Coming to America

Who: The St. Louis Symphony Orchestra conducted by David Robertson with violin soloist Gil Shaham
What: Music of Dvořák, Korngold, and Ingram Marshall
When: March 21 and 22, 2014
Where: Powell Symphony Hall

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Gil Shaham

Highlighting this weekend's St. Louis Symphony concerts is a pair impressive performances of works written right here in the good old USA (including one premiered in St. Louis) by visitors from abroad: Erich Wolfgang Korngold's 1945 "Violin Concerto" and Dvořák's 1893 "Symphony No. 9" ("From the New World").

Although separated by an almost fifty turbulent years in music history, the harmonic language of the two pieces isn't that much different—which is why the Korngold's concerto had to wait until the wave of Serialism and related compositional trends had begun to wane before it could start to get some respect.  Amply supplied with tunes recycled from Korngold's work as a film composer, the concerto has the late Romantic richness that you hear in the work of Richard Strauss and the other post Wagnerians coupled with ingenious and often unexpected bits of orchestration.  The celesta part (expertly played by Peter Henderson), for example, is large enough to almost make it a second solo instrument.  Combined with Allegra Lilly's fine harp work, the result was a kind of hallucinatory filigree that suggested a Hollywood dream sequence.

The concerto is probably familiar territory to soloist Gil Shaham (he recorded it with Andre Previn and the London Symphony back in 1994), so it's not surprising that he negotiated its many technically tricky passages with ease while not neglecting the lyricism that is at the heart of the piece.  "In spite of the demand for virtuosity in the finale," wrote the composer after hearing the concerto's premiere with Jascha Heifetz and the SLSO in 1947, "the work with its many melodic and lyric episodes was contemplated more for a Caruso than a Paganini."  There's a sense of longing in both the main theme of the first movement and (most notably) in all of the second movement "Romance" that needs to come through clearly, and we definitely got it from Mr. Shaham and Mr. Robertson Friday night.

That said, the balance between soloist and ensemble was less than ideal.  At least from our perch in row D of the dress circle, Mr. Shaham was often overwhelmed by the orchestra (which is, to be fair, a large one), even when he moved farther downstage.  I don't know how much of that was a performance issue and how much an acoustical one, although I'm inclined to suspect it's mostly the latter.

Mr. Shaham was warmly received by the audience Friday night, which applauded after every movement (something which was once commonplace in concert halls) and gave him a standing ovation at the end.  Mr. Shaham and Mr. Robertson responded with an encore: an echt Viennese (with really major luftpausen) of Kreisler's charming "Schön Rosmarin," including a bit of clowning around between Mr. Robertson and Mr. Shaham (who is, after all, his brother-in-law).

The concert concluded with a world class (or is that "new world class"?) Dvořák 9th from Mr. Robertson and the orchestra.  From the dramatically charged introduction to the electrifying final bars of the Allegro con fuoco, this was a "New World" that bristled with excitement and fine orchestral playing.  The famous "Goin' Home" English horn theme in the second movement was lovingly played by Cally Banham, the flute theme in the first movement got a particularly expressive treatment from Mark Sparks, and the brass section generally did itself proud.

Mr. Robertson intelligently shaped and paced this performance in ways that made the most of the work's strengths while minimizing its weaknesses (much as I love this piece, I understand how episodic it can be).  Tempi were well chosen, dynamics were just right—it all added up to a wonderfully coherent reading that revealed new aspects of a work which, I expect, many of us have heard so often that we could almost conduct it ourselves.

The concert opened with a relatively new work (it premiered in 2004): "Bright Kingdoms" by Connecticut-based composer Ingram Marshall.  Mr. Marshall is friend of composer John Adams (who is a major booster of Mr. Ingram's work) and a great lover of the compositional technique of mixing live and recorded sounds, which he's been doing since the 1970s.  Both approaches are evident in this music, which struck me as the sort of thing you might experience if you were listening to an Adams composition while someone in the next room was playing an old Tomita LP.

For me, the best thing about "Bright Kingdoms" was the lovely fugal central section for strings based on the hymn "Eventide" (most often heard with the words "Abide with Me").  The tune is also, apparently, the basis for a Swedish hymn, a distorted children's choir version of which is the basis for a long recorded section that takes up much of the final third of this 17-minute piece.  "Bright Kingdoms" rather wore out its welcome for me after that string chorale.  Judging from the polite applause, I probably wasn't the only one who thought so.

Next at Powell Hall:  David Robertson conducts the orchestra and soprano Karita Mattila in Wagner's Prelude to "Tristan and Isolde," Brahms's "Symphony No. 3," and Schoenberg's "Erwartung" on Friday  and Saturday at 8 PM March 28 and 29.  For more information: stlsymphony.org. 

New World records

Ingram Marshall

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This weekend David Robertson conducts the symphony in three "American" works. Granted, only one was written by an American; but all three were composed here and one even had its premiere in St. Louis.

