Review: A potent Fifth of Beethoven

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

Roger Kaza

Share on Google+:

Attracting big-name international soloists, as the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra does on a regular basis, is a sure sign that an orchestra is playing in the big leagues. So does having first chair players that are good enough to take the solo spot themselves. Friday night (October 27, 2017) we had examples of both.

The concert opened with the Horn Concerto No. 2 in E-flat major by Richard Strauss. Written in 1943, when the composer was in his eighties, it's a warm and nostalgic look back on the cultural traditions that had been seriously poisoned by the Nazi regime under which Strauss labored. The last movement in particular, as Music Director David Robertson pointed out in his pre-concert talk, has a kind of grace that recalls the horn concertos of Mozart.

In the solo spot was SLSO Principal Horn Roger Kaza, delivering a technically solid performance that was a model of classical restraint. That approach worked especially well in the Rondo finale, which skipped along beautifully. For me, though it was a bit less effective on the first and second movements, where a bit more passion would have been welcome. Mr. Kaza also muted his horn a bit too much, I thought, often causing him to be swamped by the orchestra. He and Mr. Robertson showed real rapport, though, and got impeccable support from his fellow orchestra members. It was, overall, a very satisfying piece of work that drew a standing ovation.

Up next was Alban Berg's Seven Early Songs, composed between 1905 and 1908 when he was studying with Arnold Schoenberg but not fully orchestrated and published until 1928. Like the Strauss concerto, this is also music that largely looks back to the past, although in this case that past includes Strauss himself. There's a yearning and ecstatic romanticism to this music that makes it very approachable even if, as René Spencer Saller points out in her program notes, it rather annoyed Schoenberg.

The soloist was soprano Christine Brewer, who is both a big-name international performer as well as a local favorite, with stage credits that include not only Union Avenue Opera and Opera Theatre of St. Louis but also the Metropolitan Opera, Santa Fe Opera, and English National Opera. No surprise, then, that her singing here combined a luminous, powerful sound with a clear grasp of the text.

Soprano Christine Brewer
Photo: Christian Steiner

Those texts come from seven different German poets and vary from Carl Hauptmann's straightforward "Nacht" (Night) with its vivid evocation of a nocturnal landscape to Rilke's "Traumgekrönt" (Crowned in Dreams) with its more elliptical sexual references. Ms. Brewer showed the sensitivity to the varied moods of the songs that I have come to expect of her over the years. From the post-coital blush of "Libesode"(Ode to Love") to the quiet contemplation of "Im Zimmer" (Indoors), it was all there, and delivered with great authority.

The concert concluded with a rousing Beethoven Symphony No. 5, conducted without a score and with real fire. The Fifth has been performed and recorded so many times by so many different orchestras that it can be difficult for a conductor to put his own stamp on the work, but Mr. Robertson nevertheless managed to do just that with a driving, high-energy interpretation that created tangible excitement.

It even had some surprises to offer, including a headlong first movement and a graceful second that ran, with only the briefest pause, straight into the ghostly third. The orchestra played superbly, with fine solo work from everyone, including Principal Oboe Jelena Dirks in the first movement cadenza and flautist Ann Choomack on piccolo in the finale.

In a 2006 program note on the Beethoven Fifth for the Performance Today radio program, Christopher H. Gibbs noted that "it is difficult to divest this best known of symphonies from all the baggage it has accumulated through nearly two centuries and to listen with fresh ears to the shocking power of the work and to the marvels that Beethoven introduced into the world of orchestral music." Mr. Robertson's energetic approach jettisoned quite a bit of that baggage, reminding us of the work's remarkable power and originality.

Next at Powell Hall: SLSO Resident Conductor Gemma New leads the orchestra in John William's score for Jurassic Park, accompanying a showing of the film. Performances are Friday and Saturday at 7 p.m. and Sunday at 2 p.m., November 3-5. As with all film events, there will be popcorn, drink specials, and you'll be able to bring food and drink into the hall with you; so be careful to avoid spills.

Symphony Preview: Cafe Vienna

We were in Vienna for a few days earlier this month and drenched ourselves in musical history. We visited the Mozarthaus museum. We saw a concert at the Musikverein and took a tour of the Vienna State Opera. We even stayed at the Hotel Beethoven on Papagenogasse, where the wall of our room was dominated by a picture of Placido Domingo in Fidelio.

And, of course, we had coffee and pastries.

This music scheduled for the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra concerts this weekend (October 27 - 29, 2017) brought all of that back to mind. Two of the three works on the program were first performed in Vienna and the third, while premiered in Salzburg, was performed there by the Vienna Philharmonic under Karl Böhm. So it's essentially "all Vienna all the time" this weekend.

The concerts open with that last work I mentioned. It's the Horn Concerto No. 2 in E-flat major by Richard Strauss. First performed on August 11th, 1943, the concerto's warmly nostalgic sound stands in stark contrast to the state of mind of its composer. His heath was not good, his wife was going blind, and the regime to which he had effectively sold his soul-and which he would later describe as a "twelve year reign of bestiality, ignorance and anti-culture under the greatest criminals"-was collapsing. Small wonder, then, that he took refuge in a kind of musical nostalgia.

Roger Kaza

Its lyricism not withstanding, the concerto is a difficult piece to perform, which may be one of the reasons why this is only the second time the SLSO has presented it. The local premiere was given back in 1987 with the famed Barry Tuckwell as the soloist. This time the solo spot will be taken by SLSO Principal Horn Roger Kaza. As someone who loves seeing local band members take center stage, I'm very much looking forward to his performance.

Up next will be the Seven Early Songs, composed by Alban Berg between 1905 and 1908 when he was studying with Arnold Schoenberg but not published until 1928. They hark back to the late Romantic sound world of Mahler and Strauss for the most part and are less terse and elliptical than the kind of thing Berg was writing when he published them. That means you can expect something very different from the last Berg song cycle we heard at Powell Hall.

That last song cycle was the Five Orchestral Songs to Picture-Postcard Texts by Peter Altenberg, performed by local favorite Christine Brewer last May. It's only appropriate, then, that Ms. Brewer is back as the soloist this time around. Ms. Brewer has substantial operatic credentials and Berg's songs are always very theatrical, so it should be a good fit.

Christine Brewer
Photo: Christian Steiner

At the other end of the popularity spectrum is the final work on the program, Beethoven's Symphony No. 5. The opening movement, in particular, has been heard and parodied so often that it's easy to forget that the symphony's premiere on December 22, 1808, was not a great success. The Fifth was part of a mammoth five hour program that included the Symphony No. 6 ("Pastoral"), the Piano Concerto No. 4, a couple of movements from the Mass in C, a concert aria ("Ah, perfido"), and the Op. 80 Choral Fantasy. Beethoven conducted and played the solo piano part in the concerto and the Fantasy.

