Symphony Preview: It was a dark and stormy night

The St. Louis Symphony Orchestra (SLSO) concerts this weekend (Friday and Saturday, January 31 and February 1) open with a pair of works by two composers who, despite significant differences in temperament and musical style, were close friends.

Manfred on the Jungfrau
Painting by John Martin, 1837

The concerts open with the overture to Robert Schumann's 1848 "Manfred: Dramatic Poem with Music in Three Parts," Op. 115. Based on Byron's "Manfred: A dramatic poem," Schumann's complete "Manfred" consists of the overture we'll hear this weekend along with 15 additional numbers for orchestra, choir, and soloists, dramatizing scenes from Byron's three-act work.

The titular Manfred is not the animated sidekick of Tom Terrific but rather a brooding count living in the Alps and tormented by guilt for somehow (it's never really clear how) causing the death of his beloved Astarte. He summons seven spirits from the deep, hoping to be granted forgetfulness. They can't manage it, but the demonic spirit Nemesis does summon up the shade of Astarte. She grants Manfred the forgiveness that will allow him to die.

In the last scene the spirits return to convince the dying Manfred to join them by preying on his guilt. Manfred, however, isn't having any of it:

Thou didst not tempt me, and thou couldst not tempt me;
I have not been thy dupe nor am thy prey,
But was my own destroyer, and will be
My own hereafter.--
Back, ye baffled fiends!
The hand of death is on me-- but not yours!

An elderly Abbot offers to pray for him, but Manfred rejects all forms of spiritual intervention. He will be his own man to the end. "Old man! 't is not so difficult to die," he exclaims. And proves it by promptly expiring. "He's gone," cries the Abbot; "his soul hath ta'en its earthless flight -- /Whither? I dread to think -- but he is gone."

That would be when the curtain would descend if "Manfred" were an actual play. But, although written as a script complete with scene descriptions and minimal stage directions, "Manfred" was actually an example of the genre known as "closet drama": a play never meant to be staged but rather to be read, either silently or aloud. Schumann, however, fully intended his version to be performed.

Presented for the first time in 1852 at the Leipzig Gewandhaus, Schumann's "Dramatic Poem" never really caught on with audiences, probably because Byron's deliberately archaic poetry didn't translate well into German and partly because (as Judith Chernaik writes in a recent biography of the composer, "Schumann insisted that the work was not an opera, a Singspiel, or a melodrama, but 'a dramatic poem with music' which he considered 'completely new and unprecedented.''' It was, in short, a hard sell and, given the number of performers required, expensive to produce to boot.

The overture, on the other hand, has pretty much entered the standard repertory, even though the SLSO hasn't played it in over 32 years. Its appeal is not hard to understand, packed as it is with stormy drama.

The overture opens with three powerful chords which quickly yield to a slow, brooding introduction suggesting the opening scene ("a Gothic Gallery. --Time: Midnight") in which Manfred ponders the limits of human knowledge and prepares to summon the spirits. Trumpets announce the dramatic main theme, the tempo quickens to "Leidenschaftlich" ("impassioned"), and the music becomes anguished and filled with dark conflict. Lyrical interludes suggest memories of the lost Astarte. Finally, there's a massive climax (the final confrontation with the spirits?) that yields to what Shakespeare might have called "a dying fall" as Manfred slowly shuffles off this mortal coil in a few soft closing chords. The final moments suggest that he has passed in neither hope nor despair, the master of his own fate to the end.

Portrait of Mendelssohn by
James Warren Childe
(1778–1862), 1839
en.wikipedia.org

Schumann identified strongly with Byron's tormented heroes. Indeed, Ms. Chernaik suggests that the composer, who contracted syphilis at an early age, might have identified with Manfred's guilt as a result. "What is unquestionable," she writes, "is that the figure of the solidary nobleman, Byron's alter ego, guilty and despairing, spoke him in a profoundly personal way, inspiring some of his greatest music."

Up next is the Piano Concerto No. 2 in D minor by Felix Mendelssohn from 1837. It opens, like the "Manfred" overture, on "a dark and stormy night" as descending runs in the piano fight it out with a dramatic ascending theme in the orchestra. The exchanges become shorter and more insistent until the orchestra wins out. The piano uses that dramatic theme as the basis for a more lyrical second subject but, this being a movement in classical sonata form, the minor key drama forcefully returns at the end, only to die out, within a few measures from fortissimo (very loud) to piano (soft). The piano takes over again with a gently rising theme and mini-cadenza that leads without pause to the gentle second movement.

