Symphony Review: The SLSO honors musical nomads in the season opener

“A wandering minstrel I,” sings Nanki-Poo as he introduces himself in “The Mikado”; “A thing of shreds and patches.”

You wouldn’t call the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra “a thing of shreds and patches,” but with Music Director Stéphane Denève at the podium for the opening concert of the season last Sunday they were certainly doing some musical wandering. Certainly the first half of the program paid considerable homage to those famous wanderers, the Roma, with concert standards inspired by Hungarian folk tunes and the “Nomad Concerto” by Mason Bates.

Stéphane Denève
Photo: Dilip Vishwanat

Which is rather appropriate for an orchestra that will continue to lead a nomadic existence until the renovation of Powell Hall is completed next fall.

Things got off to an energetic start with a rousing performance of the “Rákóczi March”, a.k.a. the “Marche hongroise” from Part I of  the 1846 opera/oratorio hybrid “La damnation de Faust” (“The Damnation of Faust”) by Hector Berlioz (1803–1869). It’s the sort of orchestral showpiece that never fails to get an enthusiastic response—which it did.

Up next was another favorite, a set of the “Hungarian Dances by Johannes Brahms (1833–1897). Originally composed for piano duet and published in four sets between 1869 and 1880, the dances were orchestrated by various composers, including Brahms. Denève selected the three that the composer orchestrated (Nos. 1, 3, and 10) and played them attacca—i.e., without pause.

It was a smart choice, highlighting the contrast between the energetic first and tenth dances (marked Allegro molto and Presto, respectively) and the more introspective third (Allegretto). The result was a kind of “mini suite” that showed off both the composer’s orchestration and the virtuosity of the band. I was very taken with the flutes (including Ebonee Thomas, who seemed to be holding down the currently vacant Principal position for this concert) in the Dance No. 1, and the playful oboes and bassoons (under Associate Principals Phil Ross and Andy Gott, respectively) were a delight in Dance No. 3.  

Denève gave the dances the “full Roma” treatment, with just the right touches of rubato evoking the music’s folk origins.

The first half concluded with the “Nomad Concerto” by Mason Bates (b. 1977), composed for and premiered in January 2024 by this weekend’s soloist, violinist Gil Shaham. “Envisioned to showcase the legendary Old World sound of Gil Shaham,” writes Bates at his web site, “the concerto is informed by a diverse range of traveling cultures from Eastern Europe to the Middle East.”

Gil Shaham
Photo: Chris Lee

Running just under 30 minutes, the four-movement concerto is, as promised, an ideal virtuoso vehicle for Shaham. The last time I saw him with SLSO in January 2017 I praised his singing tone and the obvious joy of his playing. That’s still true, but this time I was also impressed by the versatility he displayed in delivering the wide range of sounds Bates has written for him. In the first movement (“Song of the balloon man”) his was wistfully Chaplinesque. He and the orchestra exchanged rapid-fire motifs in the brief “Magician at the bazaar” in a way that summoned up visions of flash paper going off all over the string section.  The third movement (“Desert vision: oasis) used the orchestra’s lower voices to suggest an arid expanse of wilderness, with the violin offering brief relief in the form of a yearning  version of the Jewish folk tune “Ani Ma’amin” (“I believe”).

Shaham and the band really cut loose, though, in the concluding movement, “Le jazz manouche.” Inspired by the sound of the legendary 1930s–1940s jazz combo Quintette du Hot Club de France—especially guitarist Django Reinhardt and violinist Stéphane Grappelli—the score has the soloist and orchestra trading licks the way an actual combo would. Shaham and the first violins seemed to be having an especially good time playing off each other here. Will James on jazz percussion and Peter Henderson on piano added considerably to the period atmosphere.

As much as I loved Shaham’s performance, though, I found it difficult to become involved with Bates’s score.  It felt more like a quasi-Impressionist collection of motifs that suggested but never really achieved the status of themes. It reminded me a bit of Debussy, except without the melodies and harmonic infrastructure.

The concert concluded with the Big Event, Berlioz’s splendiferous 1830 “Symphonie Fantastique.” Denève and the orchestra played this wildly hallucinatory work (Leonard Bernstein once dubbed it "the first psychedelic symphony in history”) back in 2019, as the closer of his last concert as Music Director Designate (he became the official MD that fall). At the time I described Denève’s interpretation as consistently engrossing, filled with interesting details (something that would prove to be a hallmark of his work on the podium) and concluding with a downright hair-raising final two movements. I’m repeating myself here because all of that still applies to what we experienced last Sunday.

The St. Louis Symphony Orchestra season continues October 4th and 6th at the Touhill Performing Arts Center; check out my preview for more information or head over to the SLSO web site.

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

Symphony Preview: Mix and match

Back in the days when I was still doing a weekly show at KDHX, I loved to put together different and often seemingly unrelated songs into sets designed to highlight the relationships among them.  St. Louis Symphony Orchestra Music Director Stéphane Denève often takes a similar approach to his programming, zooming in on connections that aren’t obvious at first glance. Or at first hearing, as the case may be.

[Preview the music with my Spotify playlist.]

Berlioz in 1832
Painting by Émile Signol

You’ll witness and exceptionally fine example of this in concerts that open the new SLSO season this weekend (Friday and Sunday, September 27 and 29). The first half opens with the “Marche hongroise” (“Hungarian March”) from Part I of  the 1846 opera/oratorio hybrid “La damnation de Faust” (“The Damnation of Faust”) by Hector Berlioz (1803–1869). In the context of the full work (performed so splendidly by the SLSO in 2023), the sound of the Hungarian army tramping off to war gives Faust the opportunity to compare the enthusiasm of the soldiers with his own indifference to worldly joys. “Et quel feu dans leurs yeux,” he muses. “Tout cœur frémit à leur chant de victoire ; Le mien seul reste froid, insensible à la gloire.” (“And what fire burns in their eyes! Every heart throbs to their song of victory; Only mine remains cold, insensitive to glory.”)

Played more often as an instrumental excerpt, as it will be this weekend, it’s a rousing piece that shows off the composer’s flair for colorful orchestration. It doesn’t sound particularly Hungarian, but it’s so much fun that it hardly matters. And Berlioz wasn’t really interested in cultural fidelity anyway.

Brahms c. 1872
Photographer unknown
Public Domain

More authentically Hungarian are the 21 “Hungarian Dances” by Johannes Brahms. Based mostly on Hungarian folk tunes, the dances were originally composed for piano duet and published in four sets between 1869 and 1880. They were then orchestrated by various composers, including Brahms. This weekend we’ll hear the only ones orchestrated by the composer himself: No. 1 in G minor, No. 3 in F major, and No. 10 F major (E major in the original piano version).

As George S. Bozarth and Walter Frisch write in Grove Online, Brahms was first “exposed to the style hongrois, a blending of Hungarian musical gestures and gypsy performing style…when Hungarian political refugees on their way to the USA passed through Hamburg after the suppression of the revolutions of 1848.” Which makes the local premiere of the “Nomad Concerto” by Mason Bates a logical way to conclude the first half of the program.

Composed for and premiered in January 2024 by this weekend’s soloist, violinist Gil Shaham (brother-in-law of former SLSO Music Director David Robertson), this four-movement work, as the composer writes at his web site, “explores the mysterious and soulful music of the wanderer”:

Envisioned to showcase the legendary Old World sound of Gil Shaham, the concerto is informed by a diverse range of traveling cultures from Eastern Europe to the Middle East.  In the same way that nomadic musics have continually reimagined themselves, the many styles informing the concerto are swirled together into a unique soundworld.

