Symphony Preview: News of the world

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

Dmitri Shostakovich in 1935

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In the introduction to his chapter on Shostakovich in the 1967 Penguin Books edition of The Symphony, British musicologist Robert Layton described the Russian symphonist somewhat dismissively as a "documentary composer, far more bound up with this time than...Prokofiev, or any other of his Soviet contemporaries."

These days that would probably be a minority view. Yes, Shostakovich was heavily influenced by the economic and political turmoil that characterized 20th century Russian history. How could it be otherwise? But even in the early Symphony No. 1, which David Robertson and the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra will perform this weekend (January 12 and 13), you can hear how he transmuted those external experiences into a sound that was uniquely his own.

Written as a Leningrad Conservatory graduation piece and first performed in 1926 (when the composer was only 19), Shostakovich's First Symphony is a remarkable study in contrasts, with chamber music-style solo passages cheek by jowl with the full-tilt bombast of the composer's more popular works. Perky melodies reminiscent of the stuff Shostakovich probably heard during his work as a cinema pianist pop up in the first and second movements, standing in stark juxtaposition to the brooding and sporadically anguished gloom of the third. There's a piano part that calls to mind Stravinsky's Petrushka. And the final Allegro molto wraps everything up in a classic flourish of brass and percussion, reflecting the young composer's brash confidence while still retaining the sense of sarcasm that is always just below the surface.

It is, in short, a collage of external influences unified by Shostakovich's unique sensibility. It's not a documentary, it's art, even if it's a bit rough around the edges.

Also on the program is a piece that Mr. Layton might also have considered a "documentary" work in that it was inspired by the geopolitical news of the day. It's the Violin Concerto Op. 15, written by Benjamin Britten in 1938 and 1939 and later revised in 1950. Composed for Spanish violinist Toni Brosa, the concerto reflects the composer's sorrow over the Spanish civil war, which tore the nation apart from 1936 to 1939, ending with the triumph of Franco's brutal fascist regime.

Britten was very fond of the work. "It is without question my best piece," he observed. "It is rather serious I'm afraid." That was putting it mildly. Running around 40 minutes, the concerto is a dramatic and sometimes disturbing piece that combines fierce technical challenges with strong emotional content.

The concerto opens with a short (five note) figure on the tympani (a possible reference to the opening of Beethoven's Violin Concerto) that's soon joined by an anguished, ascending theme on the violin. The two ideas dominate the rest of the movement, sometimes in opposition to each other, sometimes joined so closely that it's hard to tell them apart. The second movement is a wildly virtuosic scherzo that feels like one of Hieronymus Bosch's creepier paintings set to music. It's almost monothematic, based largely on a triplet figure that's first stated by the violin and then gurgles away in the bassoons before moving on to the rest of the orchestra.

Benjamin Britten (R) and tenor Peter Pears with canine friend

A cadenza leads to the final movement. Marked "Andante lento," it's a passacaglia (a series of variations on a repeating theme in the bass line) that drips with anguish. "I began to feel as if I was in a massive church," writes Ben Hogwood in his Good Morning Britten blog, "the horns intoning a chant that gets taken up by the strings, as if the orchestra is slowly standing in response to the soloist's pleas for peace. Here the music sounds more like Shostakovich than any Britten so far, but at no point is it derivative. The closing notes are, in a sense, infuriating, because Britten deliberately plays between the major and minor key. The home 'note' of D isn't in question, but he creates continued uncertainty by refusing to resolve, and that stays with the listener afterwards".

Much, I imagine, like the uncertainty about the future one might feel when one's country has fallen under the heel of fascism.

"It's quite demanding, definitely," notes violinist Janine Jansen in a 2010 interview for violinist.com about her recording of the concerto with Paavo Järvi and the London Symphony. "There are some places, like the Scherzo, in the second movement, where it's very fast and there are a lot of double stops, and even double-stop harmonics. So it's quite tricky...But it is written so well, it's really an amazing piece to play, even with its difficulties. One doesn't think about it during the performance because one is so taken by the music and especially, for me, the end of the piece. The whole coda --this is the most impressive moment. It starts like a prayer, but it ends in a kind of scream, it's incredible. Every time one plays it, one can't move afterwards, physically and emotionally."

The soloist this weekend is Augustin Hadelich. I last heard him here in 2013 in a performance of Paganini's Violin Concerto No. 1 that combined virtuoso flash with real emotional sensitivity. He'll certainly need both of those skill sets for the Britten concerto.

The concert opens with a newly assembled suite from the 1995 chamber opera Powder Her Face by contemporary British composer Thomas Adès. The opera is based on the life of Margaret Campbell, Duchess of Argyll (1912-1993), whose elegant and fashionable life took a bizarre turn after a near-fatal fall down an elevator shaft in 1943. She emerged from the ordeal with no sense of smell or taste and a voracious sexual appetite--a great deal of which was on display in the notorious 1963 divorce trial that ended her marriage to Ian Douglas Campbell, 11th Duke of Argyll. A lavish lifestyle and bad investments eventually led to a penniless death but (to quote a Tom Lehrer lyric about a very different historical figure) "the body that reached her embalmer / was one that had known how to live."