That theme, which starts out sounding very much like transformation of the dark melody of the first movement, slowly changes in a way that produces, in the words of Zoran Minderovic at allmusic.com, "a hypnotic atmosphere of tranquil meditation, mystery, and melancholy."

The pace picks up again in the Presto scherzando final movement as the key shifts to D major, but now there's a playful and almost terpsichorean grace to the piano part that's reflected in the interchanges with the orchestra. The opponents of the first movement have morphed into friendly dance partners in the third.

Unlike "Manfred," in short, there's a happy ending.

Mendelssohn found the composition process unusually difficult with his second concerto. Commissioned in 1837 by the Birmingham Music Festival for a performance that fall, the concerto was almost forgotten by Mendelssohn as he went on an extended honeymoon with his new bride, Cécile Jeanrenaud. "With his mind and body otherwise occupied," writes Georg Predota at Interlude, "he wasn't very excited about the prospect of having to travel to London and Birmingham and wrote to his friend Karl Klingemann, 'I really should compose a concert for England, but haven't even started yet; for some reason this is proving to be very difficult.'" He finished it just in time for the September premiere (where he was the soloist) but, as Mr. Predota notes, "even then he was not satisfied, as he wrote to the pianist and composer Ferdinand Hiller in December 1837, 'I believe you would abhor my new piano concerto.'"

Even Mendelssohn's friend Schumann wasn't very impressed--unusual, given how much he praised the composer's work in general. As he wrote in the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik (which he had founded three years earlier):

This concerto, to be sure, will offer virtuosos little in which to show off their monstrous dexterity. Mendelssohn gives them almost nothing to do that they have not already done a hundred times before. We have often heard them complain about it. And not unjustly!...It resembles one of those works thrown off by the older masters while recuperating from one of their great exertions." (cited in Schumann on music: a selection from the writings, edited by Henry Pleasants)

For many years, the Concerto No. 2 was largely eclipsed by the more popular Concerto No. 1. As SLSO program annotator Thomas May points out, however, "contemporary performers have been reclaiming the Second Concerto and making a persuasive case that Schumann's verdict sells the music short by a considerable measure."

Sleeping Beauty at the Royal Ballet, 2008
By scillystuff from UK
Sleeping Beauty, CC BY 2.0, Link

The SLSO last presented it in 2007 with Jonathan Biss at the keyboard. This week's soloist is Saleem Ashkar, who has an unusual background for a successful classical pianist. "Born into a culture where Classical music played very little to no part at all," writes Mr. Ashkar (an Israeli-born Palestinian Christian), "my love for this music and eventual obsessive pursuit of it, was a journey, very much into the unknown, both mentally and practically. I simply had no path to follow!" Given that he made his Carnegie Hall debut at the age of 22 and has performed with orchestras such as the Wiener Philharmoniker, Royal Concertgebouw, London Symphony, Detroit Symphony, Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin, and Orchestre National de Lyon, it would seem that the path he has forged for himself has certainly not led him astray.

The concerts this weekend conclude with music that requires little in the way of an introduction: a suite from Tchaikovsky's 1890 ballet "Sleeping Beauty" assembled by guest conductor Nikolaj Szeps-Znaider. Based on Charles Perrault's retelling of the classic tale of an enchanted princess sleeping in a castle surrounded by impenetrable thorns, the ballet got a lukewarm reception from Tsar Alexander III at its premiere, but has been embraced by audiences all over the world.

Tchaikovsky's music even made its way on to the screen when George Bruns adapted large chunks of it for Walt Disney's 1959 animated version of "Sleeping Beauty." The "Grande valse villageoise" (which we'll hear this weekend) actually became a popular tune, "Once Upon a Dream," with lyrics by Jack Lawrence and Sammy Fain. Trust me, you'll recognize it.

The Essentials: Nikolaj Szeps-Znaider conducts The St. Louis Symphony Orchestra, along with pianist Saleem Ashkar on Friday at 10:30 am and Saturday at 8 pm, January 31 and February 1. Performances take place at Powell Symphony Hall in Grand Center.

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

Symphony Preview: Twilight time

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

This weekend (October 18-20) Stéphane Denève returns to conduct the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra (SLSO) in an early 20th century program that moves from light to darkness (or at least twilight) with a lyrical pause in between.

The light comes first, in the form of a suite from Francis Poulenc's 1923 ballet "Les Biches." Written for the Ballets Russe and choreographed by the Polish dancer Bronislava Nijinska, it's an immediately appealing piece. Its fusion of classical and then-contemporary pop influences can easily be enjoyed without much concern about its original minimalist scenario or cultural references.

