Symphony Preview: The Light Fantastic

This Saturday and Sunday, January 10 and 11, Stéphane Denève leads the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra in what the web site describes as “a program that celebrates powerful partnerships between dance and music.” A good summary, that, given that three of the four works on the program are actual ballets and the fourth eventually became the basis for a ballet by Jerome Robbins, albeit over three decades later.

Dancer Sergio Camacho in
St. Louis Dance Theatre’s 
Way Out West. Photo courtesy of the SLSO.

The work in question was the Concerto in E-flat major, "Dumbarton Oaks," written by Igor Stravinsky (1882–1971) in 1937–38 on commission for Robert Woods Bliss and Mildred Barnes Bliss in celebration of their 30^th wedding anniversary. The first performance was in May, 1938, at a private concert at their Dumbarton Oaks estate in the Georgetown neighborhood of Washington, D.C. It’s a bright and cheerful work, heavily influenced by the Bach Brandenburg Concertos, especially the Concerto No. 3.

As the composer recalled later:

I played Bach very regularly during the composition of the concerto, and I was greatly attracted to the Brandenburg Concertos. Whether or not the first theme of my first movement is a conscious borrowing from the third of the Brandenburg set, however, I do not know. What I can say is that Bach would most certainly have been delighted to loan it to me; to borrow in this way was exactly the sort of thing he liked to do.

No doubt, although I expect Bach would have found the astringent harmonies and constantly changing time signatures a bit weird.

The concerto follows the general format of its 18th-century inspiration, with two fast movements framing a slower Allegretto second movement. Themes are lobbed back and forth among the members of the small ensemble like the ball in a fast-paced game of tennis and there's even a very traditional fugue at the end of the first movement. The score directs all three movements to be played attacca (without pause), separated by only a series of more solemn chords to signal a break in the emotional tone.

The entire piece runs around 12 to 16 minutes. It's fun to hear but difficult to play and gives all the musicians a chance to test their mettle. The members of the SLSO passed that test with flying colors when the work was presented as part of its digital concert series in March and April 2021.

Up next is the suite Stravinsky prepared in 1922 from the score for his 1920 ballet Pulcinella. Commissioned by the eccentric entrepreneur Sergei Diaghilev, for whose Ballets Russes de Monte Carlo Stravinsky had composed his previous hits The Firebird and Le Sacre du Printemps, the ballet drew its visual inspiration from 17th-century Neapolitan commedia dell’arte characters in general and the titular character in particular.

Stravinsky’s score takes the form of a collection of sprightly pastiches on tunes by the short-lived (1710–1736) Italian Baroque composer Giovanni Battista Draghi (a.k.a. Giovanni Battista Pergolesi after his birthplace in Pergola). Later research would reveal that many of them were the result of historical misattributions, but since Stravinsky put his own personal stamp on all of them, it probably matters only to scholars these days. Stravinsky’s full score consists of 21 numbers, including several songs. The composer’s suite includes only eight of those numbers (and none of the songs), but they’re all winners.

The SLSO last performed the Pulcinella Suite in May 2021, but this weekend the experience will be very different. That’s because the orchestra has teamed up with St. Louis Dance Theatre and its Artistic Director Kirven Douthit-Boyd to create a new ballet based on the eight movements of the suite. In an article on the SLSO web site by Iain Shaw, Douthit-Boyd talks about his process in designing the ballet, which is inspired in part by Powell Hall’s origins as a vaudeville theatre.

“It’s kind of paying homage to that,” he said. The idea of a performance troupe coming through St. Louis gave him the impetus to start creating. “I’ve used each of the sections to highlight the dancers in different ways.”

In program notes for the 2021 performance, Denève said that Stravinsky “captures the spirit of several 18th-century composers and others in Pulcinella. He treats them with such respect, creating such tender and charming music.”

The second half of the concert is dedicated entirely to 20th-century French music for the ballet, beginning with the rarely heard score by Claude Debussy (1862–1918) for his 1913 ballet Jeux. It would prove to be one of his last orchestral works as the cancer that would kill him in 1918 began to tax his strength.

In his 2018 book Debussy: a Painter in Sound, Stephen Walsh describes Debussy as a composer for whom visual elements were central to his music and who in his spare time was more likely to be found at the Louvre than the Opera. He was a close friend of painter Henry Lerolle and was very taken with the work of Edgar Degas and Pierre-Auguste Renoir.

This is important not just because Jeux is a ballet but also because the scenario is primarily a set of somewhat static images of two girls and a boy in tennis outfits flirting with each other while supposedly playing tennis. Sergei Daighliev first approached Debussy with the idea in June 1912. The choreographer would be the legendary Vasily Nijinsky who had just scored a major hit in Debussy’s Prélude d’après-midi d’un faune the month before.

The composer’s first response, in a telegram, was “Subject ballet Jeux idiotic, not interested,” but Diaghilev doubled the fee and the deal was done.

One the surface the scenario, such as it is, is as straightforward as it is banal. As described in Walsh’s book, the titular games take place in or near a tennis court. Léon Baskt’s set for the premiere was a densely tree-lined London square. The curtain rises on an empty stage. A ball bounces on to the stage followed by a young man leaping across the stage in a tennis outfit. Two young girls appear and a series of flirtations follows, first between the young man and each of the girls in turn, then among all three of them. It culminates in “a kiss of disturbingly ecstatic intensity” at which point another tennis ball bounces on to the stage “like a passing policeman” and the players flee. After that an airplane was supposed to crash land on the stage, but Debussy apparently made removing that one of the requirements of accepting the commission.

But, as Nijinsky later wrote in his diary, tennis was just a cover for a much older game. Jeux, he wrote, “is the life of which Diaghilev dreamed…he wanted to make love to two boys at the same time and wanted those boys to make love to him. In the ballet the two girls represent the two boys and the young man is Diaghilev. I changed the characters, as love between three men could not be represented on the stage.”

When Diaghilev talked to Debussy, though, it was about the way he wanted the music to reflect a particular style of dancing. He wanted all three dancers to spend a lot of time en point—that is, on their toes—to create a feeling of lightness and elegance. Debussy jokingly said that “I’ll have to find an orchestra ‘without feet’ for this music. I’m thinking of that orchestral color that seems lit from behind.”