The ”Nomad Concerto” is too new to be available on the usual streaming sources, including YouTube, so I’m unable to offer my own impressions of the work. That said, Peter Dobrin, reviewing the world premiere for The Philadelphia Inquirer, wrote that “Bates in this new piece once again proves a composer unusually commanding of atmosphere and emotion.” So you now know as much about it as I do.

This won’t be the first appearance of a Mason Bates work on an SLSO program, though. His 2015 “Anthology of Fantastic Zoology” got its impressive local debut by the band under the baton of Leonard Slatkin in 2023. As I wrote back then “his is an eclectic and inventive voice that is very much welcome these days. I hope to see and hear more of his work here in the future.” It looks like I got my wish.

Mason Bates
Photo: Ryan Schude, courtesy of the SLSO

After intermission it’s back to Berlioz with his splendiferous 1830 “Symphonie Fantastique.” I have always loved it to pieces, despite the rather unsavory story of its origins (tl;dr: it’s the result of the composer’s amatory pursuit of the Irish Shakespearean actress Harriet Smithson in a manner that would get him a restraining order these days, if not an actual prosecution). Maestro Denève conducted a bang-up reading of this work in May 2019 so I admit to looking forward to his latest thoughts on the matter.

The Essentials: Stéphane Denève conducts the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra and violinist Gil Shaham in the St. Louis premiere of the “Nomad Concerto” by Mason Bates. The concert includes Berlioz’s “Hungarian Marche” from “The Damnation of Faust” and the “Symphonie Fantastique, as well as three “Hungarian Dances by Brahms. Performances are Friday at 7:30 pm and Sunday at 3 pm, September 25 and 27, at the Stifel Theatre downtown.

On Saturday, September 26, at 8 pm Mason Bates, in his alter ego of DJ Masonic, joins St. Louis DJ Alexis Tucci for “Symphonie Electronique.” Described as “a genre-defying electronic dance music party with SLSO musicians and the audience,” “Symphonie Electronique” takes place at The Hawthorn nightclub on Washington Avenue downtown.

Symphony Preview: Bang the drum slowly

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

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Last weekend's St. Louis Symphony Orchestra concerts were dominated by Mahler's Symphony No. 9, a work that is often seen as being having its genesis in the valley of the shadow of death. The theme of mortality seems to have spilled over to this weekend (March 9 and 10, 2019), when Nathalie Stutzmann will conduct the orchestra and chorus in a pair of memorial works: the "German Requiem" by Brahms and Igor Stravinsky's "Funeral Song."

Amy Kaiser
stlsymphony.org

The Brahms was last seen here back in October 2014. I wrote about it then, and rather than plagiarize myself here, I'll just refer you to my original article. In the program notes for that concert, SLSO Chorus Director Amy Kaiser called it "a major work, full of challenges: complex fugues, expressive segments, rich in harmonic details. It's a choral symphony, really." That's as good a capsule description as any.

A major inspiration for "German Requiem" was the death of Brahms's friend and mentor Robert Schumann. A similar tragedy was the impetus for the young Stravinsky to write his "Funeral Song" in 1908. In Stravinsky's case, it was the death earlier that year of his teacher, the great Russian composer and master orchestrator, Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov.

First performed in 1909 in a concert conducted by Felix Blumenfeld at the St. Petersburg Conservatoire (where Rimsky-Korsakov had taught), the original score for the work was generally believed to have been lost in the revolutions of February and October 1917, although Stravinsky himself believed that the score was simply buried somewhere in the archives at the Conservatoire.

As it turned out, he was right.

The rediscovery of the "Funeral Song" in 2015 was the happy result of a combination of good luck and dogged persistence by Stravinsky scholar Natalya Braginskaya. As Stephen Walsh wrote in The Guardian:

Natalya Braginskaya...mounted a series of unsuccessful searches helped by willing Conservatoire archivists. But it was only when the whole building had to be emptied last autumn to make way for a long-delayed overhaul that piles of previously hidden manuscripts emerged from behind rows of stacked piano and orchestral scores, undisturbed for decades, and a librarian found herself staring at the missing orchestral parts which she remembered as precisely the work that Braginskaya had been looking for.

Stravinsky in 1903
en.wikipedia.org

It would take another year for a performance of the rediscovered work to materialize. Aside from the fact that the full score had to be reconstructed from the newly discovered orchestral parts, there were rights arguments between the Stravinsky estate and the late composer's publisher, Boosey and Hawkes. Finally, the highly regarded (albeit politically controversial) conductor Valery Gergiev conducted the Mariinsky Theatre Orchestra in "Funeral Song" for the first time since its 1909 premiere on Friday, December 6, 2016. It was, as The Guardian's Walsh recounts, a Very Big Deal:

The Russian audience, deprived of their greatest composer for so many Soviet years, were rightly thrilled that a substantial piece of his had turned up on their home ground and that they were the first to play it and hear it. The applause as Gergiev held up the score was thunderous, and whatever scholars make of the work in due course, it deserved every minute of it. Stravinsky remembered Funeral Song as one of his best early pieces (though he forgot nearly everything else about it) and he was right.

What does the piece sound like? Well, it's somber, dark, dramatic, and feels only a little bit like the work of the man who would astonish the world with his ballet "The Firebird" only a year later. If I didn't know it was Stravinsky, I'd be tempted to assume it was Rimsky-Korsakov or one of the lesser early 20th-century Russian composers like Lyadov or Glazunov. You can listen to it yourself and draw your own conclusions, fortunately; Gergiev's performance is available on YouTube.

At the podium this weekend will be the French singer/conductor Nathalie Stutzmann. When she made her first appearance here in 2016, I was impressed by the way her direct emotional connection to the familiar works on the program that weekend made me hear them in different ways that shed new light on old favorites. You can find more information on Ms. Stutzmann in the preview article I wrote for her 2016 appearance and see her in action on her YouTube channel.

The Essentials: Nathalie Stutzmann conducts the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra and Chorus, along with soprano Siobhan Stagg and baritone Stephen Powell, Saturday at 8 pm and Sunday at 3 pm, March 9 and 10. The concerts take place at Powell Symphony Hall, 718 North Grand in Grand Center.

Symphony Preview: Stéphane's serenade and Brahms's lullaby

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

Stéphane Denève
Photo by Jessica Griffin

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When I first saw St. Louis Symphony Orchestra Music Director Designate Stéphane Denève conduct the orchestra back in the spring of 2003 I found him an impressive figure: tall and commanding without appearing overbearing, and with a bit of the late Leopold Stokowski's flair. Watching him conduct a program of Britten, Haydn, and Tchaikovsky, I noted his close communication with the musicians and how much they appeared to enjoy working with him.

"I don't know whether or not Stéphane Denève is being considered for the Music Director post at the SLSO," I wrote at the end of my critique. "If so and if this was an audition, I'd say he passed it with flying colors."

That looks a bit prescient now, albeit around 16 years late.

Mozart, as drawn by Doris Stock, 1789

This weekend (February 8-10), Mr. Denève is making his second appearance with the orchestra this season, with an evening of music by Mozart, Vaughan Williams, and Brahms. The concerts open with a performance of Mozart's 1787 Serenade No. 13 for strings, a.k.a. "Eine Kleine Nachtmusik," a work so well-known that most of the audience could probably hum it all the way through--and yet, as Mr. Denève notes in comments for the program, he has never conducted it before.