Francis Poulenc in 1922
Photo by Joseph Rosmand

That said, all that stuff makes pretty intriguing reading. This week's program notes by Tim Munro provide an excellent summary of the action accompanying each of the six selections of the suite, while the Wikipedia article on the ballet goes into considerable depth about the origins of the music and the contents of the full-length score. That full score consists of nine numbers, including three for mixed chorus with what, according to the University of Ottawa's Christopher Moore, the composer called "beautiful but slightly obscene texts (from the 18th century)".

And if that's not enough, conductor/scholar Leon Botstein has a fascinating article on the ballet's connections to the Surrealist movement in a program note for his 1992 performance of the suite with the American Symphony Orchestra at Carnegie Hall.

Even the title requires some footnotes. According to Poulenc's biographer Carl Schmidt (in "Entrancing Muse: A Documented Biography of Francis Poulenc") the composer acknowledged that biche, with its multiple possible meanings, is not really translatable into any other language. Wordreference, for example, will tell you it means "doe" ("a deer, a female deer...") as well as "darling" or "honey." Wikipedia adds that "it was also used as a slang term for a coquettish woman." Moore, in an article for the "Musical Quarterly," takes it a step farther, noting that "the word biches is itself pregnant with double entendre, referring most obviously to does, but also, in the underworld of Parisian slang, to a woman (or ironically, a man) of deviant sexual proclivities."

That synchs up with Mr. Munro's suggestion that the subtext of "Les Biches" includes veiled references the composer's sexual identity. "As a gay man in post-World War I France," he writes, "he masked the truth of his sexuality. A work like 'Les biches' allowed him to hint at topics and relationships otherwise taboo in polite society: the game of sexual courtship, gender fluidity, same-sex partnerships."

If that looks like a lot of heavy baggage for around 20 minutes of consistently beguiling music (or if your eyes just started to glaze over a couple paragraphs ago), here's a far more pithy summary by Maestro Denève from this week's program notes:

"Les biches" has something to do with Mozart. There is a saying: "Humor is the politeness of despair." In Mozart, you have music in a major key, which appears very light, but there is such sadness and melancholy behind it. Poulenc has this elegance--he was a dandy who would never complain--but you get hints of an internal despair. I programmed it to show that depth and lightness can go together.

Prokofiev in New York, 1918
Photo by Bain News Service

Up next is Prokofiev's Violin Concerto No. 1 in D major, op. 19, composed in 1917 but, because of the Russian revolution, not actually performed until 1923 when Serge Koussevitzky conducted the premiere in Paris. It wasn't particularly well received, partly because it's overall lyricism seemed tame compared to the kind of sarcastic and savage music for which the composer was known at the time.

I have quite a bit more to say about the Prokofiev concerto, but since I already said it in a preview article back in 2016, there's no need to plagiarize myself here. I merely note that its lyrical qualities don't make it any easier to play, so our soloist this weekend, Karen Gomyo, has her work cut out for her.

Fortunately, Ms. Gomyo is no stranger to Powell Hall, and has impressed the hell out of me every time I have seen her here. This past April, for example, I called her Tchaikovsky violin concerto "technically pristine and warmly expressive." I look forward to seeing what she does with this very different music.

This weekend's concerts conclude with Rachmaninoff's "Symphonic Dances," a work I have found oddly compelling since I first heard it on a 1961 LP recording by the Philadelphia Orchestra under Eugene Ormandy, who conducted the work's first performance in 1941. I was immediately struck by the "late night" feel of the piece--and not just because of the chimes in the last movement. It was only later that I learned that Rachmaninoff had, in fact, originally titled the three sections "Noon," "Twilight," and "Midnight." The composer dropped the titles, preferring the let the music speak for itself, and it does so eloquently.

Rachmaninoff in 1921
Public Domain, Wikimeida Commons

The work is filled with evidence of Rachmaninoff's genius as an orchestrator, with elaborate and complex string writing, inventive use of brasses and winds (including a short but poignant solo for alto sax), and an effective but never overwhelming use of the large percussion battery. This is dramatic music that is nevertheless steeped in autumnal melancholy--very appropriate now that fall seems to have finally arrived here.

The "Symphonic Dances" is the composer's last completed work (he died two years after its premiere), and there's a sense throughout of a life approaching its conclusion. "'Symphonic Dances'" writes Maestro Denève in this week's program notes, "is redeeming--it's a piece of hope. The ending is an Alleluia, a triumph over death. It was his last work, and maybe, because he composed this piece, he felt he could die."

