Symphony Preview: All-American boys at Powell Hall October 16-18, 2015

Aaron Copland in 1970
en.wikipedia.org

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It's an all-American weekend at Powell Hall this Friday through Sunday as St. Louis Symphony Resident Conductor Steven Jarvi leads the orchestra in a program of Leonard Bernstein, Aaron Copland, and George Gershwin. It includes two Big Pieces, one of which—Copland's 1926 "Piano Concerto"—is not heard all that often.

As Paul Schiavo points out in his program notes, the concerto dates from a time when Copland—then a brash young man in his mid-20s—was making a name for himself with "works that vibrated with the exciting new rhythms of the Jazz Age." The popular style of more well-known works like "Rodeo," "Billy the Kid," and the "Symphony No. 3" was still a decade or more away, although you can still hear suggestions of that big, open sound in the opening measures of the concerto.

Serge Koussevitzky
en.wikipedia.org

"The Piano Concerto", writes Copland in the first volume of his 1984 autobiography (co-authored with Vivian Perlis), "was the last of my works to make explicit use of jazz materials. I have often described myself as a 'work-a-year' man—1926 was the year of the Concerto." He goes on to give a detailed description of how jazz elements are incorporated into the concerto, but since you can read much of that in Mr. Schiavo's notes there no reason for me to repeat it here.

The concerto was not particularly well received at its 1927 premiere with Serge Koussevitzky conducting the Boston Symphony Orchestra, with the composer at the piano. "If I felt I had gone to the extreme of where jazz could take me," writes Copland, "the audiences and critics in Boston all thought I had gone too far. One critic actually accused Koussevitzky of being a malicious foreigner who wanted to show how bad American music was!" These days the concerto, while still not a core part of the repertory, rarely meets with that kind of hostility.

The soloist for the concerto will be Israeli pianist Inon Barnatan, who currently serves as the New York Philharmonic's first Artist-in-Association—a position that guarantees him three years of performances with that prestigious ensemble. The orchestra's outgoing Music Director, Alan Gilbert, has described Mr. Barnatan as "the complete artist: a wonderful pianist, a probing intellect, passionately committed, and a capable contemporary-music pianist as well." Which certainly makes him sound like a good match for this material.

Inon Barnatan
Photo: Marco Borggreve, inonbarnatan.com

In his discussion of the "Piano Concerto" in his autobiography, Copland goes on at some length to point out that he was "often critically paired with [George] Gershwin" and that some critics suggested that the latter's "Rhapsody in Blue" and "Concerto in F" might have influenced Copland's own work. But he and Gershwin had, in fact, no contact with each other. "On one occasion," notes Copland, "when we were finally face to face at some party, with the opportunity for conversation, we found nothing to say to each other!"

Which brings us to the second Big Piece on the program this weekend: Gershwin's wildly popular tone poem "An American in Paris." Begun during a trip to Paris in the same year that Copland spent working on his concerto and completed during a longer visit to the City of Light in 1928, the work is a reminder of just how much solid craftsmanship lurks behind Gershwin’s irresistible tunes.

"This new piece," observed Gershwin in a 1928 interview in Musical America, "really a rhapsodic ballet, is written very freely and is the most modern music I've yet attempted. The opening will be developed in typical French style, in the manner of Debussy and The Six, though the themes are all original. My purpose here is to portray the impressions of an American visitor in Paris, as he strolls about the city, listens to the various street noises, and absorbs the French atmosphere."

Gershwin in 1937
Photo: Carl Van Vechten
en.wikipedia.org

As someone who has just returned from another trip to Paris, I have to say it works beautifully. The lively opening with its colorful evocation of the city's lively sidewalk cafes and bustling boulevards (complete with honking taxi horns in the percussion section) is a masterful bit of musical imagery. And the bluesy central section evokes not only the homesickness of the traveler but also the charm of Paris at night.

"An American in Paris" is also reminder of how far Gershwin came in such a short period of time. This is, after all, a guy who went from being a Tin Pan Alley "song plugger" to an accomplished composer and orchestrator in only thirteen years. In another seven years he would write one of the mainstays of twentieth century American opera, "Porgy and Bess". What might he have done had he not died so young?

The concerts open with a pair of suites by Leonard Bernstein: the "Three Dance Episodes" from his first major Broadway hit "On the Town" (which opened in December 1944) and the "Symphonic Suite" from his score for the 1955 Elia Kazan film "On the Waterfront."