That footless orchestra announces itself so softly in the opening bars of Jeux that the opening bars might have been hard to hear for the First Nighters. The dynamic doesn’t rise above piano until a sforzando and a few fortissimo bars mark the entrance of the  tennis ball at around rehearsal number 8 (bar 70 or so). For the rest of the ballet forte markings are rare until the flirtation becomes heavier in the last several minutes.

Jeux is familiar territory for Denève, who recorded it with the Royal Scottish National Orchestra as part of an all-Debussy two-disc set for Chandos in 2012. At the time he was Music Director of the orchestra—his first such appointment and a big step up for a young conductor. During his tenure, which ended in 2011, he led the RSNO at the 2006 Proms concerts in London, and for the orchestra's first ever appearance in France in 2007. He would go on to conduct the Stuttgart Radio Symphony Orchestra (among others) before taking charge of the SLSO in 2019.

Finally, we have the Suite No. 2 from Bacchus et Ariane, op. 43 by Albert Roussel (1869–1937).  A relatively solitary and independent figure, probably due to the loss of his parents and grandparents before he turned ten, Roussel was influenced by both Impressionism and Neo-classicism. He absorbed those trends into his own personal style, which Nicolle Labelle (in Grove Online) describes as “harmonically spiced and rhythmically vigorous.”

Although not one of France’s better known musical sons, Roussel is a favorite of Denève, who recorded all of his symphonies with the RSNO for Naxos back in 2010. His performance of Roussel’s Symphony No. 3 with the SLSO in 2020 was enough to convince me that his admiration for the composer is fully justified. Composed in the same year as that symphony, the music for Bacchus et Ariane has a strong rhythmic drive and an appropriately Bacchanalian climax.

In this version of the story of Ariadne (Ariane in French), the spurned lover of the ungrateful Theseus, abandoned on the isle of Naxos, is about to throw herself into the sea when the god Bacchus intervenes. “Shall we dance,” he asks (anticipating Rodgers and Hammerstein by millennia). She accepts, the bacchantes join in, and (in the words of the noted musicologist Nicolas Slonimsky), “the ballet ends in a triumph of Ariadne as the consort of the god of wine.”

I’ll drink to that.

The Essentials: the regular concert series resumes as Stéphane Denève conducts the SLSO in music by Stravinsky, Debussy, and Albert Roussel. The orchestra will accompany St. Louis Dance Theatre and choreographer Kirven Douthit-Boyd in an “adventurous collaboration to imagine Stravinsky’s Pulcinella Suite in an entirely new way. Also on the program are Stravinsky’s Dumbarton Oaks Concerto, Debussy’s ballet Jeux, and the Suite No. 2 from Roussel’s ballet Bacchus et Ariane. Performances are Saturday at 7:30 pm and Sunday at 3 pm, January 10 and 11, in Powell Symphony Hall.

The Saturday concert will be broadcast live on St. Louis Public Radio and on Classic 107.3. Classic 107.3 is also where you can hear Tom Sudholt and yours truly host the Symphony Preview episode about the concert on Wednesday, January 7, from 8 to 10 pm as well as via on-demand streaming beginning on Thursday, January 8.

Symphony Preview: Stereophonic sound and other enhancements.

Akiko Suwanzi
Photo: Kiyotaka Saito

This Friday and Saturday, March 21 and 22, Stéphane Denève returns to conduct the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra (SLSO) in a program titled Bernstein and Williams: Cinematic Visions. That would be Leonard and John, respectively. Therefore, I would like to open this preview with a song:

That number is from the 1957 film version of Cole Porter’s 1955 musical Silk Stockings, which was based on the 1939 non-musical movie Ninotchka. It goes to show that the Broadway/Hollywood barrier has never been all that impermeable.

The song pokes fun at what was, at the time, the cutting-edge technology of stereo sound in cinemas. It was but one of a number of technological changes in movies that included widescreen filming (CinemaScope and its successors) and enhanced color (Technicolor, Metrocolor, etc.). These days, when you can get surround sound and high definition color in your living room, this might all seem a bit quaint, but it was a big deal Back in the Day.

The evening begins and ends with music based on film scores. Kicking things off is the yearning, romantic theme John Williams (b. 1932) composed for the 1996 movie Seven Years in Tibet, featuring a solo cello line that’s deeply infused with Essence of Erhu. Yo-Yo Ma played that in the film soundtrack. This weekend Yo-Yo Ma will be played by the SLSO’s own Yin Xiong.

Up next is the US debut of the 2018 violin concerto Les Horizons Perdus (Lost Horizons) by contemporary French composer Guillaume Connesson (b. 1970). The concerto’s connection to the “Cinematic Visions” concept is a bit tangential since it was inspired by James Hilton’s 1933 novel Lost Horizon rather than Frank Capra’s classic 1937 film or (heaven forfend) the 1973 musical film. Its four movements capture the contrast between the tranquil utopia of Shangri-La and the hectic quotidian world. “More than the illustration of a fanciful narrative,” writes Connesson, “it is this division and radical opposition between the active life and the perfection of the inner life that constitute the basis of my work” (“Plus que d’illustrer une narration Romanesque, c’est ce déchirement et cette opposition radicale entre la vie active et l’absolu de la vie intérieure qui constituent la trame de mon oeuvre”).

The first movement, “Premier voyage,” is a cacophonous and aggressive depiction of that world, with brief lyrical moments reflecting the desire to find a bit of calm amidst the noise

“Shangri-La 1 – Deuxième voyage” (the linked second and third movements) consists of a brief glimpse of the tranquility of the utopian Shangri-La followed by an exuberant dance-cum-chase scene suggesting the brief departure from and return to the Himalayan paradise.

The start of that journey is where the novel ends, leaving it unclear as to whether the protagonist finds his way back to Shangri-La. Connesson leaves no doubt about it with the final movement, “Shangri-La 2” (hence the title change from singular to plural). It’s the mirror image of the first movement—a slow, meditative mix of the sublime and the nostalgic. “At the end,” writes the composer, “a new theme appears for muted violin, which sings with an infinite tenderness of rediscovered ties with childhood” ("À la fin, un nouveau thème apparaît au violon en sourdine, qui chante avec une infinie tendresse les liens retrouvés avec l’enfance").