"I try to always serve the composer," he reflects. "With Mozart this goal is difficult, as the music is perfect in itself, so one always notices if the ego of the performer is in the way." Based on what I have seen of Mr. Denève's work to date, I think that is unlikely to be an issue. It will, in any case, be interesting to hear what amounts to his first public thoughts on this popular classic.

Up next will be a pair of purely lovely short works by Ralph Vaughan Williams: "The Lark Ascending" and the "Serenade to Music."

A romance for violin and orchestra, "The Lark Ascending" has its origins in 1914 while the composer was strolling along the seaside cliffs in Kent. It was not completed, however, until the composer returned from his service in the war disillusioned and with what would prove to be progressive hearing loss. By the time "The Lark Ascending" had its first performance in 1921, it had turned into a wistfully nostalgic look back at a bucolic way of life shattered forever by the winds of war.

Vaughan Williams in the army, 1915
rvwsociety.com

The piece takes its title from an 1881 poem of the same name by George Meredith that describes the characteristic way skylarks spiral up into the sky while singing. Meredith heard a kind of pantheist divinity in the lark's song that seems to have resonated with the composer, even though he was a devout Christian. Many have since heard a metaphor for the soul's climb to heaven in the way the work's lovely melody floats and, in the end, slowly fades into silence as it makes its final ascent.

The full poem is 122 lines long, but here are the lines Vaughan Williams chose to accompany the score:

He rises and begins to round,
He drops the silver chain of sound,
Of many links without a break,
In chirrup, whistle, slur and shake.

For singing till his heaven fills,
'Tis love of earth that he instils,
And ever winging up and up,
Our valley is his golden cup
And he the wine which overflows
to lift us with him as he goes.

Till lost on his aerial rings
In light, and then the fancy sings.

The part of the lark this weekend will be played by SLSO Concertmaster David Halen.

Mr. Halen's violin is also the first thing heard in the next work, the "Serenade to Music" from 1938. Composed as a tribute to the noted British conductor Sir Henry Wood on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of his first concert, the "Serenade" is scored for a small orchestra and a group of sixteen solo singers.

Why sixteen? Because the singers who performed the work at its premiere were noted British vocalists selected specifically by Vaughan Williams and Wood. In fact, the published score has the initials of each singer next to his or her lines. Recognizing the difficulty of coming up with sixteen soloists, the composer would later create arrangements for four soloists and/or choir, but this weekend we'll hear the original version with sixteen stellar vocalists from the SLSLO chorus.

The text of the work comes from Act V, Scene 1, of Shakespeare's "Merchant of Venice." In the play, the lines belong to the eloping lovers Lorenzo and Jessica, as they sit on a grassy bank and reflect on the importance of music. "How sweet the moonlight sleeps upon this bank!" cries Lorenzo. "Here will we sit, and let the sounds of music / Creep in our ears: soft stillness and night / Become the touches of sweet harmony." The sheer beauty of the work is supposed to have moved the composer Rachmaninoff to tears when he heard it at its 1938 premiere.

I first encountered the "Serenade to Music" as "filler" on a Columbia recording of Vaughan Williams's angry and despairing Symphony No. 4 by Leonard Bernstein and the New York Philharmonic. The performance had been recorded live at the opening of the orchestra's new home at Avery Fisher Hall in September, 1962. Coming after the final anguished chords of the symphony, the "Serenade" was like a breath of fresh air--a sudden flood of peace and beauty after a musical depiction of the horrors of war. This weekend, the "Serenade" will be played attacca, i.e., immediately following "The Lark Ascending," as though the lark had returned to earth to help pay tribute to "the touches of sweet harmony."

Brahms in 1853
en.wikipedia.org

Concluding this weekend's concerts will be a symphony with one of the sunniest final movements you will ever hear: the Brahms Symphony No. 2, written and first performed in 1877. Indeed, as James Keays writes in program notes for the Redland Symphony, the Second "is one of the most cheerful of Brahms' mature works, so much so that it is often called his 'Pastoral,' an obvious reference to Beethoven's symphony of the same name."

The comparison is an apt one since Brahms, like Beethoven, loved nature and often drew inspiration from it. "Throughout his life," writes Tim Munro in this weekend's program notes, "nature helped him return to equilibrium, an equilibrium lost in the bustle of the city. Raised in a hard-scrabble part of Hamburg, he took long walking trips with his family. Later, escaping Vienna meant he could breathe and be alone with his thoughts."

The escape that led to the Second Symphony was to the Austrian town of Pörtschach am Wörthersee. Brahms loved the place and rhapsodized that "the melodies flow so freely that one must be careful not to trample on them." He rented two small rooms for himself at the village that summer, and if his correspondence is an indication, he couldn't have been happier, as Philip Huscher writes in notes for the Chicago Symphony:

The rooms apparently were ideal for composition, even though the hallway was so narrow that Brahms's piano couldn't be moved up the stairs. "It is delightful here," Brahms wrote to Fritz Simrock, his publisher, soon after arriving, and the new symphony bears witness to his apparent delight. Later that summer, when Brahms's friend Theodore Billroth, an amateur musician, played through the score for the first time, he wrote to the composer at once: "It is all rippling streams, blue sky, sunshine, and cool green shadows. How beautiful it must be at Portschach."

Listening to the symphony again recently, I was struck by the sense of serenity, openness, and good humor in the piece. I was also struck, once again, by the similarity between the second theme of the first movement and Brahms's famous "Lullaby" ("Wiegenlied" in German) from 1868. Whether that was intentional or not is hard to say but, as Dick Strawser of the Harrisburg Symphony points out in a 2010 blog post, Brahms does report that the rooms where he was staying in Pörtschach am Wörthersee were near the summer home of Bertha and Arthur Faber, the couple for whom he wrote the "Wiegenlied" in the first place. Personally, I like to think that it was a genial nod to his friends and to the joy he felt in composing this cheerful work.

The Essentials: Stéphane Denève conducts the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra and Chorus, along with SLSO Concertmaster David Halen, Friday at 10:30 am, Saturday at 8 pm, and Sunday at 3 pm, February 8-10. The concerts take place at Powell Symphony Hall, 718 North Grand in Grand Center.

Symphony Preview: Back to the future

It's a mix of the old and new at the St. Louis Symphony this weekend (Friday and Saturday, October 28 and 29) as Jun Märkl returns to conduct the orchestra and soloist Jeremy Denk in Mozart's Piano Concerto No. 23 in A major (K. 488), Liszt's Prometheus, and the Brahms Piano Quartet in G minor, op. 25, as arranged by Arnold Schoenberg.

Franz Liszt in 1858
Photo by Franz Hanfstaengl

Prometheus, which opens the concerts, is old because it was first performed in 1855. But it's also new because this is its first appearance with the SLSO.

Prometheus was already something new at its first performance, even though the composer conducted an earlier version for chorus and orchestra in Weimar in 1850. That's because this revised version was one of the first examples of the symphonic poem, a.k.a tone poem, a genre that Liszt effectively invented.