Listening to the score for "On the Town" may feel like a nostalgic exercise now, but back in 1944 this story of three sailors out to see as much of New York as possible in one day had real resonance for a country that had been at war for four years. The D-Day invasion was just six months old and while the Third Reich was crumbling, the war with Japan still raged. Everyone in the audience understood that Chip, Ozzie, and Gabey were so desperate to see it all today because, for them, there might not be a tomorrow. You can hear that in the melancholy of the second movement ("Lonely Town") as well as in the frantic bustle of the finale ("Times Square: 1944").

Leonard Bernstein, 1945
Photo: Carl Van Vechten
en.wikipedia.org

"It was very hard for any of us on opening night to have a clear idea of what our show was really like," recall original cast members and lyricists Betty Comden and Adolph Green in the liner notes for the 1961 studio recording of the show for Columbia. "World War II was on, and the theme of young people caught in it, and the urgency of their desperately trying to cram a lifetime of adventure and romance into a moment, seemed to move the audience and give the show an underlying poignancy, while never having to ask for sympathy."

The music from "On the Waterfront"—Bernstein's only film score—shows a different side of his musical personality. It's haunting, lyrical, and, in its final pages, builds to exultant climax. In the film, the music accompanies a scene in which Marlon Brando's character, despite being beaten to a pulp by goons hired by Lee J. Cobb's crooked union organizer, shakily gets to his feat and defiantly returns to work. It's an inspiring moment, even if the film itself sometimes comes across as anti-union agitprop from a director who, a few years earlier, had cooperated with McCarthy's anticommunist witch-hunt.

The essentials: Steven Jarvi conducts the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra with piano soloist Inon Barnatan on Friday at 10:30 a.m., Saturday at 8 p.m., and Sunday at 3 p.m., October 16-18. The concerts take place at Powell Symphony Hall, 718 North Grand in Grand Center. For more information: stlsymphony.org.

Symphony Preview: Old favorites at Powell Hall on Friday, November 21st

The title of this Friday's St. Louis Symphony concert says it all: "music you know." For the overwhelming majority of classical music lovers, this will be an evening with old friends.

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And that creates its own set of challenges. Because the music David Robertson and the orchestra will be performing is so familiar that it is, I expect, difficult to come up with a way of playing and conducting it that respects the intent of the composers while still providing a creative outlet for the conductor and musicians. It will be interesting to see what the Maestro does with these wonderful old chestnuts.

Mussorgsky in 1865
en.wikipedia.org

The concert opens with Rimski-Korsakov's orchestration (actually more of a recomposition) of Mussorgsky's "Night on Bald Mountain," a work that was already a concert standard when Leopold Stokowski produced his own orchestration of it for Disney's "Fantasia." Originally titled "St. John's Eve on Bare Mountain" (and composed on St. John's Eve in 1865) the original version wasn't published until 1968 and wasn't recorded (under the original title) until 1971 (by David Lloyd-Jones and the London Philharmonic). I have the 1980 Claudio Abbado/London Symphony recording, and it's striking how different it is from Rimsky-Korsakov's rewrite. Still, Rimski-Korsakov's version remains the most well known, and it's always a rouser.

The lovely "Méditation" from Jules Massenet's 1894 operatic potboiler "Thaïs" is next. In the opera it accompanies a wordless scene in which the titular courtesan contemplates abandoning her sybaritic life to join the Cenobite monk Athanaël in the desert. Outside of the opera, it's one of those little bonbons that inevitably showed up as filler on LP records of longer works on in collections of classical "greatest hits." Dana Edson Meyers, of the symphony's first violin section, is the soloist.

Tchaikovsky's rousing "Marche Slave" from 1876 is next. It's essentially musical propaganda, written to support the Serbians (who were backed by Russia) in the Serbo-Turkish War of 1876-78. It includes quotes from two Serbian folk songs along with the Tsarist anthem "God Save the Tsar" (which also shows up in the "1812 Overture"). Divorced from 19th century politics, it's still invigorating stuff.

Henrik Klausen as Peer (1876)
en.wikipedia.org

After intermission, it's up to Norway for a suite of the incidental music Grieg wrote for Ibsen's play "Peer Gynt." Extremely popular in Norway, this elaborate five-act tragedy about the globetrotting adventures of a feckless young man who seems afflicted with terminal immaturity has not traveled as well as the great dramatist's other works. Grieg's music, on the other hand, has become an international favorite, thanks to the composer's ability to create appealing themes and paint vivid orchestral pictures of the play's action.