There was only one rehearsal before the concert, the musicians weren't up to Beethoven's demands, the auditorium was cold, and by the time the Fifth was played after intermission the audience was exhausted. Things went so badly that at one point the Choral Fantasy had to be stopped completely after a performance error. Not auspicious.

In fact, it wasn't until E.T.A. Hoffmann published an enthusiastic review of the newly published score in the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung a year and a half later that everyone began to sit up and take notice of the Fifth. "Radiant beams shoot through this region's deep night," wrote Hoffmann of the music's dramatic effect, "and we become aware of gigantic shadows which, rocking back and forth, close in on us and destroy everything within us except the pain of endless longing-a longing in which every pleasure that rose up in jubilant tones sinks and succumbs, and only through this pain, which, while consuming but not destroying love, hope, and joy, tries to burst our breasts with full-voiced harmonies of all the passions, we live on and are captivated beholders of the spirits."

More and better-rehearsed performances followed. By the time Hector Berlioz wrote his Critical Study of Beethoven's Nine Symphonies he could state that the Fifth was "without doubt the most famous of the symphonies" and "the first in which Beethoven gave wings to his vast imagination without being guided by or relying on any external source of inspiration." Today the Fifth is famous not just on earth but in outer space as well; a recording of the first movement by the Philadelphia Orchestra was part of the Voyager Golden Record, included on the first two Voyager space probes launched in 1977 and now speeding through deep space.

The essentials: David Robertson conducts The St. Louis Symphony Orchestra in music by Richard Strauss, Alban Berg, and Beethoven Friday and Saturday at 8 p.m. and Sunday at 3 p.m., October 27 - 29. Soprano Christine Brewer will perform Berg's Seven Early Songs and SLSO Principal Horn Roger Kaza will play Strauss's Horn Concerto No. 2. The concerts will conclude with Beethoven's popular Symphony No. 5. The performances take place at Powell Hall in Grand Center. For more information: stlsymphony.org.

Opera Review: No doubt about it, Union Avenue does a splendid job with "Doubt"

L-R: Elise Quagliata, Christine Brewer, Wes Mason
Photo: John Lamb

Union Avenue Opera is bringing its season to an impressive close with the local premiere of Doubt, a not entirely successful musical adaptation by composer Douglas J. Cuomo and playwright John Patrick Shanley of the latter's 2004 play Doubt: A Parable and its 2008 film version.

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, Shanley's play is a masterful examination of the dangers of both moral certainty and ethical blindness.  Set in a working-class Catholic church in the Bronx in 1964, Doubt chronicles the conflict between Father Brendan Flynn, a young progressive priest who has embraced the humanism of Vatican II, with Sister Aloysius Beauvier, an old school, steel-ruler-discipline nun.  They are at odds not only with how strictly the church school should be run but also with what Sister Aloysius believes is Father Flynn's sexual abuse of young Donald Miller, the school's first black student.  Caught between these two implacable foes is the young and idealistic Sister James, who respects both of them and who, unlike Sister Aloysius, is plagued with doubt.

L-R: Elise Quagliata, Wes Mason
Photo: John Lamb

In the opera all of these themes remain intact. But what was originally a taut, ninety-minute one act has been expanded into a full-length work running nearly two hours and forty-five minutes including intermission.   Scenes have been added in the classrooms and the church and the original four-character cast has been expanded to include adult and children's choirs. As a result, the work loses a bit of dramatic steam in places and some of the additional scenes—most notably those set in the classroom—sometimes feel more like filler than anything else.

Other additions, though, work exceptionally well.  The powerful choral number that opens the work, for example, allows us to hear individual members of the congregation reacting to Father Flynn's parable on the unifying nature of doubt.  The choral setting of Flynn's second act sermon on the evil of gossip is equally effective.

So on the whole, Doubt makes for a very compelling theatrical experience.  And for that, Union Avenue's exemplary production can take a great deal of the credit.

As Sister Aloysius, local favorite Christine Brewer once again displays the vocal power and dramatic conviction that have characterized her work on local opera and concert stages for many years.  The character must come across as a formidable figure who is nevertheless capable of compassion, and Ms. Brewer's portrayal is perfect on both counts.

L-R: Melody Wilson, Christine Brewer
Photo: John Lamb

Equally impressive is UAO veteran Elise Quagliata as the conflicted Sister James.  She's a talented singer seems equally comfortable with both the standard repertoire and newer works. As she did in UAO's Dead Man Walking back in 2011, Ms. Quagliata demonstrates that her clear and fluid mezzo voice comes paired with solid acting skills.

Making his UAO debut, baritone Wes Mason makes Father Flynn a very credible and complex character.  Is he villain, victim, or a bit of both?  Shanley leaves the question hanging, and Mr. Mason's nuanced performance keeps the balance intact.

As Mrs. Miller, whose son Donald is at the center of the controversy, mezzo Melody Wilson turns in one of the most remarkable performances of the evening.  The role is a small but vital one, and the scene in which Sister Aloysius tells her what she thinks she knows of the relationship between Donald and Father Flynn is an emotional high point of both the play and the opera.  Mr. Cuomo has written an unforgivingly long a cappella passage for her towards the end of the scene that requires remarkable vocal control, and she delivers it beautifully.  On opening night, her exit prompted spontaneous applause, despite the fact that Mr. Cuomo's seamless score tends to discourage that.

Speaking of Mr. Cuomo's music, its jazzy and astringent sounds neatly underscore the prose of Mr. Shanley's text, although there are times when it feels out of synch with the emotions expressed in that text.  Mr. Cuomo also displays what felt to me like an excessive fondness for drawing out individual words with long, melismatic vocal passages that seem to serve no particular dramatic purpose.  Overall, though, it's a good match for the naturalistic inflections of Mr. Shanley's dialog.

It also sounds like a challenge to play, so conductor Scott Schoonover deserves high praise for leading the orchestra through such a seamless reading of it.  The balance between the signers and the orchestra was quite good, which can be a very tricky business in the sanctuary of the Union Avenue Christian Church. And under his direction the Union Avenue chorus has never sounded better.

L-R: Wes Mason, Christine Brewer
Photo: John Lamb

Kyra Bishop's set, with its massive crucifix set at a drunken angle, mirrors the opera's subtext of faith in crisis, and the bare branches poking up through the floor remind us of the bitter New York winter.  Jeff Behm's lighting enhances the atmosphere.  Teresa Doggett's costumes are, as always, right on target.