The music that opens the concerts, Ingram Marshall's "Bright Kingdoms," was first performed in Oakland, California, back in 2004. It's unusual in that it uses both live and recorded sounds—a compositional technique that Mr. Marshall has been playing with since his days as a graduate student at Columbia University in the 1960s. In 1971 a summer study trip to Indonesia exposed him to gamelan music with its altered sense of time and so that, too, became part of his vocabulary.

In his notes for the 2004 premiere, Mr. Marshall wrote that the recorded sound consists of "processed recordings" of a Swedish children's choir, including a boy singing a hymn whose words, in English, are: "Through the bright kingdoms of this early, go we to paradise with song."

"Unconsciously," he went on, "the music turned out to be about innocence, the kingdoms of innocence and the dissolution of those kingdoms. Several sections of the piece are for orchestra alone, one in particular being a threnody for strings about half way through, another being a series of brightly orchestrated passages near the beginning that might be heard as 'kingdoms.' Otherwise, the orchestra and 'soundtrack' are cohabitants."

Erich Wolfgang Korngold

The orchestra has plenty of experience playing along with recorded sounds—they did an entire program of it last week with "Bugs Bunny at the Symphony II," for example—so this is nothing new for them. Although I expect Mr. Marshall's stuff might be a bit more challenging than "I Tawt I Taw a Puddy Tat."

Up next is Erich Wolfgang Korngold's "Violin Concerto in D major," op. 35, which first saw the light of day right here in Mound City back in 1947. Jascha Heifetz was the soloist, and on the podium was the French conductor Vladimir Golschmann. Golschmann was music director of the SLSO from 1931 to 1958 (the longest-reigning SLSO music director to date) and made a number of recordings with the orchestra.

Korngold's name will be familiar to classic film fans. Born in Moravia in 1897, Korngold was a child prodigy hailed as a "musical genius" by Gustav Mahler. He composed his first ballet at age 11 and his most famous opera, "Die tote Stadt," at 23. In 1934 director Max Reinhardt enticed Korngold to Hollywood to write the music for his lavish film version of "A Midsummer Night's Dream" (well worth seeing, despite the many cuts in Shakespeare's text). He returned to Austria, but was drawn back to California in 1938 to write the score for "The Adventures of Robin Hood." While he was there, Hitler's Anschluss of Austria took place, and Korngold became an émigré ("We thought of ourselves as Viennese," he would recall later; "Hitler made us Jewish.")

Dvořák with his friends and family in New York

Even if you didn't know Korngold was a film composer, you could guess it by the lush romantic sound of this music. You might also recognize some of the themes, as he recycled material from the films "Juarez" (1939), "Anthony Adverse" (1936), "Another Dawn" (1937), and—in the lively finale—"The Prince and the Pauper" (1937). It's flashy stuff and should fit nicely under the hands of soloist Gil Shaham (who is Mr. Robertson's brother-in-law).

Closing the concerts is the "Symphony No. 9 in E minor," op. 95, (“From the New World”) by Antonín Dvořák. The Czech master wrote it during a visit to America in the early 1890s and while he never explicitly quotes any American folk material, there's still something about this music that strongly suggests America. From the flute theme in the first movement that seems to echo "Swing Low, Sweet Chariot," to the second movement Largo that has (at least for me) always evoked the majestic solitude of the plains (Dvořák said he wrote it after reading Longfellow's "Hiawatha"), to the "bluesy" flatted seventh chords of the finale, Dvořák "New World" symphony just shouts "USA"—even if it does so with a strong Czech accent.

Some critics have complained of the symphony's structural weaknesses and its episodic nature, but even they have had to confess that it's never anything less than tremendously appealing. It's one of the first "classical" works I ever encountered, and I've never lost my affection for it. If you've never heard it before, I'd bet it will strike you the same way.

The essentials: David Robertson conducts The St. Louis Symphony Orchestra and violin soloist Gil Shaham in Marshall's Bright Kingdoms, Korngold's Violin Concerto, and Dvorak's Symphony No. 9, "From the New World" on Friday at 10:30 AM and at 8 PM, and Saturday at 8 PM March 21 and 22, at Powell Symphony Hall, 718 North Grand. For more information: stlsymphony.org. The Saturday concert will be broadcast live on St. Louis Public Radio, 90.7 FM, HD 1, and on the Internet from the station web site.

National identity

Joshua Bell
Photo: Eric Kabik

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In case you thought music only got political in the 1960s, allow me to disabuse you of that notion. The great composers whose music fills concert halls these days were often very politically active and weren't shy about expressing their politics in their music.

Three of the four composers whose music David Robertson and the St. Louis Symphony will perform this weekend were ardent musical Nationalists, which means they used their compositions to advocate for the cultures of their native countries. Bedřich Smetana (1824-1884) and Antonín Dvořák (1841-1904) were Czech patriots promoting the artistic and (in the case of Smetana) political independence of their homeland from the Austro-Hungarian Empire while Jean Sibelius (1865-1957) was passionate about the legends and landscape of Finland. The fourth composer, Einojuhani Rautavaara (1928- ), isn't generally regarded as a Nationalist per se, but he does draw inspiration from the Finnish countryside and folk tales.