Denève has expressed his admiration for Connesson’s music and has programmed several of his works in previous seasons. He conducted the Brussels Philharmonic in the world premiere performance with soloist Renaud Capuçon, so between him and this weekend’s soloist—Tchaikovsky Competition winner Akiko Suwanai—the music will be in good hands.

There’s an intermission between the sublime finale of Horizons Perdus and the raucous opening of An American Port of Call by Adolphus Hailstork (b. 1941). Inspired by Norfolk,Virginia—the city he calls home—the title of the work is both a tip of the hat to the suite Escales (Ports of Call) by Jacques Ibert and a portrait of, in the composer’s words, “a bustling American port city.”

But don’t take my word for it. Here’s what Hailstork himself has to say:

To me, An American Port of Call bears more than a passing resemblance to another orchestral work about a bustling port city (or at least an etching of one by Thomas Rowlandson): Portsmouth Point by William Walton (1902–1983). Here, in any case, is the celebrated American conductor JoAnn Faletta and the Virginia Symphony Orchestra delivering a slam-bang performance of An American Port of Call. Enjoy!

The program’s big finish (just before the closing credits, including several thousand digital animators) is the 1955 suite Leonard Bernstein (1918–1990) assembled from his score for the 1954 Oscar-winning crime drama about corrupt labor unions, On the Waterfront. The composer “initially resisted accepting the commission for the score,” writes musicologist William Runyan, due to his “deep antipathy for the director, Elia Kazan.” He was notably outraged at Kazan’s cooperation with Sen. Joseph McCarthy’s anti-leftist witch hunts and his participation in the infamous Hollywood Blacklist, which destroyed many careers and lives.

Not coincidentally, the script was written by Budd Schulberg and starred Lee J. Cobb—both of whom also collaborated with McCarthy.

Bernstein was also less than thrilled about the way his music was treated in the editing process—which is probably why On the Waterfront was his first and last soundtrack.

“And so the composer sits by,” Bernstein wrote in a May 30, 1954, article for the New York Times, “protesting as he can, but ultimately accepting, be it with a heavy heart, the inevitable loss of a good part of the score. Everyone tries to comfort him. ‘You can always use it in a suite.’ Cold comfort. It is good for the picture, he repeats numbly to himself: it is good for the picture.”

The suite has, in any case, been critically praised for the way in which it weaves together themes from the original score into a twenty-minute distillation of the original story. As critic Mark Swed wrote in the Los Angeles Times, Bernstein “wrenched his atmospheric themes into something far grander, a symphonic suite.” Listen to the composer’s own performance with the New York Philharmonic and see if you don’t agree.

And, of course, the full playlist for the concert is available on Spotify.

The Essentials: Stéphane Denève conducts the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra, along with soloists Yin Xiong (cello) and Akiko Suwanai (violin) in music by John Williams, Guillaume Connesson, Adolphus Hailstork, and Leonard Bernstein. Performances are Friday at 10:30 am and Saturday at 7:30 pm, March 21 and 22, at the Touhill Performing Arts Center. The Saturday evening performance will be broadcast live on St. Louis Public Radio and Classic 107.3 and will be available for streaming late the following week at the SLSO web site

Symphony Review: Doing right by D

Lately, circumstances have conspired to delay the composition of these reviews. The downside of that is that anything I didn’t make a note of at the concert has gone down the old memory hole. The upside is that it gives me time to reflect on what I saw and heard. Sometimes temporal distance lends enchantment, sometimes not.

The St. Louis Symphony Orchestra concerts last Saturday and Sunday (January 25 and 26) definitely went up on the enchantment scale. There were only two works on the program: the Violin Concerto in D major, Op. 61, by Ludwig van Beethoven (1770–1827), paired with another uncompromising essay in D major, the Symphony No. 1 by Gustav Mahler (1860–1911).

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

Stéphane Denève conducts
Photo by Virginia Harold

Both works left audiences and many critics a bit nonplussed at their premieres. Both were widely regarded as too long, too complex, and just too darned non-traditional. Both have since been redeemed by history.

One big complaint about Beethoven’s concerto back in 1806 was that its first movement, which clocks in at around 25 minutes, was longer than most concertos in their entirety. Audiences found the expanded symphonic structure difficult to follow, and in all fairness, Beethoven did push the recognized boundaries of the form to their limits. Until his past weekend, I often felt the same way.

Stéphane Denève and soloist James Ehnes made me see the piece differently this time around. I found myself completely captivated, and not just by that first movement. The entire concerto unfolded in a panoply of drama, romance, and in the Rondo (Allegro) finale, bumptious fun. Ehnes completely nailed the daunting octaves of the violin’s entrance and displayed a wide dynamic and emotional range throughout the work. 

Beethoven left room for two cadenzas in the concerto, with the result that the soloist has a plethora of choices, including (as Anthony Marwood did here in 2019) improvising his own. Ehnes chose cadenzas by the great violinist/composer Fritz Kreisler (1875–1962), and while they’re clearly products of a later era, they nevertheless effectively complement the concerto’s early 19th century esthetics. Ehnes played them and the rest of the concerto with the mix of flash and finesse I have seen him display in previous appearances with the SLSO. 

He cuts a more conservative figure on stage than some violin virtuosi, but there was plenty of passion and joy in his actual performance. The audience apparently agreed. Ehnes responded to their ovation with a quiet contrast to the finale of the concerto: the third movement (Largo) from the Violin Sonata No. 3, BWV 1005, by Bach.

Violinist James Ehnes
Photo by B Ealovega

Equally impressive was Denève’s interpretation of the work overall. This was a performance with a strong sense of momentum, beautifully shaped and with lucidity that gave me the sense of hearing and “seeing” Beethoven’s architecture more clearly than I had in the past.

He brought that same sense of clarity to his reading of Mahler’s Symphony No. 1. Like Beethoven’s concerto, Mahler’s symphony—originally billed as a five-movement “symphonic poem”—was poorly received at its 1889 premiere with Mahler himself conducting the Budapest Philharmonic. 

Multiple revisions followed. The final four-movement version, now labeled as the Symphony No. 1, was premiered in Berlin in 1896. That’s the version commonly performed today and the one we heard last weekend.

And a wonderful performance it was, too. The mysterious opening, emerging (miraculously) from near-complete silence, commanded attention from the start and made the statement of the main theme (adapted from Mahler’s song “Ging heut’ morgen über’s Feld”) that much more effective. The second movement was cheerfully bucolic, the mood aided by the way the low strings leaned into the first beat of their accompaniment of the Austrian ländler melody.

