Concert Review: Louis Lortie and Yan Pascal Tortelier deliver precise passion with the St. Louis Symphony, April 15 and 16, 2016

Louis Lortie
Photo: © Elias, rayfieldallied.com

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Most folks come back from vacations with snapshots or souvenirs.  The great French composer Camille Saint-Saëns came back from a winter trip to Egypt with a piano concerto, which was performed with an ideal mix of power and style this weekend by Louis Lortie and the St. Louis Symphony under guest conductor Yan Pascal Tortelier.

First performed in May of 1896 with the 60-year-old composer at the keyboard, the Piano Concerto No. 5, Op. 103 quickly picked up the nickname "Egyptian" in part because Saint-Saëns himself wrote that the it "takes us, in effect, on a journey to the East and even, in the passage in F-sharp, to the Far East."  The music is filled with "Oriental" touches, especially in the second movement, the main theme of which Saint-Saëns said he got from boatmen on the Nile.  There are even brief passages where the pianist produces a kind of otherworldly sound by playing major tenths two octaves apart.  You can almost smell the exotic perfume.

Saint-Saëns was clearly a remarkable pianist, and his fifth concerto calls for a daunting combination of raw virtuosity and sensitivity.  Mr. Lortie clearly had plenty of both, delivering a performance with all the flash and power called for in the boisterous finale without short-changing the delicacy of that lyrical second movement.  He is, as I have noted in the past, a very visceral performer, with every emotion etched on his face and visible in his body language.  His emotional commitment to the music could not have been more total.

That makes him an excellent match for Mr. Tortelier, who seems to love the grand musical gesture as much as the intimate detail.  Working without a baton, he uses his very expressive hands to shape phrases one moment and then his entire body to raise a massive orchestral climax the next—which is exactly what he did in the work that opened the program, Paul Dukas's rarely heard Polyeucte Overture from 1891.

Inspired by a Corneille play about a Roman nobleman who converts to Christianity and suffers the usual deadly consequences, Polyeucte is big and dramatic—real Technicolor, wide-screen Romanticism.  Brooding, tragic passages are frequently interrupted by abrupt orchestral outbursts.  Mr. Tortelier attacked this music with real intensity, and the musicians responded with a perfect performance that deserved far more applause than it got from the Friday night audience.  It has been nearly a century since the SLSO last played this piece, so it was effectively new music for them, but they played as though they knew it all by heart.

Yan Pascal Tortelier
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The concert concluded with music the musicians probably do know by heart, Maurice Ravel's popular orchestration of Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition.  Inspired by an 1874 visit to a posthumous exhibition of the works of Russian artist Victor Hartmann, the piano original is colorful and evocative stuff, made all the more so by Ravel's expansion.  Justifiably regarded as an expert orchestrator, Ravel's work here is filled with ingenious touches, like the high woodwinds chirping away in the "Ballet of the Chicks in Their Shells", the alto sax playing the voice of a troubadour in "The Old Castle", the hair-raising evocation of "The Hut on Fowl's Legs", (home of the witch Baba-Yaga from Russian folklore) and the triumphant finale, based on a sketch for "The Great Gate at Kiev". 

That means there were multiple opportunities for individual members and sections of the band to show off, and they made the most of it.  For the first curtain call, Mr. Tortelier singled out Principal Horn Roger Kaza for his exemplary work as well as Principal Trumpet Karin Bliznik, whose ringing declamation of the recurring "promenade" theme got things off to such a stirring start and whose entire section performed with such impressive precision in the tricky "Samuel Goldberg and Schmuyle" movement. Principal Trombone Tim Myers on euphonium and Nathan Nabb on alto sax also got solo bows for their fine playing in the "Bydlo" and "Old Castle" movements, respectively.  Every section of the orchestra sounded stunning, in fact, and the strings had the wonderful richness that has come to typify their work.

Conducting without a score, Mr. Tortelier brought the same sense of high drama and nuance to this music that he had demonstrated throughout the evening.  His "Gnomus" had real menace, his "Ballet of the Chicks in Their Shells" was a masterpiece of brisk precision, and his powerful "Great Gate at Kiev" brought down the house.  The applause was loud, long, and entirely justified.

There is one more performance of this program at Powell Hall Saturday, April 16, at 8 p.m.  The St. Louis Symphony season continues next weekend, April 22 – 24, as Nathalie Stutzmann conducts the orchestra with violin soloist Karen Gomyo in music by Mendelssohn, Sibelius, and Dvorák.  Performances take place at Powell Symphony Hall, 718 North Grand.