Up next is the one piece on the program that won't be familiar: the world premiere of "Beinn na Caillich (Hill of the Old Woman), Fantasia for a Fiddler" by the symphony's own Christian Woehr. He and SLSO violinist Becky Boyer Hall (the soloist for this piece) are members of Strings of Arda, described by program annotator Eddie Silva as "a world-music ensemble made up of Symphony musicians." Based only on the title, I'd expect an innovative take on Celtic themes.

The concert concludes with Aaron Copland's "Four Dance Episodes from Rodeo." Written for Agnes Demille (for whom Copland also composed "Billy the Kid" and "Appalachian Spring"), "Rodeo" (original subtitle: "The Courting at Burnt Rance") quotes extensively from Western folk tunes and ends with a lively "Hoe Down" that was once famously appropriated to sell beef. Leonard Bernstein's dynamic Columbia recording from 1960 was one of the first LPs I owned as a youngster and I still have fond memories of this music. Most of you probably do as well.

The essentials: David Robertson conducts the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra along with violin soloists Dana Edson Myers and Rebecca Boyer Hall on Friday at 8 p.m., November 21. The concert takes place at Powell Symphony Hall, 718 North Grand in Grand Center. For more information: stlsymphony.org.

Youth's magic piano

Conrad Tao

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Who: The St. Louis Symphony conducted by Leonard Slatkin with piano soloist Conrad Tao
What: Music of Roberto Sierra, Saint-Saëns, and Copland
When: April 25–27, 2014
Where: Powell Symphony Hall

[Find out more about the music with the symphony program notes and my symphony preview post.]

When pianist Conrad Tao appeared with the SLSO in February of 2013—as a last-minute replacement for an ailing Markus Groh—I described him as a tremendously talented young man at the beginning of what looked like a very promising career. This weekend Mr. Tao (who is still not 20 years old) validated that judgment with a Saint-Saëns "Piano Concerto No. 2" that was a model of power and delicacy.

The concerto is easily the French master's most popular essay in the form (he wrote five). It gets off to a big, dramatic start with a solo keyboard fantasia, of the sort Bach might have written, followed by an equally dramatic entrance on the part of the full orchestra. Mr. Tao's performance of the opening mini-cadenza was appropriately splashy, but not overpoweringly so. It set the tone for a performance that did full justice to the composer's keyboard pyrotechnics without ever descending into mere flash for flash's sake.

Mr. Tao's ability to project a more delicate sound was most obvious in the second movement—a fleet-footed scherzo with a piano part that sparkles like Champagne. A less sensitive player might (to carry on the metaphor) cause the bubbles to go flat, but Mr. Tao remained effervescent.

The manic tarantella finale that followed generated all the required thrills and resulted in a much-deserved standing ovation. That, in turn, resulted in an encore that gave Mr. Tao a chance to truly show off: the concluding Vivace—Moderato—Vivace from Prokofiev's "Piano Sonata No. 2 in D Minor," Op. 14 (1912). The movement is a wild, percussive ride that covers almost the entire eight octaves of the keyboard and even (with its repeated triplets) suggests something of the tarantella—which makes it a most appropriate choice following the concerto.

Leonard Slatkin

Under the capable baton of favorite son Leonard Slatkin, the orchestra provided nicely balanced accompaniment. The interplay between soloist and ensemble was simply ideal.

The featured work this weekend is Aaron Copland's "Symphony No. 3." A product of the final years of World War II (the composer began working on it in Mexico in 1944 and completed it just in time for its October 1946 premiere), the symphony perfectly captures the forward-looking optimism that characterized America Victorious. As Copland writes in his autobiography, the Third "was a wartime piece—or, more accurately, and end-of-war piece—intended to reflect the euphoric spirit of the country at the time."

Friday morning, Mr. Slatkin and the orchestra gave us a performance that did full justice to both the exuberant and contemplative aspects of this music. The finale, with its cheerfully bombastic expansion on the 1942 "Fanfare for the Common Man," was thoroughly rousing; the third movement Andantino quasi allegretto was sweetly nostalgic; and the opening Molto moderato had the gravitas it needs. The rapid passages of the Allegro molto second movement were executed with impressive precision, despite some fairly fast tempo choices by Mr. Slatkin.

A couple of split notes not withstanding, the expanded brass section covered itself with glory Friday morning. The super-sized percussion section (six musicians, not counting the piano and celesta) was particularly impressive as well. There was also lovely work by the winds, especially in the quieter moments just before the final statement of the "fanfare" theme in the final movement.