The third movement funeral march, with its fugal treatment of a minor-key version of a tune better known as “Frère Jacques,” dripped with that mix of sarcasm and schmaltz that made my jaw drop when I first heard it back in the 1960s. It ended as it began, pianissimo, followed after the shortest of pauses (per the composer’s instructions in the score) by the fortissimo “all hell breaks loose” opening for the fourth movement.

This was powerful stuff, with the usual high standard of playing by members of the orchestra. Mahler’s sonic canvases may be massive, but they’re filled with marvelous details that allow soloists and ensembles to shine. Examples from last Saturday’s performance include Principal Oboe Jelena Dirks, Principal Bassoon Andrew Cuneo, and Principal Bass Erik Harris in the third movement; the offstage trumpets in the eerie opening; and the eight (count ‘em, eight!) horns in the finale standing, and per Mahler’s instructions, playing loudly enough to drown out the trumpets (“Die Hörner Alles, auch die Trompeten ũbertönen”).

That’s rock ‘n’ roll, baby!

Symphony Preview: Sous le ciel de Paris

This weekend (November 15 and 16) Stéphane Denève conducts the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra in the second of two programs devoted almost entirely to the music of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756–1791). It’s all Mozart all the time—except for the 12 minutes or so that will be Anna Clyne (b. 1980).

[Preview the music with the SLSO's Spotify playlist.]

An English-born composer now residing in the USA, Clyne’s name is one that should be familiar to SLSO regulars. The orchestra has played a number of her works over the last decade or so, usually to appreciative (and well-deserved) applause. In fact, the Clyne work we’ll hear this weekend was the first of her compositions that the SLSO played.

That work is “Within Her Arms” for string orchestra. Written as an elegy for the death of the Clyne’s mother in 2008, the piece is (as I wrote back then) a kind of memory play. Its somewhat mysterious music, which at times seems to harken back to Vaughn Williams or even Thomas Tallis, rises from a whisper to a roar before finally fading away, slowly, into nothingness. “The rest,” as Hamlet says, “is silence.”

Anna Clyne
Photo by Christina Kernohan courtesy of the SLSO

“Within Her Arms” is the only work on the program that’s missing from the SLSO’s Spotify playlist. Which is a bit surprising since there’s quite a splendid performance of it there by the adventurous chamber orchestra The Knights. When you listen to the SLSO’s playlist, just pause it and play “Within Her Arms” right before Mozart’s Symphony No. 31 (“Paris”) for the full effect.

The concerts open with Mozart’s Symphony No. 1 in E-flat major, K. 16, penned when Mozart was eight years old and known primarily as a piano prodigy. It’s a modest and charming three-movement piece that sounds more like work of Johann Christian Bach (1735–1782) than Mozart. Still the somewhat enigmatic second movement does include, according to the anonymous program annotator for the Kamuela Philharmonic Society Orchestra, “a four-note motif that also appears in several later Mozart compositions, including his Symphony No. 33, and the finale of his Jupiter Symphony.” And it does end with a jolly little Presto.

Up next is the more substantial Piano Concerto No. 20 in D minor, K. 466. It was, I believe, last presented by the SLSO in 2017, at which time I described it as engrossing, menacing, and filled with the kind of high drama that audiences would come to love so much in the ensuing decades of the 19th century. Beethoven, for one, loved this concerto, performing it often and composing two cadenzas for it, Mozart's own having been lost to history. It is, in fact, sufficiently "modern" for its time that Viennese audiences might have been put off by it, had it not been the work of a man who was at the peak of popularity.

Mozart, age 6
Painter unknown

The soloist this weekend will be the talented young (born in 1990) pianist Behzod Abduraimov. I last saw him in 2018 when he played the Grieg Concerto with Gemma New on the podium. At the time, I praised the ideal mix of technical flash and sensitivity in his performance. Which bodes well for this weekend.

Next, it’s the overture to Mozart’s early opera “Mitridate, re di Ponto” (“Mithridates, King of Pontus”), which is filled with engaging tunes that belie the work’s tragic finale. First performed at the Teatro Regio Ducale in Milan, it was something of a hit despite the fact that the composer was only 14. Mozart’s more mature operas have overshadowed it since then and revivals are rare.

The concerts will close with the Symphony No. 31 in D Major, K.297 (300a) ("Paris") composed in the City of Light in June, 1778. Mozart and his ailing mother Anna Maria had arrived there after a concert tour in search of additional professional opportunities, but the pickings were slim, and the pair soon found themselves in debt. The arrival of a commission for a new symphony from Jean LeGros, the director of the high-profile Concert Spirituel, was therefore a welcome development.

The audience at the symphony's June 18th public premiere was enthusiastic, if Mozart's account is accurate. The work was interrupted by applause several times (both between and within movements) and the composer was ebullient. "I was so happy," he wrote to his father, "that as soon as the symphony was over, I went off to the Palais Royal, where I had a large ice, said the Rosary as I had vowed to do—and went home.”

His joy was short-lived. Although Anna Maria was at first invigorated by the weather and the attentions of old friends like the tenor Anton Raaff and horn player Franz Joseph Heina and his wife, even small outings tired her out. A day at the Jardin du Luxembourg with the Heinas on the 10^th left her exhausted and her health began to worsen.

Behzod Abduraimov
Photo: Evgeny Eutykhov courtesy of the SLSO

As Mozart scholar and conductor Jane Glover relates in “Mozart’s Women” (Harper-Collins, 2006), by June 26th the situation was grave enough that Mozart “was told that she should make her final confession, which she did on the 30^th. At 10:21 on the evening of 3 July, with a nurse and Heina and her beloved Wolfgang beside her, Anna Maria died.” She was only 58.

You won’t hear any of the mental anguish Mozart must have felt as he watched his mother’s health deteriorate, though, in this vigorous and graceful three-movement work. Instead, you hear the Parisian sunshine and revel in the composer’s use of what the BBC’s Tom Service calls “the biggest orchestra Mozart had used in a symphonic context.” Service’s article includes an excellent analysis of the piece, in fact, and I highly recommend it as a bit of pre-concert reading.