Symphony Preview, April 15 and 16, 2016: Saint-Saëns's selfies

My wife and I have become dedicated travelers over the last couple of decades, but we can't hold a candle to the French composer Camille Saint-Saëns. Over the course of his long (1835-1921) and prosperous life, his peregrinations took him all over Europe as well as to England, the United States, and even (in 1896) to Algeria and Egypt.

Saint-Saën in 1900
By Petit, Pierre (1831-1909)
Photographer Restored by Adam Cuerden

A musical souvenir of the latter trip closes the first half of this weekend's St. Louis Symphony concerts as pianist Louis Lortie joins guest conductor Yan Pascal Tortelier for the Saint-Saëns Piano Concerto No. 5 in F major, op. 103. As Michael Steinberg writes in his program notes for the San Francisco Symphony, the concerto picked up its nickname, "Egyptian", from the composer's own comments about the piece:

Saint-Saëns had written the concerto during a winter vacation at Luxor in Egypt, which has some bearing on the second movement and perhaps the third as well. One of the more notable features of the amiable and unpressured first movement is an allusion to Dalila's gorgeous aria "Mon coeur s'ouvre à ta voix" from Samson et Dalila. Of the second movement, Saint-Saëns himself wrote that "it takes us, in effect, on a journey to the East and even, in the passage in F-sharp, to the Far East." First comes an extended introductory section, much of it like recitative, and then the music settles into a pleasant and serene song for piano and strings. Saint-Saëns said that it was "a Nubian love song which I heard sung by boatmen on the Nile as I myself went down the river in a dahabieh." The F-sharp major music to which he refers is the pentatonic melody, delicately scored and including the occasional distant vibration of the tam-tam. Some of the orchestral detail in this colorful piece will remind us of the most famous of all "Egyptian" compositions, the Nile scene in Aïda.

The sound of that second movement is so exotic that pianist Steven Hough once wrote a tongue-in-cheek explanation of how to achieve it for the April Fool's Day, 2012, edition of his blog at the Daily Telegraph. It's worth reading.

The "Egyptian" concerto hasn't been heard on the Powell Hall stage since 1977, by the way, so this is a rare opportunity for local classical music lovers to catch it live.

The other big work on this weekend's bill is an old favorite: Modest Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition, last performed here in January of 2013. It, too, was inspired by a trip, but in this case it was just to an exhibit of work by the Russian artist and architect Victor Hartmann.

Mussorgsky in 1870

Hartmann may only have been 39 when he died in 1873, but he had already gained considerable fame for his inventive uses of Russian folk traditions in his work. He might have remained unknown outside Russia, however, had he not become friends with the equally innovative composer Modest Mussorgsky. Attending an exhibition of Hartmann's works a year after the artist's death, Mussorgsky was so moved that he immediately dashed off a piano suite based on ten of the pictures at that exhibition. Unfortunately, Mussorgsky himself died—at the age of 42—before the suite could be published.

And there it might have rested had not Maurice Ravel been commissioned by Serge Koussevitzky to produce an orchestral version of Pictures at an Exhibition in 1922. The work was a rousing success that guaranteed Hartmann a prominent place in musical history and Mussorgsky a larger share of concert programs than he might have gotten otherwise.

Ravel was not, of course, the first to orchestrate Mussorgsky's suite; that honor fell to fellow Russian Michail Tuschmalov in 1886, the year in which the suite was first published. But he only arranged seven of the ten pictures and the next attempt—by Britain's Sir Henry Wood in 1915—eliminated some of the reoccurrences of the unifying "Promenade" theme, which represents Mussorgsky wandering through the exhibition. Ravel wasn't even the first to orchestrate the entire piece; the Slovenian Leo Funtek pulled that one off in the same year as the Frenchman. Ravel's has, however, remained the most popular of the over two dozen arrangements of the original, for everything from full orchestra to jazz band to (oddly enough) solo guitar.

This weekend it's the familiar Ravel orchestration that Mr. Tortelier and the band will be performing. If you have never heard it before, I think you'll be delighted by the many opportunities it offers for individual musicians to take the spotlight. Ravel is justifiably regarded as an expert orchestrator, and his expansion of Mussorgsky's original is filled with ingenious touches, like the high woodwinds chirping away in the "Ballet of the Chicks in Their Shells", the alto sax playing the voice of a troubadour in "The Old Castle", and the hair-raising evocation of "The Hut on Fowl's Legs", home of the witch Baba-Yaga from Russian folklore. This is music that never fails to please.