Director Tim Ocel adds yet another triumph to his work for UAO, with smart and fluid staging that keeps the dramatic momentum going while always making the dramatic focus clear.  He is, for my money, the best opera director in town.

While I don't think setting Doubt to music enhances it in any way, it still makes for pretty potent theatre and is well worth your time, especially if you haven't been exposed to either the play or the film already.  It raises issues about the risks of moral certainty that are, if anything, more relevant now than they were when the play was first written.  And there is no doubt that Union Avenue's production is a singular accomplishment.

Closing performances of Doubt are Friday and Saturday, August 27 and 27, at 8 p.m. at the Union Avenue Christian Church, 733 Union at Enright in the Central West End.  For more information, visit the company web site.

Symphony Review: A spectacular Holst "Planets" brings the St. Louis Symphony season to a close

Christine Brewer
Photo: Christian Steiner

Share on Google+:

The St. Louis Symphony is bringing its regular season to a spectacular close this weekend (May 6-8, 2016) with Maestro David Robertson leading a simply excellent performance of Holst's The Planets, preceded by an equally impressive Vaughan Williams Flos campi (featuring Associate Principal Viola Kathleen Mattis) and a powerfully neurasthenic Berg Altenberg Lieder with soprano Christine Brewer.

Holst was a relatively obscure composer teaching at the St. Paul's School for Girls in Hammersmith when his suite The Planets, composed between 1914 and 1916, had its first public performance under Adrian Boult and the London Philharmonic in 1918.  The piece was an immediate success—which was not, as it turned out, a welcome development for the rather shy and retiring composer.  Indeed, like many composers who became known for a single piece, Holst eventually came to actively dislike his Greatest Hit, feeling that it overshadowed his other work.

He had a point.  Holst's many choral arrangements, as well as his music for wind band, chamber orchestra, and symphony orchestra, are well worth hearing (his Fugal Overture and Japanese Suite are favorites of mine) so it's a shame that The Planets is pretty much the only thing that ever makes it on to concert programs.  But it's so engaging that it's easy to understand the appeal.

Holst was a mystic and astrologer who cast horoscopes for himself and his friends, so his planets aren’t so much astronomical bodies as they are aspects of the human psyche supposedly influenced by those bodies. Each one of the seven movements is a mini tone poem capturing, for example, mindless aggression ("Mars, the Bringer of War"), good-humored warmth (“Jupiter, the Bringer of Jollity”), comic pomposity (“Uranus, the Magician”), or even the rage against the dying of the light and ultimate serenity that come with aging (“Saturn, the Bringer of Old Age”).

Those portraits are brilliant exercises in orchestration. Holst calls for a massive ensemble, including harps, celesta, organ, and rarely heard instruments like the bass oboe (its mournful sound used most tellingly in “Saturn”, beautifully played by Phil Ross).  When the full forces of the SLSO were deployed in playing that score—as in the relentless 5/4 death march of "Mars", with its angry fanfares that go nowhere—the sound was as overwhelming as it was precise. 

But it was in the individual solos that you could hear the real strength of this band.  That included Tim Myers on tenor tuba in "Mars", harpists Allegra Lilly and Megan Stout and keyboard player Peter Henderson on celesta in "Mercury", and Roger Kaza and the other horns in "Venus, the Bringer of Peace"—which also featured Concertmaster David Halen, Principal Cello Danny Lee, and Mark Sparks's flute section.  Karin Bliznik's trumpets were wonderfully clear in "Jupiter" and Andrew Cuneo's bassoons had great comic bite in "Uranus", a movement which seems to owe a little something to Dukas's Sorcerer's Apprentice.  There were many others as well, but you get the idea—we have a great bunch of musicians here.

David Robertson
Photo: Scott Ferguson, St. Louis Symphony

Mr. Robertson conducted a beautifully shaped performance the brought out all the nuances of the score while still respecting the big, climactic moments.  His "Mars" was hair raising, his "Venus" was sheer serenity, and the relentless tread of the passing years in "Saturn" was heartbreaking. 

Most remarkable of all, though, was his treatment of the final movement, “Neptune, the Mystic.” The score calls for a wordless women’s chorus "to be placed in an adjoining room, the door of which is to be left open until the last bar of the piece, when it is to be slowly and silently closed." The final bar of the music, for voices alone, is "to be repeated until the sound is lost in the distance."  Mr. Robertson's approach was to put the women of the SLSO chorus in the halls outside of the dress circle so that, at least from our seats in the orchestra parquet, their voices seemed to come from nowhere and everywhere.  The final fade-out was so subtly done that it was almost impossible to be sure that the piece had really ended; surely those two chords were still being sung somewhere?  Leonard Slatkin and Courtney Lewis did something similar when they conducted The Planets here in 2013, to equally magical effect.

The concerts opened with a far less familiar work by Holst's friend and fellow composer, Ralph Vaughan Williams.  Written in 1925, Flos campi (Flower of the field) is a remarkably beautiful piece written for the unusual combination of viola and mixed chorus along with the orchestra.  Cast in six movements and played without pause, it's a series of reflections on texts from one of the most openly sensual bits of the Bible, the Song of Solomon.  The texts for each movement are printed in the score and, for these performances, were projected on a screen above the orchestra.

By turns poetic, sensuous, pastoral, and even cinematic, it's quirky stuff.  The writing is often very contrapuntal but at the same time completely transparent, so the effect is one of lyrical beauty—all of which came through clearly in this performance.  Kathleen Mattis delivered the solo viola part with real passion, including the arrhythmic, bitonal opening duet with Jelena Dirks's oboe.  Mr. Robertson conducted with great sensitivity and the chorus sang their often complex part to perfection.  You couldn't have asked for a more blissful opening number.

That made for a very effective contrast with the music that followed.  Alban Berg's Fünf Orchesterlieder nach Ansichtskarten-Texten von Peter Altenberg (Five Orchestral Songs to Picture-Postcard Texts by Peter Altenberg), Op. 4 (a.k.a the Altenberg Lieder) were written around the same time as The Planets, but are as far away from Holst's picturesque mysticism as it's possible to get.  The five short songs (one is only a page long) use as their texts elliptical and eccentric poems of Peter Altenberg (real name: Richard Engländer), who sent them to friends on picture postcards—hence the title of this work.

Berg set these elusively bleak poems to intense and unsettling music scored for a large orchestra—around 100 players—that is generally deployed in small groups, so the sound overall is one of chamber music-like delicacy.  That means that individual performers and sections are often very exposed and that there's no room for anything less than very polished and sensitive playing—which is exactly what we got on Friday night.  For her part, soprano soloist Christine Brewer sang and acted Berg's songs with real conviction, combining her customary technical prowess with a real commitment to the text.