Many composers have written works labeled "symphonic poem" since then (Liszt himself wrote a total of thirteen), and what they all have in common is a reliance on some external, non-musical source for their inspiration. That source could be almost anything, including a novel (Albert Roussel's Resurrection), a poem (Schoenberg's Verklärte Nacht), a painting (Rachmaninoff's Isle of the Dead), a place (Respighi's Pines of Rome), or a historical event (Smetana's Sárka). Or, in the case of Prometheus, a story out of mythology.

We all know the story of the Greek god Prometheus, punished for giving mankind the gift of fire by being chained to a rock and having his liver eaten every day by an eagle, only to have it grow back overnight (talk about your extraordinary rendition…). For Liszt, it was a story of pain, redemption, and triumph, with a grand fugue and a triumphant ending.

The piece was regarded as radical "new music" at the time and got, as a result, its share of negative press (the infamous Eduard Hanslick, who gave Wagner such grief, called it "an interestingly orchestrated instrument of torture"). These days it's just great musical drama.

The Mozart piano concerto is likely to be the most familiar piece on the program but here, too, there are surprises. The relationship between the soloist and the orchestra is a close one, with lots of give and take between the two, and the piano part looks both backward towards Bach with complex contrapuntal passages and forward to the Romantic era with harmonies that would probably have sounded a bit radical to the composer's Viennese audiences. That's most apparent in the first movement cadenza (which, contrary to his usual practice, Mozart actually wrote down) as well as in the touching Adagio second movement.

In a 2013 interview for San Francisco Classical Voice this weekend's soloist, Jeremy Denk, observed that "a very important part of playing a Mozart concerto is the wonder of each moment." So take the time to enjoy those moments when you see him on stage this weekend.

The concerts conclude with music that's old and new simultaneously: Arnold Schoenberg's 1937 orchestral transcription of Brahms's 1861 Piano Quartet in G minor. That might seem like an odd combination, given the kind of music for which Schoenberg is best known, but in his essay "Brahms the Progressive" Schoenberg claimed that the earlier composer was actually "a great innovator in the realm of musical language, that, in fact, he was a great progressive.”

It's an argument that has been met with some skepticism but there's not much doubt that Schoenberg was a great admirer of Brahms, and his orchestral expansion of the 1861 piano quartet-it's far too elaborate to be described as straightforward orchestration-sounds like both a homage to and a radical re-thinking of the original.

Arnold Schoenberg
By Man Ray, CC BY-SA 2.0

You can hear that in dramatic opening of the first movement. The notes are all Brahms, but the music feels Wagnerian in its intensity. As René Spencer Saller points out in her SLSO program notes, the orchestration is also very different from the sound world of Brahms, with instruments that the earlier composer would never have used such as the xylophone, bass clarinet, and E-flat clarinet.

In a 1939 note to San Francisco Chronicle music critic Alfred Frankenstein, Schoenberg said that his intention was "to remain strictly in the style of Brahms and not go farther than he himself would have gone if he lived today" and "to watch carefully all the laws which Brahms obeyed and not to violate them, which are only known to musicians educated in his environment." I'm not convinced that he actually did that, but what he did accomplish was to pour some old musical wine into new bottles without damaging the vintage in any way. This is the mid-19th century seen through the lens of the early 20th, and if accepted on its own terms it's very rewarding.

The Essentials: Jun Märkl conducts the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra with piano soloist Jeremy Denk in Mozart's Piano Concerto No. 23, Liszt's symphonic poem Prometheus, and an orchestral transcription of the Brahms Piano Quartet in G minor. Performances are Friday at 10:30 a.m. and Saturday at 8 p.m., October 28 and 29 at Powell Hall in Grand Center. The Saturday concert will be broadcast on St. Louis public radio.

Symphony Peview: Of late bloomers and letter writing, November 21 and 22, 2015

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If you consider his entire output, Johannes Brahms was an early bloomer. He reportedly wrote his first piano sonata at the age of 11, was touring as a pianist by 19, and was only 20 when Schumann sang of his virtues in the October 28, 1853, issue of the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik ("a young man over whose cradle Graces and Heroes have stood watch"). Heady stuff.

Brahms, the boy wonder, 1853

And yet as a symphonist Brahms got off to a late start. His "Symphony No. 1 in C minor," op. 68, which takes up half of this weekend's St. Louis Symphony Concerts (with David Robertson at the podium), wasn't performed until 1876 (when Brahms was 43) and wasn't published in final form until the following year. "Part of the problem," wrote Larry Rothe in program notes for the San Francisco Symphony, "was that Brahms was such a harsh critic of his own work. He honed his material until he was satisfied, and he held himself to tough standards. We are told that his desire to be worthy is what kept him from introducing a symphony before he was already into middle age. He was intimidated by Beethoven. 'You have no idea what it's like to hear the footsteps of a giant like that behind you,' he said, those footsteps resonating through his psyche, making him question if he could ever do anything on a par with the author of nine symphonies that seemed to define the limits of what music could express."

Listening to the magisterial opening of the Brahms First now, it seems astonishing that it could have sprung from the brain of a man consumed with self-doubt. It's such a strong statement and the rest of the movement is so filled with drama and so commanding, you'd think it would have drowned out the sound of Beethoven's footsteps.

The other movements are equally impressive. A lyrical Andante is next—featuring a graceful trio for oboe, violin, and horn—followed by a terpsichorean third movement marked un poco allegretto e grazioso. And then Brahms caps it all with a finale that radically changes the idea of what the fourth movement in a Romantic symphony should do.

"This movement," writes Tom Service in The Guardian, "is his solution to what he saw as the 19th century's symphonic problem—the tendency for the pieces to be weighted towards their opening allegros, to have worked out all their major structural tensions by the end of the first movement. Brahms's fourth movement is different: everything is at stake here. It's the longest part of the symphony, and from the outset, its drama is set out on a bigger stage than the previous three movements... On one hand, this music crowns the work's dramatic trajectory, but it also celebrates Brahms's own vanquishing of his symphonic demons. And if we've only the ears to hear it, we'll hear how completely he created something subtly, multi-dimensionally new."

Brett Dean
boosey.com

Speaking of new things, the only other work on this weekend's program is "The Lost Art of Letter Writing," a work for violin and orchestra from 2007 that's getting its SLSO premiere with these concerts. The composer is Brett Dean, whose "Testament (Music for 12 Violas)" and "Viola Concerto" had their local premieres with the orchestra last January.

At the time I thought Mr. Dean's concerto was rather lacking in substance, stretching a paucity of brief musical ideas out well past their modest breaking point. Whether that will be true of this latest work remains to be seen. Reviews of the piece have been positive, though, which bodes well. "The Lost Art of Letter Writing is a most sincere and substantial work," wrote Shirley Apthorp in The Financial Times in 2007. "[I]t is art which needs neither pretension nor gimmicks." In a review for The Guardian of the premiere recording of the piece by Sydney Symphony, Andrew Clements was even more enthusiastic. "Like the best works with literary subtexts," he wrote, "The Lost Art of Letter Writing can also be appreciated on its own purely abstract musical terms, and as a wonderfully idiomatic concerto inhabiting a post-Bergian musical world, it's as important an achievement as Dean's earlier Viola Concerto and one of the most significant recent additions to the violin-concerto repertoire."