The Essentials: The SLSO’s Mozart celebration concludes this weekend (Friday and Saturday, November 15 and 16, at 7:30 pm) with Mozart’s Symphony No. 1 in E-flat major, Symphony No. 31 (“Paris”), and Piano Concerto No. 20 in D minor, K. 466. Behzod Abduraimov will be the soloist. Performances take place at the Touhill Performing Arts Center at the University of Missouri–St. Louis. Saturday’s concert will be broadcast live on St. Louis Public Radio and Classic 107.3.

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

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 Review: Yo Yo Ma and Stéphane Denève celebrate Elgar and Debussy

While it might seem superfluous to review the concert that was part of last Friday’s (May 3) annual St. Louis Symphony Orchestra fund-raising gala, it was such a great experience that a few words are perhaps in order.

These full-evening galas typically feature an appearance by a superstar performer and this one was no exception. World-renowned cellist and activist Yo-Yo Ma was the soloist for the Cello Concerto in E minor, Op. 85, by Edward Elgar (1857–1934). First performed in 1919, it’s a spare and, with the exception of the third movement, unsentimental work. There’s little of the kind of expansive late Romantic sound that audiences had come to expect from the composer of the “Enigma Variations” or the concert overtures “Cockaigne” and “In the South.” Poorly performed by an under-rehearsed London Symphony, the concerto got a cool reception and was not repeated in London for over a year.

Yo Yo Ma

At first blush, it seemed an odd choice for a basically celebratory evening, but Ma’s performance was so breathtakingly stellar that the wisdom of that decision quickly became clear. Ma’s sound was uniformly full and robust throughout its range, with even the faintest harmonics emerging with impressive clarity. Maestro Stéphane Denève’s introduction of Ma referred to “the diamond of his sound,” which sounds like hyperbole but was, in fact, completely accurate.

Coupled with his visible emotional commitment to the music and his close communication with both Denève and the orchestra, that sound resulted in a reading of hypnotic intensity. I have never been a great admirer of the Elgar concerto in the past, but Yo-Yo Ma and Stéphane Denève made me a believer last Friday night.

Better yet, the Elgar was preceded by a splendid performance of the popular “La Mer,” written in 1904 by Claude Debussy (1862–1918).  I missed Denève’s last performance of this in 2019, so it was an immense pleasure to see and hear it this time around. His ability to bring out the smallest orchestral details without ever losing sight of the dramatic sweep of Debussy’s brilliant musical canvas reminded me once again that when he conducts, you will hear everything. That includes elements of the music that you might never have noticed before, even if it’s a piece like “La Mer” that has become an audience favorite over the last century.

As Yo-Yo Ma pointed out while introducing his encore Friday night, one of the great things about the SLSO is that “everybody is listening…everybody cares.”

Ma went on to announce that the encore was the 1939 arrangement of the Catalan folk song “El Cant dels Ocells” (“The Song of the Birds”)—an arrangement that Casals made when he left fascist Spain, announcing that he would not play there again until Franco and his autocratic regime were gone and democracy was restored. Casals began each of his concerts with that song from then on.

It was, as Ma reminded us, Casals’ plea for peace and democracy.  The relevance to contemporary events is, I think, readily apparent.  As Ma wrote in 2018, “music, like all of culture, helps us to understand our environment, each other, and ourselves. Culture helps us to imagine a better future. Culture helps turn 'them' into 'us.' And these things have never been more important.”

The current SLSO season is officially over but post-season events continue through June, beginning Saturday, May 11 at 7:00 pm, as George Daugherty conducts the orchestra for “Bugs Bunny at the Symphony.”

I last saw this program back in 2011 and found it to be great fun. It has since been updated to include five new ’toons. The important thing is that it still includes “What’s Opera, Doc?,” “The Rabbit of Seville,” “Corny Concerto,” “Baton Bunny,” and “Long-Haired Hare.” That, all by itself, is enough to recommend it.

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

Symphony Preview: Nights and days at the opera

Summer is usually opera season here in St. Louis but this Sunday (March 3) Stéphane Denève and the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra get a jump on it with “Operatic Favorites.” It’s a collection of overtures, intermezzos, and other orchestral bonbons from operas by everyone from Claudio Monteverdi (1567–1643) to Giacomo Puccini (1858–1924). And tickets are going fast.

[Preview the music with the SLSO's Spotify playlist.]

Here's what’s on the bill of fare.

The “Toccata” that opens Monteverdi’s 1607 “L’Orfeo” is first. It’s essentially three fanfares that serve to introduce the character of La Musica (the spirit of music). She delivers a brief prologue that sets up the story, introduces Orfeo, and concludes with a poetic request for silence as the tale unfolds.  Members of the SLSO haven’t performed this since Opera Theatre presented the opera back in 1997, so a return is long overdue.

Aubrey Allicock and Monica Dewey in
The Marriage of Figaro at Opera Theatre
Photo by Eric Woolsey

Next, it’s the overture to “The Marriage of Figaro” by Wolfgang Mozart (1756–1791). It’s a lively piece that sets the musical stage very effectively for the comic scenes that open this opera, which is based on the second of the three “Figaro” comedies by the multi-talented playwright Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais (1732–1799).  

Next up is the overture to the most popular operatic version of the first “Figaro” play, “The Barber of Seville,” by Gioachino Rossini (1793–1868).  It’s lively stuff as well, even if it was made up of recycled material from two earlier operas, “Aureliano in Palmira” and “Elizabeth, Queen of England.” Of course, I can’t hear the overture these days without thinking of the classic Bugs Bunny cartoon “The Rabbit of Seville,” but maybe that’s just me.

Zoya Gramagin, Taylor P. Comstock in
Manon Lescaut at Winter Opera
Photo: ProPhotoSTL

The mood turns more dramatic with the next two selections: the “Intermezzo” from “Manon Lescaut” by Giacomo Puccini (1858–1924) and the great bel canto aria “Casta diva” (“Chaste goddess”) from “Norma” by Vincenzo Bellini (1801–1835). The former is a musical picture of the journey of Manon to the grim prison at Le Havre, where she and other courtesans are scheduled for exile in New Orleans. The latter is a plea to the moon goddess for peace by the druid priestess Norma.