A final note: on Friday night, Mr. Robertson took a few moments at the top of the second half to say farewell to second violinist Deborah Bloom, who is retiring after 42 years with the orchestra.  He praised both her musicianship and her dedication to the orchestra's community partnership program with local schools—an essential aspect of the orchestra's mission, if we hope to keep the classics alive.  I thought it was a gracious gesture, and a reminder of why Mr. Robertson has such a good relationship with the musicians.

The final presentation of this concert on Sunday, May 8 concluded the regular season, but the orchestra will be presenting a number of "special event" concerts in May and June.  For more information, visit the orchestra web site.

Symphony Preview: Hit and Miss

Share on Google+:

Unless you've sung in a choir or played in a concert band, you probably know Gustav Holst (1874-1934) only as the composer of his popular orchestral suite The Planets, Op. 32, a performance of which concludes the St. Louis Symphony's regular season this weekend, May 6-8, 2016. Singers will probably know Holst's many choral works, and recovering band geeks like yours truly are likely to be familiar with his two suites from 1909 and 1911, or his Hammersmith: Prelude and Scherzo from 1930. For everybody else, it's The Planets.

Gustav Holst in 1921
Photo: Herbert Lambert

Written between 1914 and 1916, The Planets was an immediate hit and made the previously unknown Holst something of a celebrity. This was not, as it turned out, a welcome development for the rather shy and retiring composer. Indeed, like many composers who became known for a single work, Holst eventually came to actively dislike his Greatest Hit. "Holst never wrote another piece like The Planets again," writes Kenric Taylor at gustavholst.info. "He hated its popularity. When people would ask for his autograph, he gave them a typed sheet of paper that stated that he didn't give out autographs."

If you've never heard The Planets before, you're in for a treat. I remember my delight the first time I heard this wonderfully cinematic seven-movement suite performed by the Vienna Philharmonic under Herbert von Karajan on a 1961 London Records disc. Back then my stereo wasn't much to brag about and the recording itself was a bit murky, but even so, from the first aggressive measures of "Mars, the Bringer of War"--an alarmingly mechanistic march in 5/4 time--I was hooked.

Inspired by the mythological and astrological aspects of the planets, the seven movements turn the heavenly bodies into characters and provide musical portraits of each one. "Mars" is all futile violence and dissonant brass. "Venus, the Bringer of Peace" floats in on a gentle horn solo, wafted along by flutes and strings. "Mercury, the Winged Messenger" zips along its triplets tossed around by the harp, strings, woodwinds, and celesta. And so it goes. Pluto hadn't been discovered yet and earth, of course, doesn't count in astrology, hence the seven movements instead of nine.

Ralph Vaughan Williams
in 1922

Holst actually got two hits out of The Planets, as it happens. The big, noble second theme from "Jupiter, the Bringer of Jollity" proved to be so popular that Holst later used it as a setting for Cecil Spring-Rice's poem "I Vow to Thee My Country." That version of the tune became a kind of second national anthem in England, along the lines of "America the Beautiful" over here.

Opening the concert will be a pair of works that are likely to be much less familiar: Ralph Vaughan Williams's Flos campi (Flower of the Field) from 1925 and Alban Berg's Fünf Orchesterlieder nach Ansichtskarten-Texten von Peter Altenberg (Five Orchestral Songs to Picture-Postcard Texts by Peter Altenberg), Op. 4 (a.k.a the Altenberg Lieder), from 1912. Both have been performed by the SLSO only once--the former in 1975 under Leonard Slatkin and the latter in 1966 with Eleazar de Carvalho at the podium--and neither one has exactly been on the "Top 40" with orchestras elsewhere.

In the case of the Vaughan Williams, it's partly a matter of the forces involved. In addition to the orchestra, Flos campi is scored for solo viola and mixed chorus--an unusual enough pairing to make programming it problematic. And the piece itself is a bit of an oddity in the composer's output. Cast in six movements and played without pause, it's a series of reflections on texts from one of the most openly sensual bits of the Bible, the Song of Solomon. By turns lyrical, sensuous, pastoral, and even cinematic, it's quirky stuff. Composer Phillip Cooke has called it "one of the silliest, most baffling and (in some parts) most un-Vaughan Williams piece that RVW ever wrote; it is part pastoral elegy, part crazy pagan party." But he then goes on to confess, "I love it."

The score is dedicated to the noted English violist Lionel Tertis and was, in fact, first performed with Tertis as the soloist in 1925 with Sir Henry Wood at the podium. Like Tertis, Vaughan Williams dearly loved the rich, dark sound of the viola and loved writing for it. Discussing the origins of Flos campi, Vaughan Williams's wife Ursula noted that "The viola with its capability of warmth and its glowing quality was the instrument he knew best."

Alban Berg

A different kind of darkness figures prominently in the Berg song cycle, which takes as its text the elliptical and eccentric poems of Peter Altenberg (real name: Richard Engländer). Engländer/Altenberg was an odd duck. "He is reputed to have spent most of his adult waking hours in coffeehouses," writes James Guida in a profile of the poet in The New Yorker, "and the sleeping ones in a hotel that was little more than a brothel. As for writing, his chosen medium was a feuilleton-style prose poem of anywhere from a sentence to a few pages in length, and he did wonders with it." He sent some of those little poems to his friends on postcards, and it's five of those that Berg set to intense and cryptically passionate music.

Like all of Berg's music, the Altenberg Lieder cram a lot of information into a very small amount of time--ten to twelve minutes in most performances. "Each of the songs is symmetrically conceived," writes Alexander Carpenter at allmusic.com, "that is, each begins and ends with similar, if not identical, harmonic or motivic gestures. The songs make considerable use of canon, passacaglia, and variation form." It was all apparently too much for the Viennese audience at the work's 1913 premiere, who booed and hooted like the Paris audiences at the first performance of Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring that same year.

Alas, Berg lacked Stravinsky's massive ego and talent for self-promotion, so instead of turning the audience reaction to his advantage, he retreated from composing songs entirely, choosing instead to concentrate on his orchestral works and his celebrated operas Wozzeck and Lulu. He might have achieved even greater things, but when the Nazis came to power he was denounced as a composer of entartete music ("degenerate music") and then had the misfortune to die in 1935 at the age of fifty from an infected insect bite. Such is the impact of dumb luck on human affairs.