Smetana

Smetana's music often has specific references to Czech legend and lore, so it's only right that he's represented here by two of the six tone poems that make up his epic cycle Má vlast (My Fatherland): Vyšehrad and the massively popular Vltava (more popularly known by its German name, The Moldau).

Vyšehrad, which opens the program, begins with a long introduction depicting the song of the bard Lumir, playing inside the great hall of the castle of Vyšehrad. A more dramatic central section suggests the strife that would characterize Czech history, after which the calmer voice of the bard returns. A few troubled final bars, though, suggest that the calm won't last. When you listen to Vyšehrad, notice how important the harp is as the voice of the bard. In the program book, principal harpist Allegra Lilly notes that the "big, rolled chords which are interspersed with arpeggiated passages" in the introduction help to "create a magical sound, a mystical element appropriate to the piece."

Vltava (which closes the program) is straightforward scene painting, vividly illustrating the course of the river Vltava from placid mountain stream to raging torrent at the St. John rapids (which manifest themselves as big crashing chords towards the end). The bard's theme from Vyšehrad pops up again near the end as well, to provide some artistic unity. When I was young, The Moldau (as it was usually known) was very popular with teachers of "music appreciation" courses (do they still have those?) because it was short (around 12 minutes) and the structure was simple. It's very appealing stuff.

Dvořák

Dvořák's nationalism tends to show itself more in reverence for the Czech countryside, which is very much on display in In Nature's Realm, op. 91. "Dvořák's pure woodwind colors," writes René Spencer Saller in her program notes, "and richly layered strings perfectly evoke the cries of birds, the murmuring of woodland streams, the sighing of wind in the trees." It's musical painting of a high order; some of Dvořák's most profound and touching work was inspired by his love of nature.

Originally the piece was the first of a cycle of three symphonic poems with the omnibus title Nature, Life, and Love. "His intention," writes Denby Richards, the late editor of Musical Opinion magazine, "was to explore every possible facet of nature and life and the effect they have had on the soul of man." These days the three works are usually performed separately under the titles In Nature's Realm, Carnival, and Othello.  Which is rather a pity, as there are thematic relationships among them that make more sense when they're performed as Dvořák originally intended.

Sibelius

Sibelius is represented by his Violin Concerto in D minor, op. 47. The violin was Jean Sibelius's first musical love. He began playing as a child and showed great promise as a performer, despite an elbow fracture that impeded his bowing technique. Even after it became clear that his real talent was for composition, he continued to play in chamber ensembles and even teach the instrument. It's no surprise, then, that his Violin Concerto—originally presented in 1903 and then again in a substantially revised form in 1905—is both thoroughly idiomatic and incredibly demanding. The long solo passages in the first movement and virtuoso fireworks in the finale will test the mettle of the best performers.

Fortunately, the symphony has one of the best violinists around as soloist this weekend: Joshua Bell. Born in Bloomington Indiana, Mr. Bell, who turns 46 on December 9th, began taking violin lessons at age four. By 14 he was already appearing with the Philadelphia Orchestra. He made his Carnegie Hall appearance at the age of 17 with our own St. Louis Symphony. Today he is very much in demand as a soloist with notable orchestras worldwide. As of 2011, he also became the music director of the Academy of St. Martin-in-the Fields—the first person to hold that post since the orchestra was founded in 1958 by Sir Neville Marriner. He recorded the Sibelius concerto for Sony in 2000, so he should be very comfortable with the piece.

Einojuhani Rautavaara

Like many music lovers, I expect, I discovered the last composer on this weekend's program, Einojuhani Rautavaara, via a recording of his most well known work Cantus Arcticus (1972). Subtitled "Concerto for Birds and Orchestra," this three-movement work uses recordings of birds from near the Arctic Circle to weave a remarkable musical tapestry.

It seems only fitting, then, that the Rautavaara piece we'll hear this weekend—Lintukoto (Isle of Bliss) from 2001— is inspired by a Finnish poem about the mythical isle of Lintukoto, a paradisaical place where birds migrate for the winter and where all the inhabitants are dwarves because the sky is so close to the ground. There's a kind of hallucinatory wildness to the music which should make for an interesting contrast from the Dvořák that precedes it and the Smetana the follows it. Still, all three pieces are fine examples of nature rendered as music, which makes for a nice through line in the second half of the concert.

David Robertson and The St. Louis Symphony, with violinist Joshua Bell, perform Smetana's Vyšehrad, Sibelius's Violin Concerto, Dvořák's In Nature's Realm, Rautavaara's Lintukoto (Isle of Bliss), and Smetana's Vltava at Powell Hall in Grand Center on Friday and Saturday at 8 PM and Sunday at 3 PM. The Saturday concert will be broadcast on St. Louis Public Radio, 90.7 FM and HD 1, as well as via the station web site. For more information: stlsymphony.org.