Christine Lyons as Norma in
Norma at Winter Opera
Photo: Convergence Media

Sunday, the role of Norma will be played not by a soprano but instead by the instrument of Associate Principal Cellist Melissa Brooks. I’m guessing it’s the arrangement by conductor Mathieu Herzog since that’s the one that shows up most often on YouTube, but it should be in good hands in any case.

Amilcare Ponchielli (1834–1886) was an influential and popular composer in his time, but today his 1876 drama “La Gioconda” is the only one of his operas that’s still performed, and then only at big houses with deep pockets because of its many large and elaborate sets. Most of us know it by the ballet sequence we’ll hear on Sunday, the “Dance of the Hours.” This has been so successfully parodied—first by Walt Disney and then by Alan Sherman—that it might be hard to listen to it without a chuckle, but let’s all do our best, shall we?

The second half of the concert opens with another overture, this time to the 1866 opéra comique (i.e., there’s a happy ending) “Mignon” by Ambroise Thomas (1811–1896). His operas aren’t performed often these days, but the tuneful overture to “Mignon” frequently shows up in recorded collections of overtures and, of course, on programs like this one.

The cast of Carmen
Opera Theatre
Photo: Eric Woolsey

Neither George Bizet (1838–1875) nor his opera “Carmen” need an introduction. Nor, for that matter, does “Les Toréadors” from the first of the two orchestral suites that Bizet’s friend Ernest Guiraud assembled from the score. We’ll hear it this Sunday just before another work derived from Bizet’s opera that does merit a few comments: the 1883 “Carmen Fantasy” for violin and orchestra by the Spanish violinist/composer Pablo de Sarasate.

Sarasate’s skill was legendary, and this mini-concerto bristles with technical challenges, including an elaborately ornamented version of the famous “Habanera” and the insanely fast finale, based on the Act II “Danse bohème.” The last time the SLSO presented the “Carmen Fantasy” Assistant Concertmaster Erin Schreiber blew everyone away with her performance, so it’s good to see that she’ll be the soloist once again.

Finally, we close with two heaping scoops of Jacques Offenbach (1819–1880): the “Barcarolle” from his “Les contes Hoffmann” (“The Tales of Hoffman,” left unfinished at his death) and the “Galop infernal” (a.k.a. “The Can-Can”) from his first hit “Orfée aux enfers” (“Orpheus in the Underworld”) from 1858.

Yes, we have come full circle to the tale of Orpheus. But since it’s an opéra buffon (a comic opera) the myth is played for laughs. In this version, Orpheus is a violin teacher who is more than happy to be rid of his irritating wife Eurydice and has to be bullied into getting her back from Pluto. Jupiter gets involved, lightning bolts are thrown, everybody dances the Can-Can, and all ends happily.

L-R: Anthony Webb as Pittichinaccio,
Brooklyn Snow as Giulietta, and
Emma Sorenson as Nicklausse in
Les contes d'Hoffmann at Union Avenue Opera
Photo by Ron Lindsey

In 1938, French composer/conductor Manuel Rosenthal (1904–2003) assembled some of Offenbach’s Greatest Hits into “Gaîte Parisienne,” a ballet for choreographer Léonide Massine and the Ballet Russe de Monte-Carlo. This, too, has proved to be boffo both on the stage and on recordings.

The final scene of the ballet combines a brief appearance of the “Galop” along with a longer version of the “Barcarolle.” The program notes suggest that this is what we’ll be hearing Sunday, in which case you might as well check out Rosenthal’s own 1977 recording on Spotify with the Orchestre de L’Opéra de Monte-Carlo for a sneak listen.

That said, nothing on this Sunday’s program requires anything in the way of preparation. Even if you know nothing about opera, this is the kind of music that’s designed to send you off with a shine on your shoes and a melody in your heart, as the old song goes.

The Essentials: Stéphane Denève conducts the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra along with soloists Erin Schreiber (violin) and Melissa Brooks (cello) in a program of orchestral opera selections. The performance takes place at 3 pm on Sunday, March 3 at the Touhill Performing Arts Center on the University of Missouri–St. Louis campus.

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

Symphony Review: Love and death with Denève and the SLSO

Last Saturday night (February 17) Stéphane Denève took a few minutes before giving the downbeat to the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra (SLSO) to ask the audience to applaud less.

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

Sounds odd, yes? But this was not going to be your ordinary concert. Both the first and second halves of the evening consisted of pieces that were played attacca—that is, without breaks for applause. In the second half—which consisted of the wildly popular “Carmina Burana” by Carl Orff (1895–1982)—that was because the score demanded it. The first half, though, was an experiment in creating what Denève called a “virtual symphony” out of three very different works by three very different composers.

The St. Louis Symphony Chorus
Photo: Brendan Batchelor

“Life,” observes Denève in the concert’s program notes, “starts and ends with nothingness. Music is the same: from silence to silence.” True to his word, he began the concert with a long pause for silence before giving Principal Percussionist Will James the cue for the three soft strikes of the chime that begin the 1977 "Cantus in Memoriam Benjamin Britten" for strings by Arvo Pärt (b. 1935).

The violins then enter softly while the chime continues to sound, slowly increasing in volume as more strings are added. The music reaches an ecstatic climax on an A minor chord that abruptly stops, leaving only the fading overtones of the chime.

I have heard this many times on recordings, but this was my first live performance and therefore my first opportunity to appreciate what a challenge this is for the percussionist. James had to increase the intensity of each strike of the chime ever so slightly as the music gradually built to its apex over seven minutes. That required a good ear, fine muscular control, precise cueing from the conductor, and sensitive playing by the strings.

Needless to say, all of that was present on Saturday night. Denève constructed a neat bit of sonic architecture and allowed those final chime overtones to linger just long enough before plunging headlong into the sturm und drang opening of “Icarus” by contemporary Russian composer Lera Auerbach (b. 1973).

Darryl Kubian at the theremin
Photo: Virginia Harold, courtesy of the SLSO

Like its mythological Greek namesake, "Icarus" rises to great dramatic heights. It then plummets to earth in a great descending swoop of strings, accompanied by the eerie sound of the theremin and a crash of percussion. The work concludes with a quietly elegiac section that features unearthly harmonics in the strings, the gentle sounds of the celesta and harps, and a last dying note from the theremin.