Roberto Sierra

The concert opened with a local premiere, Roberto Sierra's "Fandangos" from 2000. The work was commissioned by Mr. Slatkin and was inspired by a "Fandango" for harpsichord by Spanish composer Antonio Soler (1729–83). Quoted in Paul Schiavo's program notes, the composer describes the piece as “a fantasy, or a ‘super-fandango,' that takes as point of departure Soler's work and incorporates elements of Boccherini's fandango and my own Baroque musings.”

In practice, that translates as a lively, kaleidoscopic elaboration on Soler's original that ripples through every section of the ensemble—a kind of mini-"concerto for orchestra" that gave everyone a chance to show off. It was a great choice for an orchestra with the SLSO's depth of talent and was enormous fun to hear. Mr. Slatkin, as you might expect, knows the music well—he conducted without a score—so I think one would have to regard his performance as definitive.

The concert will be repeated Saturday at 8 PM and Sunday at 3 PM, April 26 and 27, at Powell Symphony Hall, 718 North Grand. The Saturday performance will be broadcast on St. Louis Public Radio, 90.7 FM, HD 1, and via live Internet stream. With a piece like the Copland Third, though, the live experience is highly recommended.

Next at Powell: Carlos Izcaray conducts orchestra and chorus in Orff's ever-popular "Carmina Burana" and Steve Reich's "The Four Sections" Thursday through Saturday at 8 PM and Sunday at 3 PM, May 1–4. For more information: stlsymphony.org.

Top of the pops

Aaron Copland in 1962

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"There is no doubt about it—this is the greatest American symphony!" Thus (according to the 28 October 1946 issue of "Time") spake Boston Symphony Orchestra conductor Serge Koussevitsky after conducting the first performance of Aaron Copland's "Symphony No. 3." Was he right?

You can come to your own conclusions this weekend as St. Louis Symphony conductor emeritus Leonard Slatkin (still a favorite with local audiences) conducts the Copland symphony along with Saint-Saëns’ "Piano Concerto No. 2" and Roberto Sierra's "Fandangos."

Personally, I've always had a great deal of affection for Copland's Third. It perfectly captures the forward-looking optimism that characterized America in the years immediately after World War II. As Copland writes in his autobiography, the Third "was a wartime piece—or, more accurately, and end-of-war piece—intended to reflect the euphoric spirit of the country at the time."

The symphony unfolds in four movements. "It was composed," writes Copland, "in the form of an arch, in which the central portion, that is the second-movement scherzo, is the most animated, and the final movement is an extended coda, presenting a broadened version of the opening material…The second movement stays close to the normal symphonic procedure of a usual scherzo, while the third is the freest of all in formal structure, built up sectionally with its various sections intended to emerge one from the other in a continuous flow, somewhat in the matter of a closely knit series of variations."

That third movement is, for me, the emotional heart of this symphony. There's a kind of lyrical intensity to it that reminds me of the analogous movement from Shostakovich's "Symphony No. 5" from 1937, albeit without the existential despair. And that's not the only resemblance.

Like the Shostakovich Fifth, Copland's symphony reverses the usual order of the scherzo and slow movements. It also opens with a declamatory and dramatic statement and closes with a big brassy finale. Copland's—based on his 1942 hit "Fanfare for the Common Man"—is unambiguously uplifting. Shostakovich's is much more open to interpretation.

I don't know whether or not Copland had the Shostakovich in the back of his mind during the two years he spent writing the Third. As far as I know, he has never said that he did. Besides, there are major differences between the two works. Copland genuinely intended his symphony to be triumphant while Shostakovich very likely intended his to be a subtle attack on the kind of bombast the commissars wanted to hear. And, of course, Copland didn't write his symphony under the threat of arrest, interrogation, and possible death in a Gulag. Still, if you listen to them back to back, they feel like two sides of the coin—or maybe Yin and Yang.

Camille Saint-Saëns
Tucker Collection, New York Public Library

The other Big Work on this weekend's program is also a favorite, not only of mine, but also of concertgoers in general. Camille Saint-Saëns's "Piano Concerto No. 2 in G minor," Op. 22 is easily the French master's most popular concerto (he wrote five). It gets off to a big, dramatic start with a solo keyboard fantasia of the sort Bach might have written (had he been around in 1868 when Saint-Saëns composed the concerto for virtuoso Anton Rubenstein) followed by an equally dramatic entrance on the part of the full orchestra. The second movement is a fleet-footed scherzo with a piano part that sparkles like Champagne and the finale is flashy tarantella that provides a real workout for the soloist. Done well, the concerto is always a crowd pleaser and likely to induce standing ovations.

