clearly been on the rise since he left St. Louis. I saw him conducting Francesca Zambello's excellent Porgy and Bess in Chicago a couple of years ago and he was recently appointed Music Director of the Rochester Philharmonic Orchestra. He has also had guest conducting gigs in Houston, Québec, and Dallas. It will be good to see him back on his old home turf.

The Essentials: Ward Stare conducts the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra and violin soloist David Halen Friday and Saturday at 8 p.m., and Sunday at 3 p.m., December 2-4, at Powell Hall in Grand Center. For more information: stlsymphony.org.

Concert Review: The St. Louis Symhony Orchestra offers a potent Carnegie Hall preview

Vadim Repin
Photo: Gela Megredlidze

Who: The St. Louis Symphony Orchestra conducted by David Robertson
What: Music of Debussy, James MacMillan, and Tchaikovsky
Where: Powell Symphony Hall, St. Louis
When: March 14 and 15, 2015

[Find out more about the music with the SLSO program notes and my preview article.]

Two of the three works on this past weekend's St. Louis Symphony Orchestra concerts (the ones that aren't by James MacMillan) will also be on the bill when the orchestra performs in Carnegie Hall on Friday, March 20th. If what we heard Sunday afternoon is any indication, they'll be representing their home town proudly.

The concert opened with Debussy's "Nocturnes"— three short tone poems (total playing time is around 25 minutes) inspired by literary poems by the symbolist writer Henri de Regnier. Although nothing in the three movements is explicitly nocturnal, the music nevertheless has that oddly otherworldly quality of things seen only faintly in the dark—or maybe just in a dream. The clouds in the first movement ("Nuages") coalesce and disperse in a whirl of filmy chords; the eerie procession of the second movement ("Fêtes") begins with muted trumpets and harps, builds to a climax, and then vanishes; and the wordless female chorus of the final movement ("Sirènes") is sometimes so faint that you can't be sure whether it's there at all.

Mr. Robertson and orchestra gave this piece a wonderfully nuanced and atmospheric treatment. You could almost hear the ocean in the ebb and flow of "Sirènes," for example, and the celebration of "Fêtes" had just the right touch of mystery. So did "Nuages," which was also distinguished by nice work from Cally Banham on the English horn. The women of Amy Kaiser's chorus were wonderfully seductive sirens in the final movement, and handled Debussy's sometimes challenging score (singing long lines softly is no easy thing) with great skill.

Next was the work which won't be on the program in New York (there's a new piece by Meredith Monk in that slot)—the 2009 "Violin Concerto" by contemporary Scottish composer James MacMillan. In interviews Mr. MacMillan has described himself as strongly to the kind of composer who is “deeply suspicious of any significant move towards tonality, any hint of pulse that is actually discernible, and any music which communicates successfully with a non-specialist audience.” And, in fact, his "Piano Concerto No. 3," which we heard last month, certainly was a colorful piece with lots of immediate appeal.

Mr. MacMillan is quoted in last weekend's concert program notes as saying that the concerto reflects the Celtic fiddle music of his childhood. "I've grown up with fiddle music," he recalls. "I used to play in folk bands when I was younger, and fiddles were always the core part of that music." With the exception of a brief dance-like passage in the first movement and a lyrical oboe line in the second that suggested a Scottish air, however, I heard very little of that influence.

What I did hear was a lot of jagged modernism and a lack of any real structural coherence. Musical episodes followed each other like cars in a freight train with no real through line. In the end, I felt that I had heard a series of miniatures (some more appealing than others) rather than a single unified work. The work felt, overall, less audience friendly than the "Piano Concerto."

The concerto demands some real virtuosity from the violin soloist, and it certainly got that from Vadim Repin. Mr. Repin worked closely with the composer during the concerto's genesis, introduced it to the world, and has been a major advocate for it since. We can, therefore, probably take his breathtakingly fluid performance as being definitive. He handled with ease passages that sounded absurdly difficult. More to the point, his playing had real soul, which, while it still didn't completely win me over to the music, at least made a good case for it.

When I heard to the Internet broadcast of Tchaikovsky's "Symphony No. 4" that concluded this weekend's concerts on Saturday night, I felt that Mr. Robertson's approach was perhaps a bit too detached and deliberate. When I witnessed his deeply passionate and committed reading on Sunday, it was obvious that what I was really hearing Saturday night was the cumulative distancing effect of microphones and signal processors, along with the bandwidth limitations of an Internet audio stream. There is, in fact, no real substitute for hearing this music live.

The Fourth is my favorite Tchaikovsky symphony. The composer poured all of his hope and despair into this most compact and dramatically expressive of all his essays in the genre. From the commanding "fate" motif first intoned by the brasses at the beginning to the nearly hysterical triumph of the finale, this is a piece that grabs you by the lapels and doesn't let go until the end.

Mr. Robertson and the orchestra were pretty near flawless here. The tempo and dynamic contrasts were well chosen and served the symphony's relentless sense of movement well. Timpanist Shannon Wood and his fellow percussionists performed heroically, and little individual instrumental moments that Tchaikovsky sprinkles throughout the work were done to perfection. Principal Oboe Jelena Dirks and Principal Bassoon Andrew Cuneo were singled out for solo bows at the end, but all the players sounded at the top of their game.

As I noted at the top, the orchestra will be in New York this weekend, but there is a Youth Orchestra concert on Sunday, March 22, at 3 p.m. The orchestra returns to the Powell Hall stage March 27-29 for a showing of the movie classic "The Godfather" with Nino Rota's score performed live on stage, and the regular season resumes on Friday, April 10, with Mozart and Shostakovich conducted by Hannu Lintu. For more information: stlsymphony.org.