Like many of Mr. Dean's compositions, "The Lost Art of Letter Writing" is what was once called "program music" in that it is inspired by and specifically refers to non-musical ideas. Specifically, the decline in letter writing and, indeed, in handwriting in general brought on by the ubiquity of computers. "A recent article in an Australian newspaper," writes Mr. Dean in his notes for his work at the Boosey and Hawkes web site, "points out that the proportion of personal letters amongst the total number of sent articles handled by the national postal authority, Australia Post, has declined from 50% in 1960 to 13% nowadays. Sure, we stay in touch arguably more than ever, via telephone, email and messaging, but that too has undoubtedly changed the nature of communicating."

"Each movement," he continues, "is prefaced by an excerpt from a 19th Century letter of one kind or another, ranging from private love-letter to public manifesto. Each title refers to the place and year the letter was written. The violin plays the alternate roles of both an author and a recipient of letters, but perhaps more importantly, the solo part conjures something of the mood of each of the different letters."

SLSO program annotator Paul Schiavo has some interesting things to say about "The Lost Art of Letter Writing" as does blogger Eddie Silva in a blog entry that includes an interview with SLSO violist Woehr. If you're planning to attend this weekend, they're both worth your time.

In the solo role for these concerts will be English violinist Jack Liebeck. Mr. Liebeck is professor of violin at the Royal Academy of Music and is the Artistic Director of Oxford May Music Festival (a festival of "Music, Science, and the Arts"), who comes to us with a string of good notices, several of which are quoted at his web site. Reviewing his performance of the Dvorak "Violin Concerto" last month with the Halle Orchestra, for example, Bachtrack praised his "deep understanding" of the music. "With a sound that is considerably versatile and of a beautiful sonority in the lower register, he called forth a rich soundscape which met the challenges of the concerto." In a similar vein Ken Walton, writing in The Scotsman last December, enthused about Mr. Liebeck's "nimble technique and purity of tone."

The essentials: David Robertson conducts the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra, with violinst Jack Liebeck, on Saturday at 8 p.m. and Sunday at 3 p.m., November 21 and 22. The concerts take place at Powell Symphony Hall, 718 North Grand in Grand Center. For more information: stlsymphony.org.

Symphony Preview: Big Piano, Part Zwei, with Emanuel Ax

April has been Big Piano Concerto Month at the St. Louis Symphony. Last week we had Rachmaninoff's daunting "Piano Concerto No. 3" . This week it's the equally intimidating "Piano Concerto No. 2 in B-flat major," Op. 83, written in 1881 by Brahms.

Johannes Brahms
en.wikipedia.org

The reasons why the two concerti are difficult are somewhat different, though. With the Rachmaninoff, it's mostly a matter of sheer technique. The composer was a virtuoso of the first water who wrote the piece for his use during an American tour, and even though it's now largely part of the standard repertoire, it's still not the sort of thing a performer takes on lightly.

With the Brahms it's partly a matter of sheer endurance. With four movements (as opposed to the usual three) and a running time of around fifty minutes the piece was, at the time, the longest piano concerto ever written. Now that honor probably goes to Ferrucio Busoni's 1904 Piano Concerto (five movements, seventy minutes), which includes a part for male chorus. But it's still the pianistic equivalent of running a marathon and not everybody has the endurance.

The real challenge, though, is artistic. As French pianist Phillippe Bianconi observed in a 2013 interview, the Brahms Second is "not really a concerto – it is really a symphony with principal piano...everything about it — the structure, the texture, the way the piano is integrated into the orchestral fabric, it's very symphonic. And that is what I love about it: I have the feeling I'm playing in a Brahms symphony!... The sheer beauty of this music is simply overwhelming. And I don't know many concertos that have such a great range of moods and emotions...The concerto is like a fabulous journey." At the work's November 1881 premiere in Stuttgart, in fact, the prominent critic (and Brahms partisan) Eduard Hanslick labeled it "a symphony with piano obbligato."

That means the soloist has to have not only technique and endurance but also a grasp of symphonic form—which is not guaranteed, even among some of the world's most prominent players. "The fact that its supreme complexity requires a surpassing executant," wrote Brockway and Weinstock in the 1967 edition of their provocative "Men of Music," "has not helped the B flat, for it is all too often attempted by pianists who find it quite beyond their competence. Even the greatest of ensemble players, Artur Schnabel, though none of it is beyond him, cannot give interest to the unwieldy work for its entire length."

The composer realized that he had written something monumental, in fact, and was not sure how successful it might be. In a letter to Elizabeth von Herzogenberg from Pressbaum on July 7, 1881, Brahms, with tongue firmly in bearded cheek, announced that "I have written a tiny, tiny pianoforte concerto with a tiny wisp of a scherzo. It is in B flat, and I have reason to fear that I have worked this udder, which has yielded good milk before, too often and too vigorously."

He need not have worried. "He was surely vindicated, if unsurprised," writes René Spencer Saller in the SLSO program notes, "when his Second Piano Concerto elicited rapturous applause everywhere except in Leipzig, that die-hard Wagner town." Its popularity continues to this day, when it's seen as one of the core Romantic piano concerti. Indeed, pianist Stephen Hough (who has both Brahms concerti in his repertoire) has said that the Brahms Second is one of his favorites. "For all the grandeur and excitement of the first concerto's youthful flare," he wrote in The Guardian's music blog last January, "the second's older vintage seemed wiser, more fascinatingly complex as I revisited and re-recorded both pieces last year. Its musical arguments seemed more nuanced, more open to exploration, more a search for common ground where, as in life, the sun can shine brightest ... and warmest."

At the keyboard this weekend is Emanuel Ax, a pianist with a long and distinguished career in both the concert and chamber music worlds and an impressively large catalog of recordings (he has been a Sony classical artist since 1987).  He knows the Brahms Second intimately and has performed it four times with the SLSO, including twice with David Robertson. This weekend will mark his 40th anniversary of his first appearance with the orchestra.

Edward Elgar, circa 1900
en.wikipedia.org

The concerts will open with a work of more modest proportions: Edward Elgar's 1905 "Introduction and Allegro," op. 47, scored for string orchestra with a solo string quartet, much in the manner of the Baroque concerto grosso. It was was written on commission to show off the strings of the newly-established London Symphony Orchestra and contains some wonderful stuff, especially for the solo quartet. "It's really beautiful, and kind of strange," says viola soloist Morris Jacob in an interview in the program. "It's Elgar at his best. He writes so well for strings, with beautiful, intimate moments, some of which are just majestic."

Elgar prefaced the score with the following lines from Act IV, Scene 1 of Shakespeare's oddball tragicomedy "Cymbeline" describing the decidedly mixed emotions displayed by one of the key characters:

Nobly he yokes
A smiling with a sigh, as if the sigh
Was that it was, for not being such a smile; The smile mocking the sigh, that it would fly From so divine a temple, to commix
With winds that sailors rail at.

"Shakespeare reveled in paradox," writes Ms. Saller, "the conjoining of apparent antitheses. Elgar did too, but in a different idiom." The Introduction begins wistfully in G minor but soon waxes lyrical with a tune that Elgar said was inspired by a song he heard sung by a distant voice during a vacation in Wales. The Allegro concludes with an energetic fugue. "The work," concludes Ms. Saller, "is at once Romantic and Baroque, ecstatic and exact. Like the Bard of Avon, Elgar loved the mongrels best."

Between the Elgar and the Brahms is the St. Louis premiere of "Frenesia" ("Frenzy") by contemporary German composer Detlev Glanert. Composed on commission to celebrate the 150th birthday of Richard Strauss (of "Also Sprach Zarathustra" fame), the piece was inspired by Strauss' tone poem "Ein Heldenleben" ("A Hero's Life").