This week's soloist should have what it takes to get that ovation. His more recent SLSO appearance was as a last-minute replacement for an ailing Markus Groh last February. He delivered what I described as "a bang-up performance" of Prokofiev’s “Piano Concerto No. 3” and followed it up with a spectacular encore: Liszt's “Hungarian Rhapsody No. 6.” Named a Gilmore Young Artist in 2011 (a prestigious appointment), Mr. Tao was the only classical musician on Forbes’ “30 Under 30” list that year of people changing the world. And he's not even 21 yet.

The concerts open with a local premiere: Roberto Sierra's "Fandangos" from 2000. The work was commissioned by Mr. Slatkin for the National Symphony Orchestra and was inspired by a "Fandango" for harpsichord by Spanish composer Antonio Soler (1729-83). Quoted in Paul Schiavo's program notes, the composer describes the piece as “a fantasy, or a ‘super-fandango,’ that takes as point of departure Soler’s work and incorporates elements of Boccherini’s fandango and my own Baroque musings.” It's scored for a large orchestra (including castanets) and looks like it should be pretty colorful stuff.

The essentials: Leonard Slatkin conducts The St. Louis Symphony Orchestra and pianist Conrad Tao in "Fandangos" by Roberto Sierra, the "Piano Concerto No. 2 in G minor," op. 22 by Saint-Saëns, and the "Symphony No. 3" by Copland on Friday at 10:30 AM, Saturday at 8 PM and Sunday at 3 PM, April 25-27, at Powell Symphony Hall, 718 North Grand. For more information: stlsymphony.org. The Saturday performance will be broadcast on St. Louis Public Radio, 90.7 FM, HD 1, and via live Internet stream.

A good dissonance like a man

David Robertson

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Who: The St. Louis Symphony conducted by David Robertson with pianist Kirill Gerstein
What: Music of Ives, Copland, and Tchaikovsky
When: Friday and Saturday at 8 PM and Sunday at 3 PM, September 20-22

The first concert of the new symphony season was a study in contrasts, to say the least. For many music lovers, I expect, the Big Event of the evening was probably Kirill Gerstein's surprisingly lyrical approach to the massively popular Tchaikovsky Piano Concerto No. 1. For me, though, Charles Ives's Three Places in New England—still sounding fresh and radical over a century after it was first composed—was the star of the evening.

Orchestral showpieces are not, of course, uncommon at season openers (Respighi's Pines of Rome last year being a classic example), and Three Places certainly qualifies. Written between 1903 and 1911 (or thereabouts; it's sometimes hard to tell with Ives) the work was originally scored for a massive ensemble. However, Ives cut the orchestration back substantially in 1929—to chamber orchestra proportions, in fact—at the request of Nicolas Slonimsky. Judging from the scoring described in the program for these concerts, though—piano, organ, celesta, and an impressive wind section—the symphony is using James Sinclair's fourth restored version from 1976. That's probably as close as we'll ever get to the 1914 original, which is lost to history.

Charles Ives

Ives employs his orchestral forces in ways that still, nearly a century later, sound novel and daring. Iridescent, impressionistic harmonies; snatches of popular songs and hymns; the sound of clashing brass bands—they all come together in a psychedelic musical mélange that only Ives could pull off. Sure, the conflicting time signatures (4/4 vs. 9/8, for example, in "Putnam's Camp"), cheerful dissonance, and general organized pseudo-chaos that Ives loved so much can be challenging to audiences and (especially) performers, but it's also tremendous fun. I dare anyone to listen to the colorful evocation of a July 4th picnic as seen and heard by a small child in "Putnam's Camp" without cracking a smile.

It has been a decade since the symphony performed Three Places, but you wouldn't know it from the brilliance and precision of the playing under maestro David Robertson's baton Friday night. "The Housatonic at Stockbridge" shimmered in a chromatic mist, "The ‘St. Gaudens' in Boston Common" conjured up ghostly images of the all-black Union regiment honored in the titular statue, and "Putnam's Camp" was raucous but controlled fun. The many little solos Ives sprinkles throughout the piece were played with perfection.

