Symphony Preview: Cold Cuts

Our old friend the polar vortex is paying the Midwest a visit the weekend of January 24th with snow and single-digit lows. So it seems only appropriate that the St. Louis Symphyony Orchestra concerts this Saturday and Sunday bring us music from a couple of fairly frosty countries: Finland and Russia.

Lotta Wennäkoski. Photo by Maarit Kytöharju

Finnish conductor Dima Slobodeniouk will make his first local appearance conducting 21st-century music by fellow Finns Lotta Wennäkoski  (b. 1970) and Jukka Tiensuu (born 1948). Wennäkoski’s Flounce (last performed by the SLSO in 2018 with Hannu Lintu at the podium) opens the concerts, followed by the local premiere of Tiensuu’s 2015 Teoton (Concerto for Sheng and Orchestra), composed in 2015. We move to more familiar territory in the second half with the Symphony No. 4 in F minor by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky (1840–1893),

A commission by the BBC for its 2017 Proms concert series, Flounce, which clocks in at a brief five minutes, is something of an audio funhouse in which short phrases flit back and forth like fireflies. The work opens with an exuberant orchestral outburst which soon gives way to more delicate textures that call for a wide variety of unusual techniques from the players before building again to a big and comically abrupt finish. Or to quote the composer:

The piece is thus largely characterized by brisk gestures “non troppo serioso,” but it also has passages of lace-like ornamenting in a more lightweight and lyrical mood. The same kind of duality is present in the way I’m aiming to combine an often energetic pulse with (sometimes non-conventional) timbral ideas and a feeling of space in the orchestration.

If you want to know what that looks and sounds like, check out the video of a 2023 performance by the Frankfurt Radio Symphony.

The percussion section includes some non-traditional noisemakers like a slide whistle, cowbells (Spike Jones would be so proud!), the vibraslap (a modern version of the African jawbone rattle), a rain stick, and a superball stick (Super Ball by Wham-O, as seen on TV!) for both the bass drum and harp. Superball mallets are rubbed on their instruments rather than struck and produce roaring/droning sounds. The specific effect depends on the instrument, for example, on a harp “[t]he super ball stick produces a ‘whale’-like drone, both on the sound board and on the strings.”

Jukka Tiensuu. Photo courtesy of the SLSO.

You’ll hear some unusual sounds as well in Teoton. The four movements—Fever, Adrift, Game, and Bliss—are played attacca (without pause), and the work lasts around a half hour. Teoton was commissioned by the Seoul Philharmonic Orchestra, NTR ZaterdagMatinee, Norwegian Radio Orchestra, Orchestre Philharmonique de Strasbourg, and National Taiwan Symphony Orchestra. The sheng soloist at the premiere performance by the  Seoul Philharmonic Orchestra was Wu Wei, who will also be the soloist for this weekend’s performances.

Let us then take a few sentences to talk about the sheng.  Per James Howarth in Musical Instruments Through the Ages, the sheng is a free reed instrument, which means the sound is produced by air flowing under a tuned metal reed. Chinese and Japanese free reed instruments date back to the 10th century BC or thereabouts. Western free reed instruments began to appear in the late 18th century as musicians and scientists discovered the sheng and the Japanese version, the sho. Familiar Western examples include the harmonica, accordion, concertina, and melodica.

Like the harmonica, the sheng is a mouth organ. It consists of a large number of wooden pipes of different lengths that rest in sockets in a wooden wind chest (originally a gourd) to which a mouthpiece is attached. The sheng player can produce sound both by inhaling and exhaling. The pipes have finger holes that, in modern versions, are opened and closed with keys like those on Western woodwind instruments.

Wu Wei. Photo courtesy of the SLSO

The sheng played by Wu Wei looks like a collection of different-sized clarinets, complete with metal keys, stuffed into a wooden ball with the top cut off.  In the video of his 2021 performance with the Lahti Symphony Orchestra, he’s a highly energetic and engaged soloist who draws an impressive variety of sounds from the instrument. Like Flounce, Teoton features rapid-fire exchanges of short phrases between the soloist and the orchestra (especially the winds), but there are also long, elaborate cadenzas (improvised, as in the Good Old Days) that give the soloist a chance to test their mettle.

Having watched  and listened to the work with a synchronized display of the score, my reaction was that Teoton, like Flounce, felt aggressively “modernist” in a way that is very different from most of the new works that Music Director Stéphane  Denève has programmed for the orchestra. It’s also more ambitious with a wider emotional range.

Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 4—last heard in Powell Hall in November 2017  when John Storgårds was on the podium—is my favorite. He began writing it during a winter of discontent (to paraphrase Shakespeare) in 1876–77. "Since we last met," he wrote to his friend Klimenko, "I am very much changed—especially mentally…. If the conditions of my life were different, if my desire to create were not balked at every step.... I might write something really decent."

His disastrous attempt at marriage in 1877 to a former student, Antonina Miliukova didn't help matters any. He was gay, she didn't get it, and the entire business collapsed after only a few months. Still, by the beginning of 1878, all that Sturm und Drang had in fact resulted in the creation of "something really decent."

Critics were, at first, baffled by symphony’s unusual structure, especially the length of the first movement. James Huneker, in Mezzotints in Modern  Music (1899), described it as “loosely put together.” Still, it went on to become appreciated by audiences and critics alike. In his chapter on Tchaikovsky in The Symphony (1966, Robert Simpson, ed.), musicologist Hans Keller went so far as to describe the Fourth as “the greatest—and its first movement is the most complex and innovatory of the [first] four.”