Detlev Glanert
boosey.com

"Ein Heldenleben," for the benefit of those of you who came in late, is a supreme example of musical egotism. Despite the composer's disclaimer that the work was only party autobiographical and that it was intended to be "a more general and free ideal of great and manly heroism," there's not much doubt that Strauss' hero was Strauss. The work is chock full of quotes from Strauss' music and its portrayal of music critics by a gaggle of chattering woodwinds provoked the expected outrage from the composer's detractors.

That sort of thing would be easy to parody, but Mr. Glanert isn't interested in satire. "Although Glanert admires Strauss's last great tone poem too much to mock it," reports Ms. Saller, "he recognizes that it was a product of its time. Frenesia is the ‘anti-Heldenleben,' he explains, "because the piece is against the traditional Romantic view of grand heroism, which I think is no longer possible after historic events leading to 1945.'"

"Frenesia" was given its world premiere by Xian Zhang and the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra last January—a performance that was recently made available on YouTube. It's a piece marked by strong contrasts in which loud, aggressive orchestral outbursts that sound like science fiction film music abruptly give way to passages of surprising delicacy. About two-thirds of the way through, the music begins a slow build to a massive final climax before slowly dying away, like "Neptune" from Holst's "The Planets," into silence. Overall, I'm left the impression that Mr. Glanert sees "grand heroism" as being mostly sound and fury, signifying nothing.

"Frenesia" will, in any case, make serious demands on the members of the orchestra. It will be interesting to see what they make of it.

Mr. Glanert is no stranger to the "old wine in new bottles" thing, by the way. Last October he uncorked a re-distillation of some vintage Brahms at Powell Hell in his "Vier Präludien und ernste Gesänge" ("Four Preludes and Serious Songs"), an arrangement of Brahms's op. 121 "Four Serious Songs" for baritone and orchestra. You can see my colleague Gary Liam Scott's review of that concert (which I missed because I was on stage elsewhere) at the KDHX web site.

The essentials: David Robertson conducts the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra with pianist Emanuel Ax on Saturday at 8 p.m. and Sunday at 3 p.m., April 25 and 26. The concerts take place at Powell Symphony Hall, 718 North Grand in Grand Center. For more information: stlsymphony.org.

Concert Review: 'Music You Know' and maybe some you don't

David Robertson

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Who: The St. Louis Symphony Orchestra conducted by David Robertson
What: Music You Know
Where: Powell Symphony Hall, St. Louis
When: March 13, 2015

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

The schedule at Powell Hall was packed this weekend, with David Robertson and the St. Louis Symphony playing a Whitaker Foundation "Music You Know" concert on Friday and a pair of regular subscription concerts on Saturday and Sunday.

Friday's "Music You Know" event was the second in this series of classical "greatest hits" concerts. The first one last November, while entertaining, had a few issues: too many long stage resets, too much commentary from David Robertson (engaging and enlightening though it was), and not enough precision in the orchestral playing. This time around, none of that was the case. There were fewer stage resets, Mr. Robertson's remarks from the podium were both entertaining and concise, and the orchestra sounded great.

The programming was also a bit more adventurous this time. The bulk of it was, as expected, drawn from the classical Top 40: Brahms' "Hungarian Dance No. 5," Rosas' waltz "Sobre las Olas" ("Over the Waves"; trust me, you know the tune), Borodin's "Polovtsian Dances," and Alfvén's "Swedish Rhapsody No. 1." They all got the kind of intelligent and nuanced readings that I have come to expect form Mr. Robertson and the orchestra. I've heard all of these old chestnuts more times than I can count, but Mr. Robertson still managed to put his own personal spin on each one.

There were also works which, while every bit as immediately appealing, are not necessarily as familiar. That shorter list included two radically different pieces for violin and orchestra inspired by Hungarian folk music: Ravel's flashy "Gypsy music" pastiche "Tzigane" and Bartók's less glitzy but sill technically challenging "Rhapsody No. 1." The soloists for both came from the SLSO violin section: Assistant Principal second violin Eva Kozma for the Ravel and Second Associate Concertmaster Emeritus Silvian Iticovici for the Bartók. Both played well, although I thought Ms. Kozma had the fuller sound.

Larry Kaptain played the cimbalom (hammered dulcimer) in the Bartók beautifully and the instrument itself was quite handsome.

Friday's concert concluded with an electrifying performance of the "Four Dances from Estancia" by Alberto Ginastera. This suite drawn from the 1941 ballet the Argentine composer wrote on a commission from American dance impresario Lincoln Kirstein has only recently started to gain attention from music lovers here in the USA—somewhat surprising, since it's seriously exciting stuff. The expanded percussion section did themselves proud.

The "Music You Know" concerts are clearly intended to attract a wider audience to Powell Hall. Many of the audience members Friday night were dressed more casually than is usually the case, drinks were allowed in the auditorium, and the overall vibe was more informal. I hope that approach works. If the concerts continue at this high level, the orchestra will certainly be putting its best foot forward.

After the regular subscription concerts on March 14 and 15, the SLSO is off to Carnegie Hall in New York for an appearance on Friday, March 20th. They're back for a showing of "The Godfather" with the music performed live March 27-29, and the regular season resumes with a program of Mozart and Shostakovich April 10 and 11 conducted by Hannu Lintu. For more information: stlsymphony.org.

Symphony Preview: Dancing the night away with music you know Friday, March 13, 2015

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This weekend local classical fans get a double header with two different St. Louis Symphony concerts: a Whitaker Foundation "Music That You Know" program on Friday, March 13, and music of Tchaikovsky, Debussy, and James MacMillan on Saturday and Sunday, March 14 and 15. David Robertson is at the podium for both.

The Friday program is "Folk Dances: Brahms and Bartók," and it features dance-inspired works with roots in the folk traditions of a half-dozen different countries. This is immensely appealing stuff that doesn't require a lot of advance preparation, so I'm going to limit myself to a few bits of background on each piece to supplement the Fun Facts SLSO blogger Eddie Silva provides in his program notes.

Johannes Brahms
en.wikipedia.org

Brahms: Hungarian Dance No. 5 in G minor (1873) – Part of a set of 21 dances that Brahms wrote originally for piano four hands and then later orchestrated, this particular dance has become so popular that it's almost a cliché. It has, as a result, been the butt of a lot of musical jokes, such as Allan Sherman's "Hungarian Goulash No. 5" and the "Rhapsody From Hunger(y)" by Spike Jones (where it gets mashed up with Liszt's "Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2").

Brahms thought he was basing this dance on a Hungarian folk tune (as he did for all but three of the other dances) but, in fact, he was using a czardas by Hungarian composer and conductor Béla Kéler. Ah, those carefree days before copyright law!

Juventino Rosas: Sobre las olas (Over the Waves) (1891) – A true "one hit wonder," Mexican composer Juventino Rosas was an Otomi Indian who became a prominent purveyor of salon music in Mexico City. He died at the age of 26 from a fever contracted while touring in Cuba. In his liner notes for a 1981 recording of this piece, the late music critic Andrew Lamb tells us that Rosas dedicated the waltz to a young lady whom he wooed in vain. Fitted up with lyrics by Paul Francis Webster, the main theme became the song "The Loveliest night of the Year". Mario Lanza introduced it in the 1950 film "The Great Caruso."