The Essentials: David Robertson conducts the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra and Chorus along with soloists Christine Brewer, soprano, and Kathleen Mattis, viola, on Friday and Saturday at 8 p.m. and Sunday at 3 p.m., May 6-8. The program consists of Vaughan William's Flos Campi, Berg's Altenberg Lieder, and Holst's The Planets. Performances take place at Powell Symphony Hall, 718 North Grand.

St. Louis classical calendar for the week of May 2, 2016

The Arianna String Quartet

Share on Google+:

The Touhill Performing Arts Center presents The Arianna String Quartet in Beethoven's Triumps on Friday, May 6, at 8 PM. "The ASQ's season finale begins with Edvard Grieg's electrifying String Quartet in G minor, Op.27, an audience favorite that soars with a breadth of expression and powerful resonance like no other in the string quartet repertoire. The Arianna Quartet brings their 2015-16 series to a close with Beethoven's monumental late string quartet, the Quartet in C# minor, Op.131. As a musical testament to the power and fragility of the human experience, Beethoven's creation is a timeless masterpiece that offers hope, strength and insight into the complexity of humankind's emotional and intellectual existence." The Touhill Performing Arts Center in on the University of Missouri at St. Louis campus. For more information: touhill.org.

The St. Louis Children's Choirs present their Spring Concert on Sunday, May 7, at 2 and 7 p.m. "Music Makers, Children's Choirs 1A, Chorale 2A and 2UC, and Choristers will perform a variety of music to include Broadway songs, world music, classical favorites, and music from Americana." The concerts take place at in the J. Scheidegger Center for the Arts on the Lindenwood University campus in St. Charles. For more information: slccsing.org.

Christine Brewer
christinebrewer.com

David Robertson conducts the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra and Chorus along with soloists Christine Brewer, soprano, and Kathleen Mattis, viola, on Friday and Saturday at 8 p.m. and Sunday at 3 p.m., May 6-8. The program includes Hosts's The Planets, Vaughan-Williams's Flos campi, and Berg's Altenberg Lieder. Performances take place at Powell Symphony Hall, 718 North Grand. For more information: stlsymphony.org.

On Monday, at 8 p.m., The Tavern of Fine Arts presents classical guitarist Bryan Albert in an evening of raditional classical and jazz tunes, 90s alternative, and Mr. Albert's own compositions. The Tavern of Fine Arts is at 313 Belt in the Debaliviere Place neighborhood. For more information: tavern-of-fine-arts.blogspot.com.

Symphony Preview: Wagner and friends with David Robertson and Christine Brewer Friday and Saturday, March 6 and 7, 2015

Share on Google+

This August, Union Avenue Opera will present the last installment of its four-year traversal of Richard Wagner's "Ring" operas: "Götterdämmerung" ("Twilight of the Gods"). This weekend David Robertson, soprano Christine Brewer, and the St. Louis Symphony are presenting "Brünnhilde's Immolation," the final scene of that opera. Think of it as something of a preview.

Wagner in 1871
en.wikipedia.org

Of course, Union Avenue will be using a reduced version of the score prepared by British composer Jonathan Dove. At Powell Hall you'll get the Full Monty (or maybe the Full Richard) with a massive orchestra that includes four (count 'em, four) Wagner tubas (instruments in the euphonium range but with smaller bells and French horn mouthpieces), eight horns, a bass trumpet and a pair of harps. You'll also be getting a highly regarded soprano with a penchant for big, powerful roles in Christine Brewer.

That's a good thing, because in the "Ring" operas Wagner writes vocal lines that are very long and closely integrated with the orchestra. "It is the avoidance of cadence or period in this manner," writes British critic John Warrack in the Norton "History of Opera", "that earns the vocal line the term unendliche Melodie [literally "endless melody"]. The demands made upon singers in articulating such lines are enormous, both of sheer stamina but also in the necessity of a close understanding of the issues involved".

To do Wagner justice, in other words, you need to be not only a powerful and technically skilled singer, you have to be a capable actor as well. Ms. Brewer's substantial operatic resume should serve her well here.

And that immolation scene is nothing if not dramatic. The stage directions in the libretto call for vassals to build a funeral pyre and place the body of the treacherously slain Siegfried on it. Brünnhilde sets the pyre aflame, jumps on her horse, and together they leap into the flames. Everything goes up in smoke, the Rhine overflows its banks, and finally Valhalla itself is incinerated. It's Armageddon on a cinematic scale, calling for all the skills a stage designer can muster.

I'm not sure how Union Avenue will manage it, but this weekend the performance will be accompanied by projections created by S. Katy Tucker. She provided some mood-setting visuals to go with an all-American program last fall, so it will be interesting to see what she does with the Wagner.

The second half of this weekend's concerts will be taken up with one very big work: the "Symphony No. 3" of Anton Bruckner (1824-1896), in its final 1889 revision. Bruckner was a gushingly avid admirer of Wagner and, in fact, dedicated this symphony to him, so its placement on the program makes both musical and historical sense. Personally, I'm glad to see it simply because I don't think Bruckner's symphonies get as much attention as they deserve.

"Anton Bruckner arrives in Heaven". Bruckner is greeted by (from left to right):
Liszt, Wagner, Schubert, Schumann, Weber, Mozart, Beethoven, Gluck,
Haydn, Handel, Bach. (Silhouette drawing by Otto Böhler)
en.wikipedia.org

Writers of music criticism seem unable to discuss the symphonies of Anton Bruckner without invoking the imagery of the Gothic cathedral. Perhaps that's because they so strongly suggest a connection between the material and ethereal planes—great blocks of sound alternating with moments of otherworldly beauty. In Bruckner's music you can hear both great, heaven-storming power and quiet mystery. Time seems to act differently in a Bruckner symphony, with each movement incorporating so much emotional depth that it can feel both shorter and longer than the clock indicates. Amazing stuff, really.

Alas, as René Spencer Saller relates in her program notes, the audience at the premiere of the first version of Bruckner's third in 1877 (with the composer at the podium) didn't hear any of that. "Calling the concert a disaster," she writes, "is an understatement: think nightmare fuel, the stuff of suicide notes. He was set up to fail. Although he was a good chorus director, Bruckner had virtually no experience conducting a symphony orchestra, and this was a huge and demanding work. Even worse, he was leading—or attempting to lead—openly hostile musicians who seemed determined to make him a laughingstock."