The composer poured all of his hope and despair into this most compact and dramatically expressive of all his symphonies. From the commanding "fate"motif first intoned by the brasses at the beginning to the nearly hysterical triumph of the finale, this is a piece that grabs you by the lapels and doesn't let go until the end. I've loved this work from the first time I heard it in a recording by Sir John Barbirolli and the Halle Orchestra on my parents' old console stereo some fifty years ago. I think you will as well.

The SLSO’s official playlist for the concert includes recordings of both Flounce and the Tchaikovsky Fourth, with the latter performed by the SLSO under Leonard Slatkin in a 1991 RCA Read Seal. For Teoeon, though, you’ll have to use the YouTube links, above.

The Essentials:  Guest conductor Dima Slobodeniouk and sheng virtuoso Wu Wei make their local debuts with Jukka Tiensuu’s Teoton (Concerto for Sheng and Orchestra). The program includes Flounce by Lotta Wennäkoski and the Symphony No. 4 by Tchaikovsky. Performances are Saturday and Sunday, January 24th and 25th, at Powell 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 21st, from 8 to 10 pm as well as via on-demand streaming beginning on Thursday, January 22nd.

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.

Bravo! Vail Episode 4: These moments

[Being the fourth and last in a series of dispatches from the 2023 Bravo! Vail Music Festival, attended by yours truly as part of a delegation from the Music Critics Association of North America (MCANA)]

For the MCANA collective the final day at Bravo! Vail (Friday July 14th) began at 12:30 pm with a session with composer Anna Clyne, whose “This Moment” had its world premiere that night by the Philadelphia Orchestra conducted by Yannick Nézet-Séguin. Unofficial activities started much earlier as the early risers in our group (i.e., not me) decided to take the scenic gondola ride to the top of Vail Mountain. At a little over 10,000 ft. (a good 2K above Vail) both the air and the views are rarefied and well worth the ticket price, as I would discover later in the day. One of our number actually walked up (there are multiple hiking trails for the more adventurous), but then he’s considerably younger than the rest of us.

Anna Clyne and Anne-Marie McDermott
Photo courtesy Bravo! Vail

In any case, we were all present and accounted for as we met with our official Vail PR contact (the priceless Managing Director of 8VA Music Consultancy Patricia Price, about whom I simply cannot say enough good things) for a brief but informative chat with Clyne.

Allow me to digress for a moment and state that I have been an admirer of Clyne’s music since 2012, when I first heard her “Within Her Arms” performed by David Robertson and the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra with choreography by the Hubbard Street Dance Theatre of Chicago. At the time I described it as “somewhat mysterious music, which at times seemed to harken back to Vaughn Williams or even Thomas Tallis.”

It was only later, as the SLSO began to perform Clyne’s music more frequently under current Music Director Stéphane Denève, that I realized what I was actually hearing was what Clyne described in our session as “layering,” a technique that involves combining instruments with contrasting timbres to achieve new and unusual sounds. “You might have an oboe playing a melody, but I’ll double that with both vibraphone and low clarinet,” she offered as an example. She’s in good company: Ravel (among others) was known to do the same thing (several times in “Bolero,” to pick an obvious example), although mostly as a “special effect” rather than a core compositional approach.

She put that to good use in “This Moment,” which was composed with its status as a “curtain raiser” for the evening’s performance of Mozart’s Requiem in mind. The title was inspired by a quote from the late Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh, who died last year at the age of 95: “This moment is full of wonder” (a sentiment which takes on more meaning the older I become). There are also quotes from the “Requiem: one from the “Kyrie eleison” and one from the “Lacrimosa.”

View from Vail Mountain
Photo by Chuck Lavazzi

That last one is especially poignant, since it was while dictating this movement to his pupil Franz Xaver Süssmayr that Mozart breathed his last. “And his life ended,” writes Jane Glover in “Mozart’s Women,” on an unresolved dominant chord.” Or, as Clyne said (paraphrasing Thich Nhat Hanh), “Yesterday’s tears are tomorrow’s rain”.

The conversation then went on to other topics such as working with Nézet-Séguin (“He really understands the spirit of my music”), the ways in which earlier generations of women composers and conductors have paved the way for Clyne and others (she cited Marin Alsop as a mentor; both have a strong Chicago connection), and upcoming projects with The Augmented Orchestra and the New York-based boundary-smashing ensemble The Knights.

Her final takeaway for those attending the evening’s concert? Approach new music with an open mind.

Which I did, but first it was time to play a bit of hooky and spend the rest of the afternoon hiking on Vail Mountain with my more outdoorsy wife, Sherry. She had gone up in the gondola the day before, spent a couple of hours climbing about, and came back enthusing about the gondola ride. Since this was our last day in town, I decided it was time to do something touristy, so up we went. At the top we grabbed a couple of hiking sticks courtesy of the Gondola One folks and spent the next hour or so accumulating “zone minutes” on our Fitbits.

I wore the wrong shoes, the wrong clothes, and brought a tote bag for our water bottles instead of the travel backpack I had packed specifically for excursions like this one, but it was worth it for the view.