Ravel: Tzigane (1924) – The title is French for "gypsy," and while this fiercely difficult piece for violin and orchestra doesn't use any actual Hungarian folk tunes, it certainly conjures up the feel of that kind of music. The slow, smoldering romanticism of the opening eventually gives way to a wildly energetic finale that will test the skill of the best violinists.

Hugo Alfvén: Midsommarvaka (Midsummer Vigil), Swedish Rhapsody No. 1, op. 19 (1903) – This is the first of a set of three "Swedish Rhapsodies" from a composer who, while well known in his native land, is rarely heard elsewhere. In his notes for a 1994 recording of the complete rhapsodies, Swedish composer Lennart Hedwall notes that the first rhapsody is an "impression of one of the most important national feasts in Sweden, when the people celebrate the longest day and the brightest night of the year with almost ritual intensity." In 1957 the great Chet Atkins had a major hit with his solo guitar arrangement of the first theme.

Borodin: Polovtsian Dances from Prince Igor (1869-70, 1874-87) – Left unfinished at the time of the composer's death in 1887, "Prince Igor" was eventually completed by Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov and Alexander Glazunov. Fortunately, you don't need to know anything about the opera's complex plot to appreciate these colorful dances. Three of the melodies were used by the songwriting team of Wright and Forrest for their 1953 musical "Kismet," where they became "He's in Love," "Not Since Nineveh," and "Stranger in Paradise."

Bartók: Rhapsody No. 1 for Violin and Orchestra (1928-29) – And now for something completely different: Hungarian music based on Hungarian folk tunes collected by a Hungarian composer. Bartók's two rhapsodies were originally written for violin and piano and then later orchestrated. This first one packs over a half-dozen different folk tunes into its roughly eleven minute run time. Like Ravel's "Tzigane," it demands real virtuosity.

Alberto Ginastera
en.wikipedia.org

Alberto Ginastera: Four Dances from Estancia, op. 8a (1941) – In 1941 American dance impresario Lincoln Kirstein commissioned Argentine composer Alberto Ginastera to write "Estancia" ("ranch" in Argentine Spanish), a ballet based on the music and dances of Argentine cowboys, for his company. In April of 1942, celebrated choreographer Agnes de Mille called Aaron Copland and asked him to score a cowboy ballet for her company. Kirsten's company folded in 1942 and the ballet wasn't performed until 1952. De Mille's company did not fold and Copland's "Rodeo" was a huge and immediate hit.

Both "Estancia" and "Rodeo" are now better known for four-movement suites excerpted from their scores. Copland's suite is part of the standard repertoire here in the USA, but Ginastera's didn't get much traction with American audiences until its 2008 recording by Simón Bolívar Youth Orchestra of Venezuela under Gustavo Dudamel began getting airplay on classical stations.

Which is a bit surprising, as it's seriously exciting stuff. If you can sit through all twelve minutes of it—especially the exuberant "Malambo" final movement—without getting energized then (to quote a Louis Jordan lyric), "Jack, you're dead."

The essentials: David Robertson conducts the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra with violin soloists Eva Kozma and Silvian Iticovici in a Whitaker Foundation Music That You Know concert on Friday at 8 p.m., March 13. The concerts take place at Powell Symphony Hall, 718 North Grand in Grand Center. For more information: stlsymphony.org.

Symphony Preview: Last Thoughts

Amy Kaiser
stlsymphony.org

"It's a major work," says St. Louis Symphony Chorus Director Amy Kaiser in the program notes for this weekend's concerts, " full of challenges: complex fugues, expressive segments, rich in harmonic details. It's a choral symphony, really." She's talking about the piece that takes up almost the entire program at Powell Hall, Brahms's "Ein deutches requiem" ("A German Requiem").

At around seventy minutes (depending on the conductor's tempo choices) the "German Requiem" is the longest thing Brahms wrote, and one of the most deeply felt. Begun just after the death of the composer's mother in 1865 and incorporating material that Brahms had written after the suicide attempt of his mentor Robert Schumann eleven years earlier, the "Requiem" is both a work of mourning and of solace. "The work is all about comfort for the living," notes Ms. Kaiser. "People consider it a healing piece. There's no Dies irae. There is the sound of the last trumpet, but it's joyful, not fearful. A victory over death."

It's hard to say which death affected Brahms more profoundly: that of his mother or that of Schumann, his great friend and musical father figure, nine years earlier. What's clear is that the combination provided the inspiration for one of the composer's most important works, and one that brought him considerable respect and admiration. The 1868 premiere of the complete seven-movement version (earlier drafts had gotten public performances as early as 1866) at a private performance in Bremen was a hit, as were subsequent public performances in Cologne and Leipzig. It quickly gained acceptance with audiences, critics and, perhaps most importantly, with choruses.

Brahms, later in life

But that's hardly surprising. As Reneé Spencer Saller points out in her program notes, Brahms really knew how to write for the human voice, especially the low female voice (mezzo-soprano and contralto). "Most composers give sopranos all the best parts," she observes, "but Brahms's fondness for the duskier timbres is evident throughout his vocal music, particularly in A German Requiem." The work features solo parts for soprano (5th movement) and baritone (3rd and 6th), but the four-part chorus does most of the heavy lifting, making it an appealing choice for mixed chorus. Brahms also created a reduction for two pianos that could be substituted for the orchestra, making the piece that much more accessible for ensembles with limited budgets.

That's not to say that it was a big hit everywhere. Predominantly Catholic countries were initially cool towards it, primarily because of its Lutheran orientation (the text uses German language passages from the Lutheran bible) and because Brahms, ever the agnostic, de-emphasizes the Christians aspects of the traditional text of the requiem. As Ms. Saller writes, the work "shattered nearly every rule for requiems. It never mentions Jesus Christ by name and completely avoids the topic of Judgment Day. Its real subject is not divine grace and paradise but human grief and transience. It does not mourn the dead so much as console the living. Despite its focus on death, the word that appears most often in the text is, unexpectedly,'Freude,' or'joy.'"

And then there was the usual carping from Wagner and his clique, who hated Brahms and everything he produced. Brahms's work was seen as the diametric opposite of Wagner's "music of the future," making him a kind of musical Great Satan. "The importance of Wagner's stance toward Brahms cannot be overemphasized," writes teacher and essayist Nancy Thuleen. "[M]any critics echoed Wagner's sentiments, and while some devoted serious attention to an analysis of what they considered to be the work's particular flaws, others continued with vague polemicisms and ad hominem attacks against the composer, his beliefs and religion, and above all his 'academic' attitude toward music." Still, the power of the work could not be denied, and by the end of the 19th century it was widely regarded as an established classic.

I'm going to forgo any detailed musical analysis here since Ms. Saller has provided such a concise and readable one in her notes. Those of you looking for deeper background could do worse than Ms. Thuleen's well-researched essay on the subject and, of course, there's always good old Wikipedia. Besides, words really can't do this music justice; you'll want to hear it live.

Detlev Glanert
boosey.com

The concerts open with a bit of old wine in new bottles: "Vier Präludien und ernste Gesänge" ("Four Preludes and Serious Songs"). It's an arrangement of Brahms's op. 121 "Four Serious Songs" (his last published work) for baritone and orchestra (the original is for baritone and piano) by contemporary German composer Detlev Glanert (born 6 September 1960). The songs are pure Brahms, but the preludes that separate them are a mix of the two composers. Quoted in the program notes Glanert says of the original music: "...I tried to use it and transform it like a stylistic muscle, so that the music starts in his world, is sliding slowly into our world, and then falling back again." Composed in 2005, this unique work is having its local premiere this week.