The Essentials: Stéphane Denève conducts The St. Louis Symphony Orchestra along with violin soloist Karen Gomyo in Prokofiev's Violin Concerto No. 1, a suite fro Poulenc's ballet "Les Biches," and Rachmaninoff's "Symphonic Dances." Performances are Friday and Saturday at 8 pm, and Sunday at 3 pm October 18-20. Performances take place at Powell Symphony Hall in Grand Center.

Review: Why do we love David Robertson? Let us count the ways.

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

David Robertson

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

This past weekend's St. Louis Symphony concerts (January 27-29) were the last regular subscription series programs before Maestro David Robertson and the orchestra leave for a tour of Spain in February. If what I heard Friday night is any indication, they'll do so (to quote Mr. Wordsworth) "trailing clouds of glory."

The evening was classic Robertson in every respect, beginning with the order structure of the evening: two audience favorites surrounding a new work getting its American premiere, thereby guaranteeing that the audience would at least give the new piece a chance.

It was smart programming, because the work in question—Rolf Wallin's 2011 Fisher King for trumpet and orchestra—doesn't have a lot of immediate appeal. In a program note on his publisher's web site Wallin, a trumpet player himself, notes that the work deals in part with "the love/hate instrument of my childhood and youth" and is "about visiting some dark places."

I found the piece suffused with an underlying sense of anxiety, with horror movie-style gliding passages in the strings and a challenging solo part with lots of nervous trills and aggressively rapid passages calling for plenty of double-tonguing and nimble fingers. There are even sections in which the score indicates a range of notes and it's left up to the soloist to decide which ones to actually play. It's fascinating stuff, especially for a former brass player like yours truly, but if the conversations I overheard in the lobby during intermission were any indication, it was not particularly well received by the audience, who apparently found it a bit monotonous.

But what a remarkable performance it got from the orchestra and soloist Håkan Hardenberger! Working with two different trumpets (a standard instrument for most of the concerto and a piccolo trumpet for the brief coda), Mr. Hardenberger navigated this difficult score with ease and authority. His tone, in the rare moments when his instrument was unmuted, was clean and clear. For the most part, though, we heard it filtered through a variety of mutes, reflecting the composer's desire to counteract the instrument's extroverted musical personality.

The two familiar works bracketing Fisher King were the 1945 suite from Aaron Copland's 1944 ballet Appalachian Spring and Beethoven's Symphony No. 7 in A major, op. 92. Both were performed with that mix of attention to orchestral detail and keen understanding of musical architecture that we have come to expect from Mr. Robertson over the years.

Håkan Hardenberger
Photo: Ben Ealovega

The Copland was classic Robertson, with enthusiastic yet precise podium choreography and pristine playing by the orchestra and impeccable solos from the principals. From the serene opening pages to the big treatment of "Simple Gifts" to the quiet finale, this was a performance that will represent the orchestra well when it's presented in Madrid next month.

It was the Beethoven that really brought down the house, though. Conducting without a score, Mr. Robertson brought this familiar music to new life, finding novel approaches to the piece without in any way imposing on it. Playing the Allegretto second movement attacca (without pause) after the first, for example, shed new light on both movements--and provoked spontaneous applause both Friday and Saturday night. Crescendos were beautifully shaped and tempo choices were relaxed enough to make every detail clear but still brisk enough to keep Beethoven's momentum going.

This was, in short, exactly the sort of thing that made Mr. Robertson so welcome when he joined the SLSO as music director in 2003, and it's why I will be sorry to see him go in 2019. His work with the orchestra reminds me in many ways of the good old days of Leonard Slatkin, and that's saying something.

The concerts conclude with an unscheduled encore, which is presumably going to Spain with the orchestra as well: the "Ritual Fire Dance" from de Falla's ballet El amor brujo. That got a rousing round of applause as well.

The St. Louis Symphony Orchestra leaves the first week in February for its 2017 Spain Tour with dates in València, Madrid, and Oviedo. Regular concerts resume February 24 and 25 as Sir Andrew Davis conducts the orchestra and chorus in Walton's Belshazzar's Feast along with Elgar's Falstaff and the overture to Nicolai's Merry Wives of Windsor.

Preview: Music of renewal and decay at the St. Louis Symphony

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This weekend (January 27-29, 2017) brings us the last of the regular St. Louis Symphony season concerts before the orchestra departs for its tour of Spain next month (the subscription season resumes at the end of February). The orchestra is saying "¡Hasta luego!" with concerts featuring a couple of familiar favorites and one piece that's getting its American premiere.