Wagner's endorsement of his younger protégé probably didn't help. "It was after Wagner had espoused his cause," observed conductor and Bruckner booster F. Charles Adler in a 1938 radio broadcast, "accepting the dedication of the Third Symphony and hailing him as the greatest symphonic writer after Beethoven, that his trials really began. The critics who had praised his early efforts turned, and could find no words virulent enough to express their distaste. One went to far as to cry: 'Bruckner composes like a drunkard!' Orchestras and conductors refused his works as unplayable. Everywhere fun was poked at him and his music. To a man of Bruckner's timidity it was nearly fatal. But somehow he did survive it."

Bruckner not only survived but triumphed. The first performance of his "Symphony No. 7" in 1884 was a rousing success and the composer lived to see himself lionized worldwide. The music of the two other greatest post-Wagnerian composers—Gustav Mahler and Richard Strauss—may be more popular these days, but Bruckner is nevertheless firmly established as one of the great late-19th century symphonists.

Photograph of Gabriel Fauré
by Eugène Pirou, c. 1900
en.wikipedia.org

The concerts will open with the "Elegie for Cello and Orchestra," Op. 24, by Gabriel Fauré (1845-1924). Like Bruckner, Fauré was an admirer (albeit a less ardent one) of Wagner. Unlike the older composer, Fauré was not much influenced by Wagner in his own music, opting for a more restrained style and shorter, less grandiose musical structures. "Whereas Wagner was the undisputed king of his self-invented 'universal music drama,'” writes Ms. Saller, "Fauré excelled in exquisite miniatures: chamber music, art song, piano pieces." His best-known large work—the 1890 "Requiem in D minor," Op. 48, clocks in at a modest 35 minutes or so and is characterized by a radiant and transparent sound that's miles away from Bruckner's massive sound cathedrals.

Still, the sad and wistful tone of the "Elegie" should work well as a preparation for the prolonged Wagnerian death scene that will follow it. "Fauré 's preference for light orchestral scoring," writes Dr. Beth Fleming in program notes for Symphony Silicon Valley, "is the ideal envelope for the rich, resonant tone of the 'cello, and in this beautiful work the solo voice controls the situation from the first moment to the last. Over steady chords reminiscent of a dirge, the 'cello melody leads the listener through a rapturous lament that begins dramatically and gradually becomes more quiet and resigned. The orchestra speaks alone for a time in a contrasting melody and is eventually joined by the 'cello, which takes over in a magnificent cadenza before the return of the original funereal section. Eventually the 'cello seems to sing itself into silence. The result of this tiny work is an impeccable moment of pure musical poetry."

The essentials: David Robertson conducts the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra with Christine Brewer, soprano, and Bjorn Ranheim, cello, on Friday and Saturday at 8 p.m., March 6 and 7. The concerts feature Bruckner's "Symphony No. 3" and the "Immolation Scene" from Wagner's " Götterdämmerung" ("Twilight of the Gods"). The concerts take place at Powell Symphony Hall, 718 North Grand in Grand Center. For more information: stlsymphony.org.

Unfinished buisness

Christine Brewer

Who: The St. Louis Symphony Orchestra conducted by David Robertson with soprano Christine Brewer and baritone Lucas Meachem
What: Music of Suppé, Schubert, and Zemlinsky
Where: Powell Symphony Hall
When: May 3-5, 2013

Share on Google+

Every now and then the most publicized event in a symphony concert turns out not to be the one that leaves the greatest impression. This weekend all the fuss was about the local premiere of Alexander Zemlinsky’s lavishly scored and slightly exotic Lyrische Symphonie (Lyric Symphony) Op. 18 (1922-23) with baritone Lucas Meachem and local favorite soprano Christine Brewer. For me, though, the real highlight of the program was Maestro David Robertson’s highly charged version of Schubert’s Symphony No. 8 in B minor, D. 759 (“Unfinished”) from a century earlier.

Don’t get me wrong. I thought the Zemlinsky was pretty compelling stuff, but it was the Schubert that was genuinely moving. From the urgent opening theme on the cellos and basses to the final, resigned sighs from the strings and winds, this was a deeply-felt “Unfinished”, filled with high drama and pathos, emotionally overwhelming, and beautifully played. The development section of the first movement was particularly intense, with Mr. Robertson (working without a score) giving it the “full body conducting” treatment, and those big organ-like chords from the winds in the second movement have never sounded better. I haven’t heard a Powell Hall performance of the “Unfinished” with this kind of power since Leonard Slatkin’s days as music director. I don’t know whether or not Mahler ever conducted the “Unfinished”, but if he did I think it might have sounded like this one.

Did Schubert really mean to leave his eighth symphony as a two-movement work? It would be unusual (not to say radical) if he did, and surviving sketches of the first part of a scherzo suggest he planned to give it the conventional four movements. Many composers have even tried to complete it for him. If the attempts I’ve heard are typical, the results have been mixed at best. As it stands, the two movements balance each other so perfectly that it’s hard to see how Schubert could have improved upon it, especially when performed with the kind of conviction I heard Sunday afternoon.

Lucas Meachem

But let’s get back to what was, for many, the Main Event. But let’s get back to what was, for many, the Main Event. Although proscribed by the Nazis and then dismissed as hopelessly old-fashioned in the years after World War II, Alexander Zemlinksy was, by all accounts, a composer of prodigious technique and imagination as well as a highly regarded conductor, especially in the opera house. As Paul Schiavo points out in his program notes, Zemlinsky described himself as “a man of the theater”, composing seven operas along with a ballet and incidental music for Shakespeare’s rarely performed Cymbeline. You can hear that in the Lyric Symphony, which consists of seven settings of poems from The Gardener by the Nobel Prize-winning Indian poet Rabindranath Tagore. The songs are linked by orchestral interludes and played without pause, resulting in a dramatic progression from (to quote Mr. Schiavo again) “yearning and desire to a peak of romantic union, then on to the bittersweet inevitability of parting.”

Or, to quote an Irving Berlin lyric from just two years before Zemlinsky’s composition, “After You Get What You Want You Don’t Want It.”

Alexander Zemlinsky

This is really rather impressive music. Zemlinksy combines opulent and colorful orchestration—it calls for a typically massive, stage-filling post-Wagnerian ensemble and uses it creatively—with an almost Classical sense of organization. Each of the soloists gets a song of longing, a song of fulfillment, and a song parting, after which the baritone wraps it all up with “Friede, Mein Herz” (“Peace, My Heart”), which suggests the kind of calm resignation one hears at the end of the Schubert “Unfinished.” The orchestral interludes smoothly manage the transitions between songs, and there’s even a bit of “cyclic form” with the “yearning” motif that opens the work returning, transformed, in the instrumental postlude.