Wintley Phipps

The first half of the program concluded with one of the great works for narrator and orchestra, Aaron Copland's A Lincoln Portrait. Written in response to a commission from André Kostelanetz for a musical depiction of an "eminent American" after the Pearl Harbor attack, A Lincoln Portrait is a classic example of what the composer called his "vernacular style": open harmonies, liberal quotations from folk sources, and general accessibility.

It premiered in Cincinnati in 1942 with Kostelanetz at the podium and local actor William Adams reading the narration. Many of the voices taking on that role since then have come from places other than the stage, though, and this weekend's narrator is no exception: motivational speaker and education activist Wintley Phipps. A commanding figure with palpable stage presence and a resonant bass voice, Mr. Phipps delivered the narration (drawn from Lincoln's speeches and other documents) with great feeling. He read it from a teleprompter placed at floor level, unfortunately, instead of a music stand on stage, so his eyes were cast down much of the time—not a problem for patrons seated on the orchestra floor, but for those of us upstairs it meant we mostly just saw the top of his head. Still, it was a very effective performance that reminded me of how far the level of rhetoric has fallen among our elected officials over the years.

Kirill Gerstein

The Tchaikovsky concerto brought the evening to happy conclusion. Mr. Robertson and soloist Kirill Gerstein did some slightly unorthodox things with it, revealing aspects of delicacy and charm not always apparent in this popular old chestnut. The second subject of the first movement, for example (marked "allegro con spirito"), was played more slowly than usual, and the movement as a whole got more rubato and lyricism than I'm accustomed to hearing. The tempo contrasts in the second movement were more marked than they sometimes are and the "allegro con fuoco" first subject of the finale was as fiery as I've ever heard it. There were also lovely solo passages by (among others) Mark Sparks (flute), Danny Lee (Cello), and Phil Ross (oboe).

It was, in short, the sort of original take on this popular work that made me hear parts of it with new ears. Ives would have approved of that, I think.

Mr. Robertson seemed in especially good spirits Friday night, by the way. He gave a cheerful nod to Mr. Gerstein after the first movement of the Tchaikovsky, for example, and then turned to the audience to congratulate us for not applauding between movements (one of those bits of concert etiquette that probably baffles newbies, but that's another discussion). He also congratulated us for our singing during "The Star Spangled Banner" at the top of the concert, but that might be pro forma (I note wryly).

For more background on the music, check out Paul Schiavo's program notes on the St. Louis Symphony web site.

Next week: that famed tribute to Richard Strauss's ego Ein Heldenleben ("A Hero's Life") along with Beethoven's Piano Concerto No. 3 and Patrick Harlin's 2011 Rapture, inspired by the composer's quasi-religious experience plumbing the depths of Kubera Cave. Lars Vogt is the pianist and the orchestra is conducted by Stéphane Denève, who gave us such a splendid "Daphnis et Chloé" in May of 2011. For more information: stlsymphony.org.

Symphony Notes: First Nighters

David Robertson

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The opening concert of the St. Louis Symphony season is always a gala night (and, as Groucho Marx once observed, "a gal a night is plenty for me"), usually marked by at least one orchestral showpiece. The new season opener is no exception, although the showpiece is probably not the kind some of the more conservative members of the audience might expect.

Under the baton of Maestro David Robertson, this weekend's concerts start off conventionally enough with an arrangement by the great bandmaster John Philip Sousa and legendary composer/conductor Walter Damrosch of "The Star-Spangled Banner" and continues in an American vein right up to intermission. From that old-fashioned opening, though, we plunge straight into one of the more remarkable pieces to flow from the pen of that legendary American iconoclast Charles Ives: Three Places in New England.

Charles Ives

Originally written between 1903 and 1911 or thereabouts and scored for a massive orchestra, the work was cut back substantially by Ives in 1929 at the request of Nicolas Slonimsky. Judging from the scoring described in the program, which includes piano, organ, celesta and an impressive wind section, the symphony is using James Sinclair's restored version from 1976. Ives employs his orchestral forces in ways that still, nearly a century later, sound novel and daring. Shimmering, impressionistic harmonies, snatches of popular songs and hymns, the sound of clashing brass bands—they all come together in a psychedelic musical melange that only Ives could pull off. It's a challenge to musicians and audience alike that's not to be missed. It has been a decade since the symphony performed it, which is far too long as far as I'm concerned.