L-R: Rosa Feloa, Jennifer Johnson Cano,
Issachah Savage, Kyle Ketelsen
Photo courtesy Bravo! Vail

A change of wardrobe, a light dinner, and it was off to the Ford Amphitheatre for our final concert: Clyne’s “This Moment” and Mozart’s Requiem  K. 626. True to her description of the work earlier that day, “This Moment” was the ideal opener for the Mozart. The quotes from the Requiem, while unmistakable, were also clearly delivered in Clyne’s own unique language. There was lamentation and conflict in the music but also, in the final analysis, a comforting sense of peace. “This Moment” is, indeed, “full of wonders.”

Then it was time for the Requiem itself.  It’s usually heard in Süssmayr’s completion—a choice which has not been without its critics over the years, including me. At least two other completions were done in the early 19th century and several musicologists have produced their own over the last four or five decades.

Nézet-Séguin opted for a 1971 edition by German violinist and musicologist Franz Beyer (1922–2018). Beyer used Süssmayr as a point of departure but cleaned up some of what Julliard’s Robert Levin called Süssmayr’s “infelicities” in the orchestration. “Franz Beyer took the Requiem to the dry cleaners and took the spots out,” said Levin. “He made it more transparent and simplified it.”

It had been a little over a year since I had seen a performance of the Mozart Requiem and that was in the more resonant environment of Powell Hall in St. Louis. The covered portion of the Ford has a markedly dryer sound, which makes instrumental details that much easier to hear, but it seemed to me that Beyer did, indeed, clarify the sound and, in his words, “color it with the hues of Mozart’s own palette.” The trombone solo in “Tuba mirum,” for example, was as clear as I have ever heard it.

How much of that was the work of Beyer vs. Nézet-Séguin, the Philadelphians, and the Colorado Symphony Orchestra Chorus, I can’t say, but this performance of the Requiem was certainly a stunner as far as I was concerned. It was dramatic, emotionally powerful, and just all-around compelling.

Choral director Duain Wolfe, Yannick
Nézet-Séguin, Philadelphia Orhcestra
and Colorado Symphony Orchestra Chorus 
Photo courtesy Bravo! Vail

For an amateur chorus, the CSO singers acquitted themselves extraordinarily well, even if they were (as a fellow critic pointed out) a bit shy in the tenor department. It helped that they were placed at the back of the orchestra on unusually high risers (the feet of the singers in the back row were literally above the heads of the those in the first) which enabled them to project with force and clarity. Vocal lines were impressively clear, even in fugal sections like the “Kyrie.”

The solo quartet consisted of soprano Rosa Feloa, mezzo Jennifer Johnson Cano (who sang the Requiem in St. Louis last year), tenor Issachah Savage, and bass-baritone Kyle Ketelsen. They were placed on risers downstage right, just behind the violins, which provided useful sonic separation from both the chorus and the orchestra. All four singers were impressive vocally, with Cano and Ketelsen showing the most dramatic engagement with the text.

The band, of course, played with the consummate skill that I had come to expect from them over the last few days. For his part, Nézet-Séguin’s substantial operatic experience was apparent in his ability to draw out the human drama in Mozart’s music without compromising the religious sincerity behind it.

And so the musical side of our visit to Vail came to an end. Most of our group retired to the patio at La Cucina, one of the two restaurants at our hotel (the exceptionally comfortable Lodge at Vail), for snacks, drinks, post-concert discussions, and friendly farewells. Some of us knew each other from previous MCANA events while some of us were meeting for the first time. We all got to know each other better during the week and were all better for having done so.     

“The soil of our mind,” wrote Thich Nhat Hanh,  “contains many seeds, positive and negative. We are the gardeners who identify, water, and cultivate the best seeds.” Four days of Bravo! Vail left us with a packet of Music and Friendship seeds. They’re always the best.

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

Symphony Preview: The three ages of man

This weekend, March 3 and 4, Stephanie Childress conducts the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra  in a program of music from three different centuries written by composers at three very different stages of their lives and careers. It’s just as varied as you might expect.

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

Oswald Huỳnh
Photo: Allison Davis

The concerts open with the premiere of “Gia Đình” (“Family”) by Oswald Huỳnh (b. 1997), one of three composers chosen for the 2021–2022 Mizzou New Music Initiative, a joint project of the University of Missouri and the SLSO. Written in collaboration with Childress and members of the orchestra, “Gia Đình” is described in Skyler Dykes’s program notes as a reflection of the Vietnamese diaspora that “draws from a sampling of Vietnamese folk melodies and religious texts and plays with experimental techniques, such as chant and improvisation.”

In that respect, it sounds very much like the “Ngū Hành (2022) and “Frequent Wind” (2021), the only other works by Huỳnh that I have been able to find online. Both combine Vietnamese traditions with innovative performance practices. “Frequent Wind,” for example, uses an amplified music box. “Gia Đình” is scored for a conventional orchestra of winds, strings, and percussion, but even so I’d expect some unusual sounds in performance.

From new music by a 21st century composer at the beginning of his career, we leap back in time to a popular concerto by a middle aged 18th-century master. Franz Joseph Haydn (1732–1809) composed his Keyboard Concerto No. 11 in D major, Hob. XVIII (referring to its position in the catalog of Haydn’s works by Dutch musicologist Anthony van Hoboken) in 1784 or thereabouts. He had just inked a new contract with his long-time employer, the House of Esterházy, that allowed the composer to sell his own works on the open market, and the D major concerto was one of them. Its lively and genial style has made it a favorite of audiences and performers alike.