Paul Dukas

The concerts open with a work that hasn't been performed by the SLSO since 1920: the concert overture Polyeucte, written in 1891 by Paul Dukas. Inspired by a Corneille play about a Roman nobleman who converts to Christianity and suffers the usual deadly consequences, it was the composer's public debut, written the year he graduated from the Paris Conservatory. So it's probably not surprising (as Renée Spencer Saller writes in her program notes) that it shows the influence of someone who threw a very long shadow back then, Richard Wagner:

The overture opens with a threnody of low strings and moody woodwinds. Out of this luxuriant gloom, violins scurry; timpani rumble and roar. Piercing silences puncture orchestral swells. Plangent winds hint at the tragedy's romantic subplot. The subtle harmonic shifts and haunting timbres make the Wagner comparisons inevitable, but who cares? Fin-de-siècle Wagneriana doesn't get any better than this.

Too true. It's big, dramatic stuff: real Technicolor, wide-screen Romanticism and, at only a little over 15 minutes, considerably shorter than Corneille's five-act tragedy.

The Essentials: Friday and Saturday at 8 p.m., Yan Pascal Tortelier conducts the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra with piano soloist Louie Lortie in Saint-Saëns's Piano Concerto No. 5, Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition, and Dukas's Polyeucte Overture. Performances take place at Powell Symphony Hall, 718 North Grand. For more information: stlsymphony.org.

Hellraiser

Augustin Hadelich

Who: The St. Louis Symphony Orchestra conducted by Yan Pascal Tortelier with violinist Augustin Hadelich
What: Music of Rossini, Paganini, and Berlioz
Where: Powell Symphony Hall
When: April 12-14, 2013

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As René Spencer Saller points out in her program notes for these concerts, the legendary violinist/composer Niccolò Paganini was the early 18th century equivalent of a modern rock star, with an extravagant talent and matching lifestyle. He made women faint with ecstasy and cheerfully encouraged rumors that he owed his phenomenal talent to a deal with Satan by dressing all in black and riding to concerts in a black coach drawn by black horses. He was, in short, Mr. Showbiz.

You can hear that flash as well as a fair amount of finesse in his Violin Concerto No. 1 in D Major. Op. 6, which he first performed in 1816. Like most of Paganini’s music, it demands a high level of technical skill, especially in the opening and closing movements. The soulful "Adagio", though, could almost pass for an operatic aria and demands real musical sensitivity.

Augustin Hadelich appears to have plenty of both. He negotiated the purely showoff material with ease. But he also made that second movement sing and even, in places, weep. In his notes for a 2011 Kennedy Center performance of the concerto, Peter Laki notes that this movement “supposedly depicts a famous actor of the time delivering one of his most heart-rending speeches.” Others have heard the composer’s own anguish over his poor health. Whatever the cause, it’s emotionally charged stuff, and Mr. Hadelich did it well, beautifully supported by Mr. Tortelier and the orchestra.

Unlike Paganini, Mr. Hadelich does not appear to be drawn to the showy or overtly theatrical in performance. Yes, he was dressed entirely in black, but when he started playing his concentration was entirely on his instrument and the conductor. He’s a serious musician, a fact made all the more apparent is his encore, the "Andante" from Bach’s Violin Sonata No. 2 (BWV 1003). Virtuosity of a different kind is called for here, as the performer must sustain both the rocking base line and fluid melody above it. Done well, as it was Friday morning by Mr. Hadelich, the music presents the illusion that two instruments are playing at once.

If Paganini courted a diabolical image, his friend Hector Berlioz perhaps took it a step farther by actually going to Hell in the final movement of his 1830 Symphonie fantastique, Op. 14. Subtitled “An Episode in the Life of an Artist,” the work tells, in dramatic and musically explicit terms, the story of a “young vibrant musician” who becomes sexually obsessed with an “ideal” woman. He dreams of her in the first movement; unsuccessfully pursues her at a ball in the second; and flees to the country to escape his longing in the third. In the fourth movement “March of the Scaffold” (often performed by itself) he overdoses on opium (the LSD of the early 19th century) and dreams he is being beheaded for her murder. The work ends with the hallucinatory “Dreams of a Witches' Sabbath,” in which the protagonist envisions himself at an infernal dance, presided over by the object of his affection, now transformed into a demon.

The idea for the Symphonie came from Berlioz’s own obsession with the Irish Shakespearean actress Harriet Smithson, whom he wooed for years and finally won after convincing her to attend a performance of the piece. The composer never tried to kill her, but he did threaten to kill himself with an opium overdose if she didn’t marry him—which she did. The marriage did not end well, but that’s another story.