The first half of the program ends with one of the great works for narrator and orchestra, Aaron Copland's A Lincoln Portrait. Written in a burst of patriotic fervor (and in response to a commission) after the Pearl Harbor attack, A Lincoln Portrait premiered in Cincinnati in 1942 with André Kostelanetz at the podium and local actor William Adams reading the narration. Many of the voices taking on that role since then have come from places other than the stage, though, and this weekend's narrator is no exception: motivational speaker and education activist Wintley Phipps. It's stirring stuff, blending Copland's spacious music with Lincoln's inspiring words.

Kirill Gerstein

After intermission, the tone shifts from American to Russian nationalism with a performance of the ever-popular Piano Concerto No. 1 in B-flat minor, op. 23 by Tchaikovsky. The pianist is Kirill Gerstein, last seen here in 2012 as the soloist in the local debut of Thomas Adès’s In Seven Days. He was impressive as hell then as well as in the Shostakovich Piano Concerto No. 2 back in 2011 (his local debut). The interesting question this time is: can he find a way to make an old standard like this one fresh and exciting? It's one of the best-known piano concerti in the world, after all, and an in-demand performer like Mr. Gerstein has probably performed it hundreds of times.

These and other questions will be answered at Powell Hall this weekend. Concerts are Friday and Saturday at 8 PM and Sunday at 3 PM. For more information: www.stlsymphony.org, where you can also download Paul Schiavo's program notes. The Saturday concert will be simulcast on St. Louis Public Radio, 90.7 FM and HD 1.

Kirill Gerstein isn't the only guest musician this weekend, FYI. R. Douglas Wright, Principal Trombone with Minnesota Orchestra, will also be sitting in for the Ives and Tchaikovsky.

Urban Legends

Who: The St. Louis Symphony Orchestra conducted by David Robertson with pianist Orli Shaham
What: Music of Copland, Bernstein, and John Adams
Where: Powell Symphony Hall
When: February 15-16, 2013

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“There was a desert wind blowing that night. It was one of those hot dry Santa Anas that come down through the mountain passes and curl your hair and make your nerves jump and your skin itch. On nights like that every booze party ends in a fight. Meek little wives feel the edge of the carving knife and study their husbands' necks. Anything can happen.” – Raymond Chandler, Red Wind (1938)

In his notes for the 2009 world premiere of City Noir by the Los Angeles Philharmonic composer John Adams doesn’t list Raymond Chandler as a source of inspiration, although he does mention Chinatown and The Naked City (which are surely related). Listening to the bravura performance of City Noir that closed Friday morning’s concert, though, it was that quote from the beginning of Red Wind that came immediately to mind.

Like that story, City Noir is a mix of violence (sometime suppressed, sometimes overt) and sensuality with an “anything can happen” edginess. Written for a large orchestra, including a massive percussion section, a jazz drummer, and an alto sax soloist, the music has the kind of cinematic sweep that suggests a classic private eye flick on steroids. It’s mostly exciting stuff but after a while, especially towards the end of the frenzied first movement, “The City and Its Double,” I began to feel a bit like Marlowe after a working-over by a couple of thugs. This is complex music, but subtle it mostly ain’t.

Still, it gave Mr. Robertson and his forces a chance to show what fine musicians they are. Everyone played well, of course, but Principal Tim Meyers’s “walking” trombone solo in the second movement and Acting Principal Tom Drake’s performance of what Adams describes as a “moody ‘Chinatown’ trumpet solo” in the third were standouts. So was the virtuoso alto sax work of guest soloist Tim McAllister. Principal horn Roger Kaza and the new Principal Violist Beth Guterman Chu also had nice moments in one of the work’s few quieter passages at the end of the second movement. Mr. Robertson conducted with his usual all-in commitment and precision.

This weekend’s performances of City Noir are being recorded by Nonesuch for a later commercial release along with Adams’s Saxophone Concerto (which the symphony is performing in October). I think the record company will be pleased with the results. They’ll also be happy with the lack of coughs, cell phones, or other audience noise during the softer passages, demonstrating that people actually can be quiet when they put their minds to it—or at least when symphony CEO Fred Bronstein makes a personal appeal to do so before the concert.

Orli Shaham
Photo Credit: Christian Steiner

Like City Noir, Leonard Bernstein’s Symphony No. 2 ("The Age of Anxiety") is urban music. In Bernstein’s case, though, New York is just the backdrop for musings on the difficulty of finding The Meaning of Life in an age when God is either dead or (to quote Walt Kelly) merely unemployed.