Haydn circa 1770
Painting by
Ludwig Guttenbrunn

It was also, in its own way, something of a cutting-edge piece. Haydn’s earlier keyboard concertos were, according to the Grove Dictionary, likely composed for organ and often played on the harpsichord. The D major concerto was written with a relatively new instrument in mind: the fortepiano. This forerunner of the modern concert grand was smaller (a range of four or five octaves, depending on the maker) and lighter, both in tone and weight, due to the fact that the frame was wooden rather than the cast iron of the modern instrument. Not as radical as an amplified music box, of course, but fairly “with it” for Haydn.

Like many keyboard concertos of its time, Haydn’s D major assumes a lot of latitude for the performer. The score is short on expressive and dynamic indications and while Haydn wrote of a couple of his own cadenzas for it, most performers feel free to improvise their own. That means the soloist this weekend—our own trusty and well-beloved Peter Henderson—should have plenty of opportunities to put his own stamp on the work.

After intermission, it’s time for the Big Event of the evening, the Symphony No. 3 in E-flat major, op. 97 (“Rhenish”), by Robert Schumann (1810–1856). It was composed and orchestrated in just one month in 1850, the year in which Schumann arrived in Düsseldorf to assume the position of Music Director.

Schumann had been strongly recommended by Ferdinand Hiller, the outgoing MD, despite the former’s lack of conducting experience. This was a bit surprising, since the job would put Schumann in charge of the orchestra and chorus (Gesangverein) of the Allgemeiner Musikverein and oblige him to oversee the music on major feast days at St. Maximilian and St. Lambertus, Düsseldorf’s principal Catholic churches as well.

Still, Schumann accepted the job because the salary would lessen the financial strain on Clara (whose concertizing was the family’s principal source of income) and because Düsseldorf’s location on the Rhine just north of Cologne placed it, as Judith Chernaik writes (in Schumann: The Faces and the Masks), in “one of the most beautiful and poetic regions of Germany.”

Schumann in 1850
en.wikipedia.org

Celebrated in German song, story, and (thanks to Wagner) opera, the Rhine held a particular fascination for Schumann. “Schumann had taken a steamboat down the Rhine in his youth,” writes Chernaik, “and the great river had magical associations for him.” He was especially taken with the great Gothic cathedral at Cologne. When we saw it last year as part of a Rhine River cruise the cathedral’s exterior was in the midst of a massive clean-up and restoration project, but even so it was awe-inspiring both inside and out. I can only imagine how stunning it must have been over 170 years ago. Not surprisingly, the cathedral gets its own musical selfie—marked feierelich (solemnly)—in the fourth of the symphony’s five movements.

Although Schumann was, at the time, only four years away from the crippling mental illness that would confine him to an asylum and eventually lead to his death at the age of 46, the “Rhenish” shows no sign of any weakening of his musical powers. Quite the opposite, the work’s bottomless well of melodic invention and logical construction mark it as the product of a mind overflowing with creative energy. “Schumann certainly took on a new lease off life when he wrote it,” observes Julius Harrison in The Symphony Vol. 1: Haydn to Dvorak. “Its form is classical and the music itself developed with inspiration and great skill…[H]ad he lived ten years longer, what might he not have done in the world of the symphony?”

We’ll never know the answer to that question, of course, but we at least appreciate the wonderful legacy he left us. From the dramatic rising E-flat major chords of the first movement (often seen as an homage to Beethoven’s “Eroica”) to what Harrison accurately describes as “the imposing ending full of joie-de-vivre” of the last, this is music guaranteed to grab you by the lapels and not let go.

The Essentials: Stephanie Childress conducts the orchestra and piano soloist Peter Henderson in Haydn’s Keyboard Concerto No. 11 in a program that also includes “Gia Đình” (“Family”) by Oswald Huỳnh and the Symphony No. 3 in E-flat major, op. 97 (“Rhenish”), by Robert Schumann. Performances are Friday at 7:30 pm and Saturday at 10:30 am, March 3 and 4, at Powell Hall in Grand Center. The Saturday concert will be recorded live and broadcast at 8 pm the same day 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 Preview: Very old school

I’ve been listening to a lot of Great Courses audio lectures these days on world history and archeology. It’s an enlightening and humbling experience. It’s also one I highly recommend for anyone who thinks a nation that has existed for over two centuries is somehow remarkable. Or you could just read Shelley’s poem “Ozymandias.”

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

James Lee III
Photo courtesy of the SLSO

Or you could spend some time exploring the history of the Cahokia Mounds State Historic Site just across the river in Illinois. That’s what composer James Lee III  (b. 1975) did for “Visions of Cahokia,” the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra commission which has its world premiere this weekend (Saturday and Sunday, January 28 and 29) under the baton of Music Director Stéphane Denève. The Mississippian civilization flourished there for around 800 years (i.e., 550 years longer than the USA) before dissolving as a result of internal strife and economic hardship brought on, in part, by climate change (the so-called “Little Ice Age,” which ended around 200 years ago). I’ll leave you to contemplate that possibly awkward bit of reality while we shift the focus to Lee.

If his name is familiar, that’s probably because this will be the fourth work by him to be heard at Powell Hall, beginning with his “Emotive Transformations” in November 2021. That was my first exposure to his work, which I described as “unquestionably contemporary, but still listener-friendly—a hallmark of the new music that Denève has introduced to local audiences.” His next two works— “Chuphshah! Harriet's Drive to Canaan” last March and “Sukkot Through Orion's Nebula” last November reinforced that opinion, while demonstrating Lee’s skill as an orchestrator.