Unlike the marriage, the music lasted, although it was fiercely controversial. Parisians had just gotten used to the idea of Beethoven when along came this wildly dramatic bit of excess scored for a massive orchestra and accompanied by a narrative that was, to say the least, lurid. Younger composers like Liszt and Saint-Saëns loved it but traditionalists like Mendelssohn were appalled. Even today, a good performance is still (to quote another concertgoer Friday morning) a “wild ride.”

Watch Berlioz: Symphonie fantastique on PBS. See more from Keeping Score.

In order for that ride to be enjoyable, of course, you need a conductor who can keep it all under control and make the languorous sighs of the first movement as compelling as the histrionics of the last. Mr. Tortelier did all of that Friday morning, and then some. His interpretation was nuanced without sacrificing any of the composer’s high drama. He clearly knows this music inside out—he conducted without a score—and that level of expertise was apparent in every note.

Mr. Tortelier’s conducting style is fascinating to watch. Working without a baton, he uses his very expressive hands to shape phrases. He seems to be all about economy of movement, holding the big gestures in reserve for when they’re really needed—the volcanic final moments of the Symphonie, for example. There’s subtle shading there that parallels his interpretive approach.

The Berlioz offers plenty of solo opportunities for members of the orchestra, and the symphony musicians did not disappoint. Cally Banham, for example, did full justice to the famous English horn solo in the bucolic “Scène aux Champs,” as did oboist Phil Ross with the offstage echo part. Andrew Cuneo and his fellow bassoonists were wonderfully precise in the fourth movement death march. There was also lovely work here by Scott Andrews and Diana Haskell on clarinet, Andrea Kalpan on flute, and Julie Thornton on flute and piccolo. Praise is also due to Harpists Megan Stout and Claire Happel for their lovely sound in the second movement waltz waltz as well as to the entire percussion section, who get a vigorous workout in the final two movements..

The concert opened with a wonderfully jolly performance of the overture to L’italiana in Algeri by another detractor of the Symphonie fantastique, Gioachino Rossini (“What a good thing it isn’t music”). It’s classic Rossini, with those familiar slow builds in volume and pace that earned him the nickname “Signor Crescendo.” Here, as in the Berlioz, Mr. Tortelier found variety and nuance where I have not heard them in other performances, at least on CD. Mr. Ross’s oboe and Ms. Thornton’s piccolo sounded quite fine in their solo passages.

Next on the calendar: Friday and Saturday, April 19 and 20, at 8 PM, Ward Stare conducts the orchestra and chorus in an intriguing program of two rarely heard Brahms choral works, Johann Strauss Jr.’s Artist’s Life waltz, a suite from Richard Strauss’s Rosenkavalier, and Webern’s entrancing Im Sommerwind. For ticket information: stlsymphony.org.

TPTBT (The Place to Be Tonight): Saturday, April 13

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Who: The St. Louis Symphony with conductor Yan Pascal Tortelier and violinist Augustin Hadelich
What: Music of Rossini, Paganini, and Berlioz
When: Tonight at 8 (simulcast on St. Louis Public Radio 90.7 FM and HD 1) and Sunday at 3
Where: Powell Symphony Hall
Why: "Known for his gorgeous tone and expressive communication, Augustin Hadelich has catapulted into the top echelon of young violinists. He makes his STL Symphony debut performing Paganini’s Violin Concerto No. 1, followed by Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique. Complete with an elegant ball, a frightening march to the scaffold and a pastoral scene in a field, Berlioz’s most celebrated work is an orchestral tour-de-force."  We saw this concert Friday morning and were very impressed by Mr. Hadelich's performance.  The real killer, though, was Mr. Tortelier's electrifying Symphonie fantastique; a beautifully nuanced and highly dramatic interpretation.

Watch Berlioz: Symphonie fantastique on PBS. See more from Keeping Score.

Paganini was a violinist of such astounding technique that some said he was in league with the devil—a myth he cultivated by dressing entirely in black and arriving at concerts in a black carriage pulled by black horses.  His much-deserved reputation as a womanizer and hellraiser only added to the legend.  Berlioz was more stable, but his Symphonie fantastique—inspired by his obsession with the Irish Shakespearean actress Harriet Smithson—is pretty extreme stuff as well.  Subtitled "Episode in the Life of an Artist", it's detailed program chronicles a sexual obsession that leads to a drug overdose (opium, the LSD of the early 18th century) and resulting hallucinations of murder and a Satanic mass.

And you thought the classics were stuffy!  Check out the embedded video above for an entertaining and enlightening tour through the Symphonie fantastique and the life of its creator.