The program for this hybrid of piano concerto and symphony comes from W. H. Auden’s 1947 epic poem of the same name about four angst-ridden young people who meet in a New York bar and try to find the answer to, as Douglas Adams put it, the question of “Life, the Universe, and Everything.” Over the course of the work’s six sections the protagonists reflect on the meaning of life, fantasize about happiness, mourn the death of God (Auden’s “Colossal Dad”), abandon themselves to hedonism in a late-night party, and finally find some sort of faith, or at least a sense of resolution. In a 1977 press conference at the offices of Deutsche Gramophon (where Bernstein was recording Age of Anxiety), the composer said that resolution was the “Buddhistic idea” that God was everywhere.” That notion is probably more Bernstein than Auden, of course.

That’s pretty ambitious stuff for a purely orchestral work (although no more so than, say, Also Sprach Zarathustra) but even without the extra-musical program, The Age of Anxiety still makes perfect sense, with a clearly laid-out structure and irresistible thematic material that is classic Bernstein. Indeed, in the 1977 interview cited above, the composer said that the work had “acquired a life of its own” and that the poem and the symphony were no longer “mutually integral.”

Speaking of interviews, in a Valentine’s Day interview for St. Louis Magazine piano soloist Orli Shaham notes that she and her husband Maestro Robertson have frequently collaborated on Age of Anxiety. “I feel in many ways as I’ve grown with the piece,” she says. “We’ve grown with it together. It’s grown in direct relation to what the other one of us thinks about the piece.” Indeed, Mr. Robertson has even prepared the version of the score she uses (cut and pasted to minimize page turning).

No surprise, then, that their performance Friday morning was of the “two minds with but a single thought” variety. Ms. Shaham was strongly invested in the music, to the point where you could almost see her acting out the parts of Auden’s characters. I’ve always found this somewhat theatrical aspect of Ms. Shaham’s keyboard style very appealing, especially given her formidable technique, and Friday was no exception. Mr. Robertson’s direction made the most of the dramatic contrasts in the score and the overall result was just stunning. The standing ovation that followed should have gone on longer and would have if it had been up to me.

As in the Adams, there were some solo performances in the orchestra that deserve a nod. Tina Ward and Principal Scott Andrews were perfect in the highly exposed clarinet duet that opens the work; Principal double bassist Erik Harris tore up the joint with his “slap bass” part in “The Masque”, which also featured some very flashy work by the percussion section; and Peter Henderson provided some nice accents on celesta and the small (but critical) offstage piano part that Bernstein (as he notes in that 1977 interview) uses as a way to indicate “the separation of self from reality.”

The concert opened with Copland’s short suite of themes from his score for the 1939 film version of Thornton Wilder’s Our Town. This peaceful evocation of Grovers Corners, the fictional New England “everytown” of the early 20th century, is about as distant from the tightly wound urban soundscapes of Adams and Bernstein as you can get. But, like them, it strongly evokes a sense of place and time. Mr. Robertson’s interpretation stressed the lyrical a bit more than I prefer, but it was a lovely performance nevertheless. The applause for it was shockingly brief, I thought, given the quality of the performance. Maybe the audience was insufficiently caffeinated.

Next on the regular calendar: There’s a Black History Month concert with the IN UNISON® Chorus on Thursday, February 22 at 7:30 PM and an appearance by jazz trumpeter Chris Botti on Friday, February 23, also at 7:30. The regular season resumes on Friday and Saturday, March 1 and 2, at 8 PM with Delius’s The Walk to the Paradise Garden, Elgar’s Violin Concerto (with Tasmin Little), and Beethoven’s Symphony No. 4. Sir Andrew Davis conducts. For ticket information: stlsymphony.org.

TPTBT (The Place to Be Tonight): Saturday, February 16

Photo Credit: Christian Steiner

Pianist Orli Shaham (pictured) and St. Louis Symphony conductor David Robertson demonstrate why they're the hardest-working couple in classical show biz with a bravura performance of Leonard Bernstein's Symphony No. 2 ("The Age of Anxiety") as part of an American Masters concert weekend. The program also features the local premiere of City Noir, John Adams's hyperchaged 2009 homage to the Los Angeles of Raymond Chandler and Chinatown (which is being recorded live for future release on Nonesuch), and a gracefully lyrical reading of Copland's Our Town suite. The concert starts at 8 PM at Powell Symphony Hall, 718 North Grand in Grand Center. The concert will be broadcast on St. Louis Public Radio at 90.7 FM, HD 1, and on via live Internet stream but, to paraphrase the orchestra's web slogan, you have to see it live. Get your tickets at stlsymphony.org.

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