Symphony Review: An optimistic universe in Mozart's "Requiem"

“The universe is optimistic.” Thus spake Music Director Stéphane Denève at the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra this past Saturday (November 9). The inspiration for that declaration, he said, was the fact that the final chord in the score of Mozart’s “Requiem” (the major work on the program) is ambiguous. It could be either major or minor, but the overtones suggest the former.

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

I see the Universe as being indifferent myself, but I can hear what he means in the music, especially in a performance as good as the one I witnessed Saturday night.

Erin Freeman
Photo courtesy of the SLSO

Under the direction of its new director Erin Freemen the SLSO Chorus sang with a mix of power and clarity that was a joy to hear. The latter was especially apparent in, for example, the contrapuntal sections of the “Kyrie” and “Sanctus,” in which the individual lines were lucidly delineated. Newly installed baffles behind the singers might have helped project their sound a bit more effectively than in the past, but that was just icing on the proverbial cake. This was and is a splendid group of singers of whom Freeman is clearly proud.

Mozart’s “Requiem,” like Verdi’s (which the SLSO performed back in April), is unabashedly theatrical but not in the same way. Verdi was all about heaven-storming drama while Mozart was more interested in consolation here on earth. That’s not to say that he neglected the drama entirely—the “Dies Irae” and “Rex Tremendae” can be pretty intimidating. But Mozart—and his pupil Franz Xaver Süssmayr (1766–1803), who completed the “Requiem” after Mozart’s death—tempered the cataclysmic with the comforting.

That means that a good “Requiem” must bring us the tenderness along with the terror, and Denève’s performance certainly did that. His uncanny knack for highlighting interesting details and finding nuances that aren’t always apparent in the work stood him in good stead here. When Mozart and Süssmayr called for drama, it was there, but so was the compassion. This was a finely tuned reading that got equally fine playing from the orchestra.

Dashon Burton
Photo by Hunter Hart

Kudos are also due to the soloists, both individually and as members of the quartet.  Bass-baritone Dashon Burton and tenor Josh Lovell made a strong impression in the “Tuba mirum” duet with trombonist Jonathan Reycraft, although Burton seemed to falter a bit on the cadenza. Soprano Joélle Harvey and mezzo Kelly O’Connor displayed the deepest connection with both the audience and the text. All four were extremely moving in the heartfelt “Benedictus.”

The evening opened with Mozart’s 1788 Adagio and Fugue in C minor, K. 546, for strings. This is a stark and emotionally charged work consisting of a newly composed Adagio followed by an arrangement of the Fugue in C minor, K. 426, for two pianos from 1783. It was a genuine showpiece for the rich, full-bodied sound of the SLSO strings. Articulation was clean and the lines of the fugue were clearly laid out.

Somber as the mood was at that point, it became a bit darker with the next work, the "Vier Präludien und ernste Gesänge" ("Four Preludes and Serious Songs") by Detlev Glanert (b. 1960). Published in 2005, the work is an arrangement/expansion for baritone and orchestra of the last thing Brahms wrote, the Op. 121 "Four Serious Songs."  The songs are pure Brahms, but the preludes that separate them are a mix of the two composers. It’s not difficult to hear the transitions, but even so they are handled tastefully and complement rather than detract from the original songs.

The texts, adapted from the Lutheran Bible but stripped of any explicitly religious content, are meditations on death as sometimes bitter, sometimes comforting, and always inevitable. It’s not until the final song, “Wenn ich mit Meschen und mit Engleszugen redete” (“If I could speak with the tongues of men and of angels”), that the tone becomes consoling. Based on I Corinthians 13, it delivers a message that some alleged Christians these days are ignoring: “And now these three remain: faith, hope, and love; but the greatest of these is love.”

This was all beautifully sung by Burton. He captured the mood of each song, from authoritative to soothing, with emotional honesty and vocal power. The orchestra did justice to Glanert’s demanding preludes, and Denève brought it all together in a poignant interpretation that included a long moment of silence at the end—a perfect choice.

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 Preview: Big Piano, Part Zwei, with Emanuel Ax

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

Johannes Brahms
en.wikipedia.org

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Edward Elgar, circa 1900
en.wikipedia.org

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

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

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

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

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

Detlev Glanert
boosey.com

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

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

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

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

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

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

Symphony Preview: Last Thoughts

Amy Kaiser
stlsymphony.org

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

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

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

Brahms, later in life

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

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

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

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

Detlev Glanert
boosey.com

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

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

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

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

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