Auerbach is quoted as declaring that “all my music is abstract,” but “Icarus” nevertheless is strongly evocative of its source material, and her orchestration is as inventive as it is demanding. Every section of the orchestra got a solid workout Saturday night, with the winds and percussion being kept especially busy. There were great solo moments here as well by Concertmaster David Halen, harpists Allegra Lilly and Megan Stout, and guest artist Darryl Kubian on the theremin.

The theremin, by the way, is one of those oddball instruments whose almost-human voice you’ve probably heard before in a sci-fi or suspense movie or TV show. Miklos Rozsa featured it prominently in his score for Hitchcock’s 1945 thriller “Spellbound,” for example.  Kubian gave us a brief, entertaining introduction to his instrument at the top of the evening, complete with performances of “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” and, inevitably, Alexander Courage’s “Star Trek” theme. Everything I wrote earlier about the importance of fine muscle control and a good ear goes double for the theremin, which is played by moving one’s hands and fingers in the air. So kudos to Kubian and also to Denève for a compelling reading of the score.

Like Pärt’s “Cantus,” Auerbach’s “Icarus” also returned us to silence. This time it was broken by the opening notes (bass clarinet and low brass) in the concert version of the “Liebestod” (literally “love death”) from the opera “Tristan und Isolde” by Richard Wagner (1813–1883). Here, again, we have a work that is essentially one long climax (in both the sonic and erotic sense) followed by a gentle fade to silence.

Tenor Sonnyboy Dlada

Denève’s operatic background served him well in a performance that delivered the emotional punch of that big harmonic resolution, although with just a bit less impact than I had hoped for. I’m beginning to suspect that the wider and more shallow stage space at Stifel, in combination with the hall’s somewhat dry acoustics, might make it harder to deliver the kind of visceral impact one could get at Powell. This was, in any event, another fine performance by the orchestra, with lovely solo bits from (among others) Cally Banham on English horn, Tzuying Huang on bass clarinet, and Phil Ross on oboe.

Considering how common standing ovations are at SLSO concerts, I’m a bit disappointed that more of us didn’t rise from our seats at the conclusion of Denève’s brilliantly conceived “virtual symphony.” I’m reminded of Salieri’s remark to Mozart in the film version of “Amadeus”: “Do you know you didn't even give them a good bang at the end of songs to let them know when to clap?"

There’s certainly “a good bang” at the end of “Carmina Burana,” as well as at many other points in this justifiably popular work. Based on an 1847 collection of secular poetry by anonymous authors from the 12th and 13th centuries, Orff’s “scenic cantata” celebrates not the theoretical joys of heaven but rather the practical ones of earth: food, drink, gambling, and (especially) sex.

Those poems also convey an important message for us today: the immense influence of blind chance on our lives. The opening and closing of the work, "Fortuna Imperatrix Mundi," sets the tone for this realization by reminding us that the wheel of fortune is continuously turning, and it is unwise for any of us to become overconfident.

Soprano Ying Fang

“Carmina Burana” is mostly about the soloists and the massive, percussion-heavy orchestra. This was my first opportunity to hear the SLSO Chorus and Children’s Choirs at Stifel, and I came away mightily impressed by the clarity of the sound. Both of these ensembles were in top form as usual, and Stifel’s acoustics made it easier to hear the precisely articulated multi-lingual lyrics (Latin, Middle High German, and Old Provençal) more clearly.

As for the orchestra, the big moments had plenty of impact, and the many solos sprinkled throughout the score were done quite nicely. Andrew Cuneo’s bassoon solo in "Olim lacus colueram"—a macabre little piece about a roasted swan seen from the bird's point of view—pushed both him and tenor Sonnyboy Dlada up to the top of their ranges, and they both sounded chilling. Principal Flute Matthew Roitstein had a fine duet with Principal Tympani Shannon Wood in the trio of the boisterous “Tanz.” Matthew Mazzoni and Principal Keyboard Peter Henderson were very effective, especially with their two pianos placed downstage center in front of the podium.

The vocal soloists only have a few numbers each, but those few always have a substantial impact when performed well—as they certainly were Saturday night. Baritone Thomas Lehman sang with a perfect mix of vocal power and theatrical acumen in his several solos, from the comic intoxication of the Abbot of Cockaigne in "Ego sum abbas" to the powerful mix of passion and despair in “Estuans interius.”

Soprano Ying Fang has one of those voices that seems to float effortlessly in the air, as it did with the Children’s Choir “Amor volat undique.” Her singing in the “Cour d’amours” (“Court of Love”) numbers had a subtle sensuality, both in the solos and in the duet with Lehman towards the end of the section. I think she fudged the infamous upward glissando in “Dulcissime” a bit but sang the rest of it in wonderfully coloratura style.

Baritone Thomas Lehman

I have already noted Dlada’s impressive performance of his only solo. That bit can be played for laughs (as it was by Bramwell Tovey’s “Carmina” in 2018), but it’s so much more effective when delivered with the genuine, tragic anguish that Dlada gave it.

So, yes, this was a killer “Carmina,” conducted with that ideal mix of musical sophistication and theatrical insight I have come to associate with Denève’s performances of opera-adjacent works like this and last season’s  “La damnation de Faust.” Congratulations to all concerned, including guest choral director Andrew Whitfield and Children’s Choir artistic director Alyson Moore.

Next from the SLSO: On Friday, February 23, at 7:30 pm Kevin McBeth conducts the IN UNISON Chorus along with vocalist BeBe Winans in “Lift Every Voice,” the SLSO’s annual celebration of Black History Month. On Saturday, February 24, at 7:30 pm Steve Hackman conducts the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra and vocalists Rich Saunders, Khalil Overton, Erin Bentlage in “Brahms X Radiohead.” It’s a symphonic synthesis of Radiohead’s album “OK Computer” and Johannes Brahms’ First Symphony. Both performances take place at the Stifel Theatre downtown.

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

Symphony Preview: The sounds of silence

I have often written that the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra (SLSO) Music Director Stéphane Denève knows how to use silence as a musical element. So it’s not surprising to see him saying the following in the program notes for the concerts he will conduct this weekend (February 17 and 18): “Life starts and ends with nothingness. Music is the same: from silence to silence.”

[Preview the music with the SLSO's Spotify playlist.]

We’ll hear that in the first half of the evening, in which Denève will perform three strongly contrasting works attacca (without pause)—creating in the process a single half hour of music that should range from a nearly inaudible whisper to a shriek that will blow your hair back. Assuming that, unlike me, you have hair.