That said, since this is a world premiere, I have no idea what “Visions of Cahokia” will sound like. Fortunately, Lee provides a detailed description in this weekend’s program notes so there’s no need to repeat it here. You can, however, listen to some of his other compositions on Spotify.

Leonard Bernstein in 1955

Like “Visions of Cahokia,” the 1954 Serenade for solo violin, strings, harp and percussion by Leonard Bernstein (1918–1990) was inspired by an ancient civilization—specifically Athens in the late 4th century BCE. Subtitled “after Plato’s Symposium,” the Serenade consists of five movements, each of which refers to a specific episode in Plato’s fictional depiction of a drinking party in which each guest is challenged to make a speech in honor of Eros, the god of love. The speakers include real-life characters like Aristophanes, Alcibiades, Socrates, and even (as part Socrates’s speech) Diotima of Mantinea—who may or may not have been a historical figure but who is, in any case, the only woman whose voice is heard. She’s also portrayed as acting as Socrates’s teacher rather than his student, which is an interesting reversal of the role usually played by the former in Plato’s writings.

The day after completing the score, Bernstein wrote detailed notes explaining how each movement relates to its designated character in the Symposium. It’s not clear, though, to what extent these are actual primary inspirations. Bernstein biographer Humphrey Burton has suggested that they are more likely to be associations that occurred to him late in the composition process.

Having listened to both the Serenade and a dramatic reading of the Symposium, I’m inclined to agree. The serenity of the second movement (Aristophanes, Allegretto), for example, seems not entirely consistent with the cheerfully avuncular tone of the character’s speech in the Symposium. And the ominous drama of the Socrates section of the final movement seems out of synch with the quiet sense of authority that the noted philosopher projects in Plato’s text.

The real connection, as noted at the official Bernstein web site, may be more a matter of form than content. In the Symposium, each speaker takes up where the last one left off, using the last man’s ideas as a springboard for his own. Bernstein’s music does something similar, deriving the musical ideas of each movement, in part, from those of its predecessor.

If all that sounds a bit academic, fear not. The Serenade is a tremendously appealing work. You don’t need to look under the hood to appreciate the ride.

Sibelius in 1913
By fi:Daniel Nyblin (1856–1923) -
What We Hear in Music, Anne S. Faulkner,
Victor Talking Machine Co., 1913.,
Public Domain, 

The concerts conclude with a familiar favorite that’s a good match for the gloomy weather we’ve had recently: the Symphony No. 2 by Jean Sibelius (1865–1957). Like many of Sibelius’s works, the Symphony No. 2 evokes the darkness of the majestic, windswept Finnish landscape that rarely sees the sun for months on end. It's the kind of darkness you might appreciate from inside a cozy cabin. Like, say, the all-wood home (Sibelius didn't want to hear the sound of rain in metal gutters) on Lake Tuusula in the Finnish forest where the composer lived and worked from 1982 until his death.

It's dramatic and uplifting, and it conjures up potent images of the natural world that so inspired Sibelius. At the same time, it’s a reflection of the political darkness griping the composer’s homeland when the symphony was completed in 1902. Only three years earlier, the composer’s “Finlandia” was a defiant protest against attempts by Russia, which then ruled Finland, of the suppression of Finnish language and culture. Indeed, conductor Robert Kajanus, who first recorded the symphony in 1930, saw the Symphony No. 2 as a musical depiction of Finland’s struggle for independence. To him, the Tempo Andante second movement represented “the most crushing protest against all the injustice which today threatens to take light from the sun,” while the finale was “a triumphant closure which is capable of arousing in the listener a bright mood of consolation and optimism.”

Which, now that I think of it, is something we could use during our own current period of political darkness.

The Essentials: Stéphane Denève conducts the world premiere of "Visions of Cahokia" by James Lee III, Leonard Bernstein's “Serenade (after Plato's Symposium)” with violin soloist James Ehnes, and  the Symphony No. 2 by Sibelius. Performances are Saturday at 8 pm and Sunday at 3 pm, January 28 and 29 at Powell Hall in Grand Center. The Saturday concert will be broadcast 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: To infinity and beyond with Stéphane Denève and the SLSO

“To infinity and beyond!” With that wry nod to Buzz Lightyear, Music Director Stéphane Denève launched a St. Louis Symphony Orchestra concert last Friday night (November 18th) inspired by what Pythagoras called the “music of the spheres.”  The night sky has fascinated human beings for as long as there have been human beings, and last weekend’s program (repeated on Saturday and Sunday, the 19th and 20th) showed just how much variety that fascination can encompass.

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

Guillaume Connesson curtain call

The first half of the evening was taken up by three very different but equally appealing contemporary works, beginning with the world premiere of “Astéria” by contemporary (b. 1970) French composer Guillaume Connesson. Denève described it as music in which you can hear “not only the sound of falling stars but also how they sing.” Which, in this case, means rapidly descending figures in the woodwinds accompanied by wave-like themes in the strings that call to mind Debussy’s “La Mer.”

The overall feel is that of a vast seascape with combined with a meteor shower. There’s a sense of expansive acoustic space created by Connesson’s inventive use of orchestral color. Denève, who is a great booster of Connesson, has said that his work “continues the great tradition of French music. It is full of rich harmonies and it is colourful, well-orchestrated music. I just love it.”