Ms. Brewer and Mr. Meachem both have substantial operatic experience, so it’s not surprise that their performances captured the full emotional range of the songs. They both worked from scores (although Mr. Meachem seemed to refer to his less often), but I never had the sense that they weren’t fully in command of their roles.

Mr. Meachem impressed me with his musical and dramatic skills the last time he sang with the symphony (in their May 2008 Carmina Burana) and he did so again Sunday. Ms. Brewer’s voice was strong and clear as usual and, like Mr. Meachem, she was fully in command of the text. Mr. Robertson held Zemlinsky’s big, complex infrastructure together nicely and the musicians performed with their customary skill. There was some exceptionally fine playing from the horns, most notably in the third song, “Du Bist die Abendwolke” (“You Are the Evening Cloud”) and a lovely violin and cello duet for Concertmaster David Halen and Principal Cello Daniel Lee leading into the fourth song.

The concert opened with an appropriately smile-inducing performance of Franz von Suppé’s overture for the 1844 farce Ein Morgen, Mittag und Abend in Wien (Morning, Noon and Night in Vienna), featuring a lovely solo from Mr. Lee. It’s part of a collection of incidental music for the play, none of which is ever heard these days.

Suppé is a classic example of the composer who achieved fame and fortune in his lifetime, only to slide into obscurity afterwards. Although he wrote thirty operettas and hundreds of other works, mostly for the stage, Suppé is represented these days almost entirely by a handful of overtures—at least on this side of the Atlantic. Some of his operas still see the light of day in Europe, particularly in his native Austria. Fortunately his Requiem and some of his stage works are available on CD for those curious as to what the rest of his music sounds like.

Next on the calendar: David Robertson concludes the regular concert season May 9-12 with an unusual musical mix: Bruckner’s motet Christus Factus Est, Act III of Berg’s disturbing Wozzeck, and Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9. Soloists are Susanna Phillips, soprano; Kelley O'Connor, mezzo-soprano; Joseph Kaiser, tenor; and Corey McKern, baritone. Performances are Thursday through Saturday at 8 and Sunday at 3. For ticket information: stlsymphony.org.

TPTBT (The Place to Be Tonight): Friday, May 3

Christine Brewer

Share on Google+:

Who: The St. Louis Symphony Orchestra conducted by David Robertson with soloists Christine Brewer (soprano), and Lucas Meachem (baritone)
What: Music of Suppé, Schubert, and Zemlinsky
Where: Powell Symphony Hall
When: Tonight and Saturday night at 8 and Sunday at 3
Why: "Full of exotic themes, heartfelt yearning and wild freedom, Zemlinsky’s Lyric Symphony receives its STL Symphony premiere with phenomenal soprano Christine Brewer. Paired with the stunning melodies and warming glow of Schubert’s “Unfinished” Symphony, this concert will leave your spirits soaring." The local premiere of Zemlinksi's remarkable seven-movement symphony/song cycle (first performed in 1924) will probably be reason enough to attend this concert series for many music lovers. The fact that one of the soloists is our own Christine Brewer is just icing on the cake. In addition, Maestro Robertson will conduct an informal Q&A on the orchestra level after the concert.  The concert opens with the lively overture to Suppé's Morning, Noon, and Night in Vienna.

Download the program notes!

In sunshine or in shadow

Christine Brewer

Who: Soprano Christine Brewer and The St. Louis Symphony Orchestra conducted by David Robertson
What: Music of Dvořák, George Crumb, and Richard Strauss
Where: Powell Symphony Hall, St. Louis
When: January 13 and 14, 2012

Darkness was audible at the Saint Louis Symphony Orchestra this weekend with a slightly rocky but satisfying Dvořák Seventh Symphony and a uniformly elegiac Four Last Songs with Christine Brewer. George Crumb's whimsical Haunted Landscape was a contrasting kaleidoscopic light show.

As an accompaniment to the few brief days of seasonal weather this winter, the program could not have been more appropriate.

Dvořák’s Symphony No. 7 has always been a favorite of mine, for reasons that are difficult to articulate. I can’t hear it without thinking of a long journey down a dark mountain river. Flashes of light illuminate the trip, but we don’t see the sun until the work’s final moments, when the tonality changes from D minor to D major.

Maintaining a strong rhythmic pulse and a sense of momentum, then, have always been the hallmarks of a great Dvořák 7th for me, especially in the first movement. Mr. Robertson didn’t appear to be going in that direction with his somewhat magisterial approach to the opening of the first movement (this was an allegro maestoso with the emphasis on the maestoso), but by the time we got the to development his approach had built up enough dramatic tension that I was largely won over. The beautifully wrought Poco adagio second movement (with some exceptionally fine playing by the woodwinds) and driving Scherzo completed the process, nicely paving the way for a crackling dynamo of a final movement. When that D-major sun finally rose, all I needed was a set of shades.

That said, the orchestral playing was a bit ragged in spots during the Dvořák — rather surprising given the ensemble’s usual polish. My guess (and it’s only that) is that it got less rehearsal time because of the complexity of the 1984 George Crumb work that had its local premiere Friday night.

Based on the title, you might think A Haunted Landscape would be another exercise in musical shadow. Not a bit of it. As the composer explains on his web site, the title “reflects my feeling that certain places on the planet Earth are imbued with an aura of mystery.” “Places,” he notes, “can inspire feelings of reverence or of brooding menace (like the deserted battlefields of ancient wars).”

To reflect those varied moods, Mr. Crumb assembled a score that is not so much music in the conventional sense as it is a sound collage that uses music as an element. The orchestral forces are huge, consisting not only the usual strings and a full complement of winds but of a massive percussion battery as well. One of the delights of Haunted Landscape, in fact, is watching the skill with which the percussionists handle a wide variety of exotic items such as Cambodian angklungs, Japanese Kabuki blocks, the Brazilian cuica, the Appalachian hammered dulcimer, and a piano struck, plucked, and generally manhandled in the style of John Cage or Conlon Nancarrow.

Haunted Landscape, in other words, is a kind of musical theme park. There’s a little bit of everything here: Ivesian string chorales set against orchestral cacophony, moments of breathtaking stillness alternating with aggressive outbursts of brass and percussion, and a stunning array of unusual and even unearthly sounds from all those percussion instruments, some of them so subtle (e.g. stroking cymbals with string instrument bows) that they barely break what Johann Friedrich Herbart called the “limen of consciousness”.

I don’t know whether I’d want to own this piece, but it was certainly fun to hear it, especially when performed with such precision — an impressive feat, considering that this was the work’s St. Louis premiere. I can’t imagine how many hours of rehearsal were necessary to make this complex music funhouse work, but they certainly paid off on opening night.