Arvo Pärt
By Woesinger - Arvo Part,
CC BY-SA 2.0, Link

It all begins with the 1977 "Cantus in Memoriam Benjamin Britten" for string orchestra and chime (a.k.a. tubular bell) by Arvo Pärt (b. 1935). Composed to honor the death the previous year of the British composer, whom Pärt greatly admired for "the unusual purity of his music," the work is, like much of the contemporary Estonian composer's music, a massively complex sonic structure that still sounds very simple.

Using only the pitches of the A minor scale, the "Cantus" opens with three soft strikes of the chime, after which the strings enter softly while the chime continues to sound. The music moves slowly to an ecstatic climax on an A minor chord that abruptly stops, leaving only the fading overtones of the chime. It's simultaneously despairing and hopeful—both a dirge and a celebration.

“From silence to silence,” as Maestro Denève said. But not for long. Because the next sound you hear will be the agitated opening of “Icarus” by contemporary Russian composer Lera Auerbach (b. 1973). Based on “Humum mandere” and “Requiem for Icarus” (the last two movements of her seven-movement Symphony No. 1, “Chimera,” from 2006), this 2011 tone poem strongly evokes the tragic figure from Greek mythology whose desire to fly took him just a little too close to the sun. Like its namesake, “Icarus” rises to great dramatic heights, only to finally succumb and fall to earth in a great crash of percussion. The quietly elegiac section that concludes the work ends with the soft, eerie sound of a percussionist rubbing her moistened finger along the rim of a partially filled wine glass—a primitive version of Benjamin Franklin's glass harmonica.

Lera Auerbach
wisemusicclassical.com

Because it’s not available on Spotify, “Icarus” isn’t part of the SLSO’s playlist, but you can see it performed by Mark Wigglesworth and the National Youth Orchestra of Great Britain on YouTube at the 2019 Young Euro Festival. The recording by John Fiore and the Düsseldorf Symphony (also on YouTube) is more polished and includes the optional theremin for that extra touch of otherworldliness, but there's an urgency to the live performance that makes it hard to beat.

The theremin is presumably optional because it’s hard to find people who can master an instrument that’s played simply by moving one’s hands in the air. Fortunately, the SLSO has found composer/thereminist/violinist and AV engineer Darryl Kubian to tame that particular beast.

Like Pärt’s “Cantus,” Auerbach’s “Icarus” also returns us to silence. This time it’s broken by the bass clarinet as we begin the concert version of the “Liebestod” from the opera “Tristan und Isolde” by Richard Wagner (1813–1883). The “Liebestod” is usually performed in combination with the opera’s Act I “Prelude,” with its famous "Tristan chord."  The “Prelude” sets up a harmonic tension that isn’t resolved until nearly four hours later when Isolde, in the "Liebestod," wills herself to join her lover Tristan in death.

We have, once again, music that fades away in the end. “The rest,” as the dying Hamlet says, “is silence.”

There’s considerably less silence in the work that makes up the second half of the concert, “Carmina Burana” by Carl Orff (1895–1982). Once described by British critic Richard Osborne as “the best known new composition to emerge from Nazi Germany, ” "Carmina Burana" was something of a cult item in this country until John Boorman's 1981 epic "Excalibur" appropriated bits of it for the soundtrack. The resulting upswing in popularity was not unlike that experienced by Richard Strauss's "Also Sprach Zarathustra" (or the first two minutes of it, anyway) after the release of "2001: A Space Odyssey."

Carl Orff in 1940
By Hanns Holdt (1887-1944)
abebooks, Public Domain

Orff envisioned this material as the basis for a choral cantata with some mimed action and “magic tableaux.” And, in fact, the first performance in Frankfurt in 1937 was fully staged, with dancers, sets, and costumes. It's usually presented strictly as a concert piece these days (although the Nashville Ballet gave us an impressive staging of it in 2013), but the composer's theatrical intentions are evident in every note.

“Carmina Burana” derives its title from an 1847 collection of secular poetry by anonymous authors from the 12th and 13th centuries that turned up in 1803 in the Benedictine monastery in Beuren, Germany. As befits their “vulgar” status, the poems celebrate not the theoretical joys of heaven but rather the practical ones of earth: spring, sex, food, sex, drink, gambling, and sex. They also recognize something that we moderns have lost track of, to our detriment: the heavy influence of blind chance on our lives. The setting of “Fortuna Imperatrix Mundi” (“Fortune, Empress of the World”), which opens and closes the work, reminds us that the wheel of fortune is always turning and that none of us should get too cocky, as the universe tends to dope-slap the excessively smug.

Although "Carmina Burana" is mostly about the chorus, there are some great moments for the soloists. Highlights include "Olim lacus colueram"—a macabre little piece about a roasted swan seen from the bird's point of view—which pushes the tenor soloist up to the very top of his tessitura; “Dulcissime,” which opens with an absurdly difficult upward glissando for the soprano; and “Estuans interius,” a dramatic baritone aria that boils over with the rage and frustration of the disappointed sensualist.

The singers this week—all of whom have substantial experience with “Carmina Burana”—are soprano Ying Fang, baritone Thomas Lehman, and tenor Sunnyboy Dlada. Die Deutsche Bühne has described Dlada’s voice as “crisp, clearly focused, brightly timbred…agile and coloratura oriented,” which sounds ideal for the role of the swan.

If you're curious as to what the "Carmina Burana" poems might have sounded like back in their original form, check out the René Clemencic Consort’s 1975 and 2009 recordings on Spotify. Also on Spotify: the 1992 recording of “Carmina Burana” by Leonard Slatkin and the SLSO. The recording in the SLSO’s playlist is the 2005 recording by the London Symphony Orchestra.

The Essentials: Stéphane Denève conducts the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra and Chorus along with soloists Ying Fang (soprano), Sunnyboy Dlada (tenor), and Thomas Lehman (baritone) in Carl Orff’s “Carmina Burana.” The concerts open with Arvo Pärt’s "Cantus in Memoriam Benjamin Britten," Lera Auerbach’s “Icarus,” and Wagner’s “Liebestod” from “Tristan und Isolde.” Performances are Saturday at 7:30 pm and Sunday at 3 pm, February 17 and 18, at the Stifel Theatre.

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