Judging from the response, the audience loved both “Astéria” and its brilliant performance by Denève and the band.

“Astéria” is “big band” music (around 90 musicians Friday night) that contrasted neatly with the next work—“Primal Message” by contemporary American violist/composer Nokuthula Endo Ngwenyama (b. 1976). Scored for strings, harp, keyboard, and percussion, it’s one of the more purely beautiful bits of new music I have heard recently. There are ravishing melodies for the cello and viola and an overall sense of nostalgia-tinged serenity.

As a showcase for the SLSO strings, it couldn’t be beat. Principal Viola Beth Guterman Chu and Principal Cello Danny Lee gave eloquent voice to Ngwenyama’s somewhat Celtic-sounding themes, and the sound of the full ensemble was entrancing. The piece ended with a bit of delicate filigree on celesta and harp (expertly done by Peter Henderson and Principal Harp Allegra Lilly, respectively) that was as evanescent as stardust.

James Lee III curtain call

The Big Band returned with “Sukkot Through Orion's Nebula” by American composer James Lee III (b.1975). It’s a wildly colorful 10-minute tone poem about the Messiah descending to earth on Yom Kippur (The Day of Atonement) in a blaze of brass and percussion that prominently features the marimba, xylophone, vibraphone, and (inevitably) the bass drum. A calmer central section uses the celesta, harp, and winds to evoke the misty nebula before the resplendent return of the Son of God. I was reminded of Vachel Lindsay’s famous poem “General William Booth Enters into Heaven” (“Booth led boldly with his big bass drum”).

It’s some pretty boisterous stuff which (somewhat paradoxically) demands discipline and polish from the musicians. That it emphatically got Friday night. A shout-out is due, in particular, to the quintet of musicians who handled the large percussion battery. That would be Shannon Wood on tympani and  his instruments and Will James, Alan Stewart, Kevin Ritenauer, and Edouard Beyens on everything else. Lee’s score kept them hopping.

The evening concluded with “The Planets,” Op. 32, by Gustav Holst (1874-1934). Last played by the SLSO in 2016 under David Robertson, Holst’s suite is undoubtedly his greatest and probably his only hit. Denève and the band gave it a thrilling and yet subtle reading that brought out individual voices while retaining a strong sense of momentum.

Denève’s interpretation of the first movement—“Mars, the Bringer of War”—was essentially a microcosm of everything he and the orchestra did that was so right. The tempo was brisk, creating the proper sense of mindless urgency, but dynamics were carefully modulated, and orchestral details were clearly articulated, so there was a sense that doom was merely being held back. When the first big orchestral crash came up, the impact was cataclysmic.  

"The Planets" curtain call

There was also a plethora of pristine renderings of the many wonderful instrumental solo bits that Holst’s score provides in abundance. That includes (but, as usual, is not limited to) Principal Horn Roger Kaza’s delicate opening solo in “Venus, the Bringer of Peace” as well rest of his section in “Jupiter, the Bringer of Jollity”; the quicksilver woodwinds, Allegra Lilly and Megan Stout’s harps, and Peter Henderson’s celesta in “Mercury, the Winged Messenger”; Phil Ross’s mournful bass oboe in “Saturn, the Bringer of Old Age”; the bassoons under Andrew Cuneo, musically thumbing their noses at the pretentions of “Uranus, the Magician;” and multiple appearances by Concertmaster David Halen and Principal Oboe Jelena Dirks.

And then there were the final moments of “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." Denève achieved that by (as far as I can tell) placing the singers on the orchestra level in back of the audience—presumably in the lobby if he was following Holst’s instructions.

Wherever they were, it worked. Seemingly coming from everywhere and nowhere (although probably from the main lobby), the voices faded so imperceptibly that it was hard to tell when they stopped singing. In my mind, they still are.

Next at Powell Hall: Conductor Xian Zhang and pianist George Li make their St. Louis Symphony Orchestra debuts performing the overture to Rossini’s opera “L'Italiana in Algeri,” Rachmaninoff’s “Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini,” and Respighi’s “Fountains of Rome” and “Pines of Rome”. Performances are Saturday at 8 pm and Sunday at 3 pm, October 26 and 27. The Saturday 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 Preview: Starry, starry night

The St. Louis Symphony Orchestra concert Stéphane Denève will conduct this weekend (November 18-20) will consist of music inspired by something that has fascinated human beings for, I imagine, as long as there have been creatures that could be identified as human beings: the night sky.

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

“The first documented records of systematic astronomical observations,” notes the European Space Agency, “date back to the Assyro-Babylonians around 1000 BCE. From this cradle of civilisation in Mesopotamia—in the southern part of present-day Iraq—astronomers had built up knowledge of the celestial bodies and recorded their periodic motions.” We’ve learned a lot since then, and yet only one of the four works on this weekend’s program actually deals with the physical reality of interplanetary space. The other three explore the more mythological aspects of the celestial dome.

Guillaume Connesson
Photo by Fanny Houillon

The concerts open with a world premiere of “Astéria” by contemporary (b. 1970) French composer Guillaume Connesson. Since it’s a world premiere, I can’t give you my impressions of the piece, so I will instead defer to Benjamin Pesetsky’s program notes, which include extensive commentary by the composer. For now I’ll just note that Asteria was “the Titan goddess of falling stars and perhaps of nighttime divinations such as oneiromancy (by dreams) and astrology (by stars).”