Speaking of premieres, both the conductor and soprano soloist are making their St. Louis debuts this week. At the podium is Markus Stenz, Principal Conductor of the Netherlands Radio Philharmonic Orchestra, Principal Guest Conductor of the Halle Orchestra, and Principal Guest Conductor designate of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra. His globe-trotting resume includes six seasons as the Artistic Director and Chief Conductor of the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra as well as a "Ring" cycle in Shanghai and a BBC Proms appearance; busy guy.

Soprano Carolyn Thompson gets around as well, mostly in the USA and UK. She has performed with the English National Opera, Glyndebourne Festival Opera and Opéra de Paris, among others, as well as at the Boston Early Music Festival. Her repertoire is wide-ranging, from the title role in Lully's "Psyche?" to Anne Truelove in Stravinsky's "The Rake's Progress."

Our baritone soloist, on the other hand, will be familiar both to symphony audiences as well as to Opera Theatre regulars. Bass-baritone Patrick Carfizzi scored a real hit at OTSL this summer as the wily Dulcamara in a wonderful production of Donizetti's "The Elixir of Love" and was also part of the cast of the the much-praised concert version of Britten's "Peter Grimes" that the SLSO took to Carnegie Hall last fall.

The essentials: Markus Stenz conducts the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra and Chorus, along with soloists Carolyn Sampson, soprano, and Patrick Carfizzi, bass-baritone, in Brahms's "German Requiem" and "Four Preludes and Serious Songs" (arranged and augmented by Detlev Glanert) Saturday at 8 p.m. and Sunday at 3 p.m., October 4 and 5. The Saturday concert will be broadcast on St. Louis Public Radio, 90.7 FM, HD 1, and via Internet streaming. The concerts take place at Powell Symphony Hall, 718 North Grand in Grand Center. For more information: stlsymphony.org.

The Mortal Storm

Who: The St. Louis Symphony Orchestra conducted by David Robertson, with pianist Yefim Bronfman and violinist Erin Schreiber
What: Music of Brahms, Vaughan Williams, and Nielsen
When: September 12 and 13, 2014
Where: Powell Symphony Hall, St. Louis

The late eighteenth century artistic movement known as sturm und drang (usually translated as "storm and stress") had already evolved into the pervading sensibility of the Romantic era by the time the earliest work on this weekend's St. Louis Symphony concerts—the "Piano Concerto No. 1" by Brahms—was written. But "storm and stress" of one sort or another lie at the heart of it and the other two pieces on the program.

David Robertson

In the case of the Brahms, the stress was personal. When the composer began work on the piece in 1854 his friend and mentor Robert Schumann was confined into an asylum following a suicide attempt and the 21-year-old composer had moved in with Schumann's wife Clara to help manage her household and seven children.

Schumann would die in the asylum two difficult years later, and it's hard not to think of the great stress and tragedy of that when you hear the powerfully dramatic opening of the concerto, with its portentous drum rolls, declamatory first theme, and melancholy second. Like the composer's second concerto, it's a big work—nearly 50 minutes long and structured more as a symphony with piano obbligato than a conventional concerto of the period. It demands much in the way of stamina and skill from the soloist.

Pianist Yefim Bronfman demonstrated that he had both when he performed the Brahms Second here back in 2012, and he did it again Friday night. He has the chops to deliver the big, pounding climaxes, especially in the final movement, but he was just as persuasive in the tender lyricism of the Adagio second movement, which Brahms described as a musical portrait of Clara Schumann.

I wouldn't say this concerto is my favorite Brahms. The first movement, in particular, tends to ramble and never fully realizes the dramatic potential of those opening minutes. Still, Mr. Robertson made a very good case for it, pulling every ounce of angst and drama from the score. The second movement was serenely beautiful and the main theme of the Rondo finale was more infused with the spirit of the dance than I have heard in some recordings. There were a couple of ragged moments in the horn section in the first movement but otherwise the orchestra performed at its usual high level.

The "storm and stress" that informs the two works in the second half of the program is more global than personal. Both Ralph Vaughan Williams's "The Lark Ascending" and Carl Nielsen's "Symphony No. 4" ("The Inextinguishable") were begun during the early years of World War I. They're radically different pieces, but the shadow of that great cataclysm hangs over both.

Inspired by a George Meredith poem that describes the characteristic way skylarks spiral up into the sky while singing, "The Lark Ascending" is a work of surpassing beauty for violin and orchestra. Begun in 1914 and completed in 1920, the work is a wistfully nostalgic look back at a bucolic way of life shattered forever by the winds of war. The final pages, in which the lovely main theme slowly fades into silence as it makes its final ascent, can surely melt the hardest heart.

Erin Schreiber

The last time I saw Assistant Concertmaster Erin Schreiber in the solo spot (November of 2011), she was rocking the house in Luciano Berio's absurdly difficult “Corale (on Sequenza VIII) for violin, two horns, and strings.” The Vaughan Williams, with its sustained lyricism and ethereal final section, requires an entirely different kind of virtuosity. I'm happy to report she delivered the goods, with a performance of transparent beauty. The balance between soloist and orchestra was also quite good, at least from where we sat in the first row of the dress circle. That's not always easy to accomplish in Powell Hall's acoustical environment, which tends to swallow up soloists.

Nielsen's "Symphony No. 4" confronts the horror of the war directly. Like G. B. Shaw, Nielsen believed in a kind of pantheistic "life force" that pervaded all of nature. It's that force that Nielsen saw as "inextinguishable," even in the face of war and death. As he wrote in his program notes for the piece, "music is life, and like it inextinguishable." That force is demonstrated most dramatically in the famous "timpani battle" in final movement, in which timpani players placed on opposite sides of the orchestra fire volleys of sound at each other, but that's just the most vivid example of what British music writer Hugh Ottoway describes as "an elemental opposition of forces" that pervades the whole symphony.

This is dynamic, propulsive music, and it got an appropriately kinetic performance from Mr. Robertson and the symphony, with some really fine playing by the musicians. Nielsen's orchestration gives each of the different sections of the band a chance to shine. Brasses dominate the first and last movements, woodwinds the dance-like second, strings the searing third and, of course, the timpanists get to mix it up in the finale. They were all on top of their game Friday night, but percussionists Tom Stubbs and Shannon Wood deserve a particular shout-out for their performances.

I'm a great fan of Nielsen's symphonies and feel they haven't gotten nearly the attention they deserve locally. I'd be happy to see them on the Powell Hall stage more often, especially when they're performed with this kind of skill and conviction.

This weekend's concerts mark multiple anniversaries for the SLSO. It's the orchestra's 135 season and the 10th under Mr. Robertson. It's also the 20th for Concertmaster David Halen and Chorus Director Amy Kaiser (whose work you'll hear next week in the score for "Pirates of the Caribbean"). Mr. Robertson led the entire audience in a celebratory champagne toast at intermission, and a splendid time was had by all.

Next at Powell Hall: it's a movie night as Richard Kaufman conducts the orchestra and chorus in Hans Zimmer's score for "Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest" while the film plays on the big screen. Showings are Friday and Saturday at 7 and Sunday at 2 p.m., September 18-21. For more information, visit the SLSO web site.