I suspect that the rehearsals for Strauss’s Four Last Songs, on the other hand, were like a reunion of old friends. It has been less than five years since soprano soloist Christine Brewer and Mr. Robertson performed these moving contemplations on mortality that were the composer’s final utterances before his death in 1949. Both the conductor and orchestra clearly have a great deal of affection for Ms. Brewer, a hometown gal who has made it big in the opera and concert world, and she clearly feels the same way about them. Her demeanor was more that of a featured ensemble player than a soloist, listening attentively to the orchestra and, in particular, to Concertmaster David Halen’s meltingly beautiful violin solo during the third song, “Beim Schlafengehen” (“Going to Sleep”).

In a post on the symphony blog last week, Eddie Silva quoted a friend of his to the effect that Four Last Songs “is one of the few works that often sounds better on recording, because it calls for such vocal subtlety that few singers can perform it appropriately in a concert hall”. I agree, but for a different reason. Despite the delicacy of much of the scoring there’s no escaping the fact that all four of these songs, like most of Strauss’s other works, call for a large orchestra. I think it’s a challenge, even for a Wagner and Strauss specialist of Ms. Brewer’s caliber, to be heard clearly over that many players while remaining true to the elegiac tone of the music. And, in fact, from our seats in the dress circle boxes she was often overwhelmed by the orchestra. You can compensate for that in the studio or in a live broadcast.

Balance issues aside, though, Ms. Brewer’s voice was as lovely as ever. From a purely theatrical perspective, I would have preferred to see more differentiation among the narrative voices in the songs. Granted, they all deal with death, but they do it in very different ways. The audience as a whole clearly had no such reservations, however, awarding all concerned with a standing ovation and earning the process a charming encore: Strauss’s “Morgen!” (“Tomorrow!”). Composed to a text by John Henry Mackay when Strauss was a young man of 30, it was a perfect choice, nicely balancing the somber resignation of all that had gone before.

Next at Powell Hall: violinist Christian Tetzlaff joins Maestro Robertson and the orchestra for Sibelius’s Violin Concerto on Saturday at 8 PM and Sunday at 3 PM, January 21 and 22. Also on the program is the Prelude to Act I of Wagner’s Parsifal and John Adams’s Harmonium with the Symphony Chorus. For more information you may call 314-534-1700, visit stlsymphony.org, like the Saint Louis Symphony Facebook page, or follow @slso on Twitter.

Move heaven and earth - but slowly

Mezzo Kelley O'Connor
Photo by Dario Acosta

Who: The St. Louis Symphony Orchestra and Chorus
What: Barber’s Prayers of Kierkegaard and Mahler’s Symphony No. 2 (“Resurrection”)
Where: Powell Symphony Hall, St. Louis
When: April 8 through 10, 2011

The ranting of wealthy and powerful fundamentalists and their political and media enablers aside, there’s no getting around the fact that the central message of Christianity is one of mercy, forgiveness, compassion, and love. This weekend’s St. Louis Symphony concerts offered a pair of powerful musical reminders of that message. The fact that one came from the pen of an Austrian Jew who converted to Catholicism out of professional expediency and the other from a gay American man is probably another illustration of how outsiders often see the truth more clearly than members of the tribe.

The big draw for these concerts, of course, was the Symphony No. 2 (“Resurrection”) by Gustav Mahler. For me, however, the most compelling moments came from Samuel Barber’s rarely heard Prayers of Kierkegaard from 1954. A setting for large orchestra, chorus, and multiple soloists (soprano, alto, and tenor) of four of the many original prayers by Christian existentialist philosopher Søren Kierkegaard (1813 – 1855), Prayers pays homage to both Gregorian monophony and Baroque polyphony while remaining true to Barber’s late-Romantic musical language. It’s a fascinating and complex piece that makes a convincing case for Kierkegaard’s emphasis on the primacy of each individual’s experience of Divine love, without the clutter of organized religion.

Under the baton of David Robertson, the orchestra and chorus delivered a rock-solid performance. The choral writing sounded complex and tricky, which made the clarity and enunciation with which it was sung that much more impressive. The soloists – soprano Christine Brewer, alto Debby Lennon, and tenor Keith Boyer – all did fine work, although Ms. Brewer seemed a bit uncomfortable in her lower register.

This is only the second time the symphony has undertaken this remarkable work and the first time under Mr. Robertson’s direction. I hope he felt as much satisfaction conducting this performance as I did hearing it.

The Mahler was, I’m sorry to say, somewhat less satisfying. The “Resurrection” Symphony has long been a favorite of mine, going back to my first encounter with the classic Otto Klemperer recording from early 1960s. A kind of Mahler multivitamin, the “Resurrection” contains all the key elements of the Viennese master’s work: moments of chamber-music delicacy alternating with massive orchestral outbursts, vulgar marches, lilting Ländler, a darkly comic scherzo, and passages of sublime beauty, and an ecstatic choral finale of overwhelming power. And yet, in the musical equivalent of alchemy, Mahler's sense of architecture somehow transmutes it all in to a single, unified work that brilliantly encompasses the themes of death, rebirth, and transcendence.

Personally, I missed the transcendence. As was his wont that last time he conducted this work (in 2007), Mr. Robertson favored a loving emphasis on orchestral details coupled with tempi that were somewhere between slow and plodding. Individual moments (especially in the second movement) took on a crystalline clarity as a result, but so did the joins in Mahler’s somewhat episodic musical architecture. The work came to a complete standstill far too often for me, I’m afraid, despite first-rate work from all the performers.

Christine Brewer, looking and sounding revived and re-energized, once again served as soprano soloist, backed up by mezzo Kelley O’Connor – utterly compelling in the “Urlicht” (“Primal Light”) setting that begins the symphony’s fourth movement. Amy Kaiser’s Symphony Chorus sounded splendid once again.

In brief remarks before the symphony began, Ms. Kaiser noted that this weekend’s performances were dedicated to the late Richard Ashburner, long a member and supporter of the chorus. Their work was a fitting tribute to their former colleague.

A great Mahler 2nd – such as the one Leonard Slatkin did with the SLSO back in 1982 (happily still available on CD) – never fails to move me to tears in those final glorious moments of spiritual rebirth. This one left me impressed with the virtuosity of the players and clarity of Mr. Robertson’s artistic vision, but it left me dry-eyed as well.

Next up on the symphony schedule: Maestro Robertson conducts Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 10 and Tchaikovsky’s ever popular Piano Concerto No. 1, with Yefim Bronfman at the keyboard April 15 through 17. For more information, you may call 314-534-1700, visit slso.org, or follow @slso on Twitter.