Maestro Denève is a great admirer of Connesson, having conducted three of his works with the SLSO (it would have been four had the COVID-19 outbreak not caused the cancellation of his Cello Concerto in 2020). Denève has often said that he wants to present newer works that musicians like to play and listeners are likely to want to hear more than once. Connesson’s music, based on what I have heard of it in the past, certainly qualifies.

The next piece on the program—“Primal Message” by contemporary American violist/composer Nokuthula Endo Ngwenyama (b. 1976)—was also affected by the pandemic. Its November 2020 premiere by Xian Zhang and the Detroit Symphony took place for a “largely online audience.”  You won’t find that version on YouTube or on the SLSO’s Spotify playlist, but there is a fine performance by the Northwest Sinfonietta on the former.

Nokuthula Endo Ngwenyama
Photo courtesy of the SLSO

I highly recommend a listen in advance to this ethereally entrancing work. It’s one of the more purely beautiful bits of new music I have heard recently. There are ravishing melodies for the cello and viola and an overall sense of nostalgia-tinged serenity. There is also, at least to my ears, a very Celtic feel to the piece, even though the composer was born in Los Angeles of Zimbabwean-Japanese parentage. To me, that suggests a wide range of musical interests on her part.

“Primal Message” was inspired by the 1974 Arecibo Message, a “simple, pictorial message, aimed at our putative cosmic companions in the globular star cluster M13” by the Arecibo Radio Telescope in Puerto Rico. "I just started having fun with the idea of what a 'Primal Message' would sound like," said the composer in a 2021 interview for violinist.com. "What could we convey about our emotional intelligence? And are we really ready to connect to another life form, when we're having such a hard time connecting with each other?"

Given that M13 is 25,000 light years away, our message won’t arrive until the year 26,974, by which time humanity will be greatly changed (if not long gone). It’s nice to imagine that Ngwenyama’s lovely work might still be around, though, as it paints a bucolic picture of contemporary humanity that would be wonderful legacy for posterity, should there be any.

The last work on the first half of the program is “Sukkot Through Orion's Nebula” by American composer James Lee III (b.1975). Lee’s inspiration is Biblical, drawing on themes from both the Old and New Testaments as well as on the theology of Seventh Day Adventists, the religious tradition in which Lee was raised. Once again, there’s a detailed description by the composer himself in the program notes, so I’ll just note that Sukkot is a mid-October Jewish holiday that is “both an agricultural festival of thanksgiving and a commemoration of the forty-year period during which the children of Israel wandered in the desert after leaving slavery in Egypt, living in temporary shelters as they traveled.” That shelter is a sukkah, hence the name.

James Lee III
Photo courtesy of the SLSO

The work also refers to Chapter 14 of Revelation, which “marks a different kind of metaphorical harvest, and Orion’s Nebula, which is mentioned in the Book of Job.” The musical result of this mix is a wildly colorful 10-minute tone poem about the Messiah descending to earth on Yom Kippur (The Day of Atonement) in a blaze of brass and percussion. A slightly less exuberant central section develops some of the initial themes in passages for harp and strings before the return of celebratory opening material.

It's exhilarating stuff, with a musical vocabulary that is unquestionably contemporary while remaining listener-friendly—another hallmark of the new music that Denève has been introducing to the SLSO audience.

This weekend’s concerts conclude with “The Planets,” Op. 32, by Gustav Holst (1874-1934). Last played by the SLSO in 2016 under David Robertson, Holst’s suite is undoubtedly his greatest and probably his only hit. Singers are likely to 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.”

This being a hectic week for me, I have elected to repeat what I wrote about “The Planets” back in 2016. Besides, that was all lost in the Great Revision of the KDHX web site later that year, so think of this as a bit of digital reconstruction.

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."

Gustav Holst in 1921
Photo: Herbert Lambert

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 (a remastered version of which is available on Spotify). Back then my stereo wasn't much to brag about and the original 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 (which has since lost its planetary status) hadn't been discovered yet and Earth, of course, doesn't count in astrology, hence the seven movements instead of nine.

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.

The Essentials: Stéphane Denève returns to conduct the orchestra and members of the chorus in a celestial-themed program consisting of the world premiere of Guillaume Connesson’s “Astéria,” “Primal Message” by contemporary American violist/composer Nokuthula Endo Ngwenyama, James Lee III’s “Sukkot Through Orion's Nebula”, and Holst’s ever-popular “The Planets.” Performances are Friday at 7:30 pm, Saturday at 8 pm, and Sunday at 3 pm, November 18-20. The Saturday 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 Preview: A light in the darkness (over at the Lichnowsky Place)

Now that we have set our clocks back and the shades of night, to paraphrase Longfellow a bit, are falling faster, the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra is getting into the spirit with concerts in which musical darkness is predominant—at least until after intermission.

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

Let me explain.

This Friday at 10:30 am and Saturday at 8 pm, November 11 and 12, conductor John Storgårds and violinist Leila Josefowicz perform the tone poem “Night Ride and Sunrise” by Jean Sibelius (1865-1957), the US premiere of the 2016 Violin Concerto by British composer Helen Grime (b. 1981), and the Symphony No. 4, Op. 60, by Beethoven (1770-1827). All three begin in darkness, but only the second effectively stays there.