Aaron Copland, 1962

The concerts open with one of the favorites, the 1945 suite from Aaron Copland's 1944 ballet Appalachian Spring. Dating from a time in Copland's career when he was trying to write in a more popular and accessible style, the score for Appalachian Spring is direct and uncomplicated in its appeal. Which is only fitting, since the ballet scenario devised by legendary choreographer Martha Graham is equally straightforward, telling the simple story of a young couple in rural Pennsylvania starting their life together and building their home with the help of their neighbors and the local preacher.

Although the ballet was originally scored for a small ensemble of 13 players, it's Copland's later suite for full orchestra that has become the most familiar. It was last heard here in a 2010 performance that was accompanied by projected images from a children's book: Jan Greenberg's Ballet for Martha: Making Appalachian Spring.

Ballet for Martha was, in fact, the original working title for Appalachian Spring. The ballet didn't get its official title until shortly before the premiere, when Ms. Graham suggested Appalachian Spring based on lines from the Hart Crane poem "The Dance":

O Appalachian Spring! I gained the ledge; Steep, inaccessible smile that eastward bends And northward reaches in that violet wedge Of Adirondacks!

So the "spring" is more a reference to the aquatic feature than to the season, although since the poem overall is about the coming of spring it would probably be fair to say that it's a reference to both.

The classic Beethoven

The other selection from the classical "top of the pops" is Beethoven's Symphony No. 7 in A major, op. 92, last heard here in an exhilarating performance by last weekend's guest conductor, Andrey Boreyko, in 2014. First performed at a December 8, 1813, charity concert to benefit widows and orphans of soldiers killed in the Battle of Hanau-which marked the beginning of the end of Napoleon's dreams of empire-the work was greeted with wild acclaim by audiences and critics alike. The second movement Allegretto, in particular, "enchanted connoisseur and layman," according to a contemporary review in the Allgemeine Musikalische Zeitung. Welsh musicologist David Wyn Morris has called the symphony "the continuous cumulative celebration of joy."

Perhaps the most famous and most enthusiastic review, though, came from Richard Wagner. It's so effusive it's worth quoting at length:

All tumult, all yearning and storming of the heart, become here the blissful insolence of joy, which carries us away with bacchanalian power through the roomy space of nature, through all the streams and seas of life, shouting in glad self-consciousness as we sound throughout the universe the daring strains of this human sphere-dance. The Symphony is the Apotheosis of the Dance itself: it is Dance in its highest aspect, the loftiest deed of bodily motion, incorporated into an ideal mold of tone.

They just don't write pull quotes like that anymore.

The big news this weekend, though, is the first American performance of Fisher King for Trumpet and Orchestra, written in 2011 by Norwegian composer and trumpet player Rolf Wallin. The title refers to the Arthurian legend of a wounded monarch, the last in a long line of kings charged with keeping the Holy Grail, whose injuries make it impossible for him to move on his own power. In despair, he spends all his time fishing while his kingdom falls in to ruin, and only magic worked by a true king can cure him.

Rolf Wallin
Photo: Benjamin Ealovega

In the first known version of the story-Chrétien de Troyes's Perceval, the Story of the Grail from the late 12th century-the cure is worked by the knight Perceval, who would later become the model for Wagner's Parsifal. Mr. Wallin doesn't specify which version of the story he was thinking of, but in a program note on his publisher's web site he's very frank about the source of his concerto's inspiration:

In many ways, since we're dealing with the love/hate instrument of my childhood and youth, this trumpet concerto was bound to be become almost autobiographical. It is about visiting some dark places. Low places. The place inhabited by the mythical wounded Fisher King, his country degenerating into a Wasteland, a place we all have been at least once in our life. But it is even more about the hope of transforming that Wasteland into brightness and abundant, flowing energy.

Fisher King is laid out as one continuous movement running a little under a half hour, but it's divided up into three sections that roughly correspond to the traditional fast-slow-fast pattern of the classical concerto. You can read an excellent detailed description of the work in Paul Schiavo's SLSO program notes, but I'd also recommend listening to the recording this weekend's soloist, Håkan Hardenberger, made for Naxos with the Bergen Philharmonic under John Storgårds. The label has thoughtfully made it available on YouTube.

. There's an underlying sense of anxiety in this piece, with lots of thorny passages for both the soloist and the orchestra. There are moments of real beauty in the slower central section and passages of great drama elsewhere, capped with a rather abrupt ending. In the end, I found that I rather liked this somewhat enigmatic music; your mileage may vary.

The essentials: David Robertson conducts the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra and trumpet soloist Håkan Hardenberger on Friday and Saturday at 8 p.m. and Sunday at 3 p.m., January 27-29. The concerts take place at Powell Symphony Hall, 718 North Grand in Grand Center. For more information: stlsymphony.org.