Sibelius in 1913
By fi:Daniel Nyblin (1856–1923) -
What We Hear in Music, Anne S. Faulkner,
Victor Talking Machine Co., 1913.,
Public Domain, 

Sibelius composed “Night Ride and Sunrise” in 1908, at a time of stress and personal crisis. His family was expanding—his daughter Margareta had just been born—but his finances were shrinking. He was up to his eyeballs in debt and was failing to meet his composing commitments to his new German publisher Robert Lienau. He had promised four new works per year between 1905 and 1909, but by 1908 had delivered only a handful.

Worse yet, he had developed a throat tumor that required multiple operations. Fearing cancer as a result of his years of smoking and heavy drinking, his doctors had advised him to abstain from both. “Sibelius,” write Fabian Dahlström and James Hepokoski in Grove Music Online, “was haunted by the shadow of death, and much in his music and thought at this time turned towards the darker and the more introspective.”

Certainly the first half of “Night Ride and Sunrise” evokes a wintry nocturnal journey with a repeated “galloping” motif that builds in intensity, gradually morphing into a rising and falling woodwind theme that suggests a bleak, windswept landscape. Slowly the mood changes and eventually rising themes in the brasses and strings suggest the rising sun. It’s a cold Finnish sun, to be sure, but it’s a source of light nevertheless.

Surprisingly, “Night Ride and Sunrise” is getting its first-ever performances by the SLSO this weekend.

Sibelius’s reliance on the repetition of a small number of short melodic phrases as building blocks for his musical structures led Dahlström and Hepokoski to refer to this and other works from the period as “proto-minimalist…breaking more decisively away from the sonata principle through multiple, cumulative rotations.” It even has the kind of strong rhythmic pulse that characterizes 20th century minimalists like John Adams and Philip Glass, although to a less obsessive degree.

“Proto-minimalist" is also not a bad description of Grime’s concerto, the American premiere of which is up next.

Helen Grime
Photo courtesy of the SLSO

Running around 22 minutes, the 2016 Violin Concerto is essentially built on a series of elaborations and expansions on the brief triplet theme first heard at the very beginning in the upper registers of the violin and orchestra and frequently punctuated by syncopated whacks from the bass drum. Although played as one continuous movement, the work is divided up into three separate sections (clearly marked in the score) with, to quote the composer, “extensive dreamlike interlinking passages that connect them.” The mood throughout is ominous and anxious, even in the more serene passages—which seems somehow fitting, given how the world at large has been faring since 2016.

That said, Grime’s inspiration for the concerto came not from international politics but rather from her previous collaborations with Swedish violinist Malin Broman, for whom the concerto was written. “I was immediately struck by the ferocity, power and passion in her playing,” writes Grime. ”At turns she is able to play with a sort of wild abandon but also with great tenderness, sensitivity and with many different colours…I wanted to highlight and showcase these striking, opposing qualities. Violent, virtuosic music covering the whole range of the violin is contrasted with more delicate and reflective filigree material that features oscillating natural harmonic passages and searching melodies.”

At that, she certainly succeeds. The agitated first section, the dreamlike (and slightly nightmarish) second, and the wild finale (with its unexpectedly abrupt ending) require the soloist to squeeze pretty much every possible sound out of the instrument and utilize its entire range—often at a frenetic pace and with frequent changes of meter. Needless to say, orchestra has to be equally on its toes.

You won’t find the work in the helpful SLSO Spotify playlist for this weekend, but there is, fortunately, a recording of the work’s premiere performance by the Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra on YouTube. Daniel Harding conducts with Broman as soloist. Not so fortunately, whoever did the video somehow managed to paste bits of the first movement on at the end of the concerto, interrupting both the closing credits and the applause. Although the video runs over a half hour, the actual performance ends at around 22:44 with a brief silence (because of that abrupt finale, I suspect) followed by the truncated applause.

Beethoven’s Symphony No. 4, which closes the program, also opens in a form of musical darkness, although in this case it’s more of a sonic twilight. A mysterious Adagio introduction suggests “the start of something big” and after a few minutes we get it in the form of an energetic Allegro vivace. From there on, the Fourth is all a-bubble with good humor.

The Red Castle at Hradec nad Moravicí

Whether or not you go along with the "Music History 101" notion that Beethoven’s even-numbered symphonies are lighter in tone than his odd-numbered ones (Schumann called the Fourth “a slender Grecian maiden between two Nordic giants”), there’s no getting around the fact that this one simply radiates good cheer. From the lively first movement, to the comical little descending passage for bassoon that interrupts the coda of the finale, this is music by a composer young enough to be optimistic but mature enough to have mastered his craft.

It probably helped that he wrote it during a stay at the Silesian country estate of one of his major patrons, Prince Lichnowsky (Beethoven described him as “one of my most loyal friends and promoters of my art”) during one of the composer’s rare periods of relatively good health. Beethoven loved going for walks in the country and Lichnowsky’s lavish estate (now open to tourists as the State chateau Hradec nad Moravicí) is perched picturesquely on a heavily forested bluff overlooking the Moravice river. No wonder the composer was in such good spirits.

The Essentials: John Storgårds conducts the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra and violin soloist Leila Josefowicz in “Night Ride and Sunrise” by Sibelius, the US premiere of the 2016 Violin Concerto by British composer Helen Grime, and the Symphony No. 4 by Beethoven. Performances are Friday at 10:30 am and Saturday at 8 pm, November 11 and 12 at Powell Hall in Grand Center. The Saturday night 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.