The suite, a 2017 co-commission by the SLSO along with four other notable orchestras and Carnegie Hall, consists of three dance episodes from the opera (published 2007 as Dances from Powder Her Face and performed by the SLSO in October 2013) along with five additional movements. The original scoring for a 15-piece pit orchestra has been expanded to symphonic proportions, with a large percussion battery that includes a pop gun, a washboard, two whips (!) and a paper bag.

"I'm not making this up, you know," as Anna Russell once said.

The Essentials: David Robertson conducts the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra and violin soloist Augustin Hadelich Friday at 10:30 am and Saturday at 8 pm, January 12 and 13. The concerts take place at Powell Symphony Hall, 718 North Grand in Grand Center.

Taking the Fifth

Jaap van Zweden

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Who: The St. Louis Symphony conducted by Jaap van Zweden
What: Music of Beethoven and Shostakovich
When: January 31 – February 2, 2014
Where: Powell Symphony Hall

It was a case of saving the best for last this weekend as the St. Louis Symphony concluded its four-week "Beethoven Festival" with stunning performances by guest conductor Jaap van Zweden of the Fifth symphonies of Beethoven and a composer who greatly admired Beethoven, Dmitri Shostakovich.

The pairing of these two symphonies isn't just a clever gimmick. Both works, as Paul Schiavo points out in his program notes, are works "of strife or pathos progressing to exultant finales. That progression makes for a musical drama that is both elemental and thrilling."  That said, these two symphonies come from vastly different worlds—and not just because one was written 120 years after the other.

The Beethoven is certainly the more famous and less ambiguous of the two.  "Beethoven's Fifth Symphony," wrote English scholar and BBC classical music producer Basil Lam back in 1966, "was the first of a new kind of symphony, which, because it expressed in musical terms the optimistic humanist philosophy, became almost the norm in the nineteenth century."  The message of triumph through struggle could not be clearer, especially in the exultant final pages of the last movement where, as Mr. Schiavo writes, "the dramatic passage from darkness to light, from despair to joy—that is the “meaning” of the finale and the goal of the entire symphony."

That's not to say that there aren't plenty of traps for the unwary conductor. Tempi have to be carefully chosen (especially now that "original instrument" guys like Roger Norrington have shown us the kind of excitement you can generate by paying attention to those metronome markings) and the overall interpretation has to maintain a sense of momentum and progress towards that joyous finale without feeling rushed and without neglecting the many wonderful orchestral details Beethoven provided. 

None of this posed a problem for Mr. van Zweden and the orchestra, though.  The first movement was crisp and incisive, setting the stage for the dramatically charged (and bracingly brisk) reading that was to follow.  The second movement Andante con moto was expressive but never lugubrious and the scherzo was appropriately mysterious.  And the finale was, indeed, joyous.

Those orchestral details referred to above came through with great clarity as well.  The entrance of the basses and cellos at the beginning of the fugato section of the scherzo was exceptionally dramatic, I thought, and the winds were lovely throughout.  This was, in other words, a Beethoven Fifth that was perfectly balanced and even, at times, revelatory.  Which, for a piece this well known, is saying something.

Shostakovich's Fifth has a complex history.  The composer wrote it quickly (in three months) in 1937, partly in response to harsh criticism of his surreal and lurid 1934 opera "Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District" by the Stalin regime.  "The opera disappeared overnight," notes Michael Tilson Thomas in an episode of the PBS series "Keeping Score" on the Fifth, "and every publication and political organization in the country heaped personal attacks on its composer."

This was at the height of that outbreak of official violence now known as the Stalinist Terror, so being blacklisted didn't just put your career in jeopardy but your life as well.  The composer set out, therefore, to produce a work that would appear, at least on the surface, to meet the demands of heroic socialist realism. He even went so far as to accompany the first performance with an article in the Moscow newspaper Vechernyaya Moskva titled "A Soviet Artist’s Reply to Just Criticism"—lest there be any doubt that he had Learned His Lesson.

It worked.  Shostakovich was officially rehabilitated and for many years afterwards the Fifth was seen, even in the West, as a classic example of Triumph through Struggle.  It was only many years later, when the composer's private thoughts about the Fifth began to come to light, that it became apparent there might be a deeper meaning to this music—a meaning apparent to the opening night audience in Leningrad in 1937, even if the commissars missed it.  "Many in the premiere audience were seen to weep openly," writes Richard Freed, in his notes for Leonard Slatkin's 1986 recording with the SLSO. "[T]hey wept, Shostakovich himself felt, because 'they understood; they understood what was happening around them and they understood what the Fifth was about.'"

Listening to it now, it's impossible not to hear despair and defiance instead of patriotic uplift, especially in the ominous mock fanfare of the opening and the succession of aggressive march tunes in the finale. The second movement Allegretto is a Mahlerian parody of a waltz, complete with squawking clarinet (nicely done by Dana Haskell in the E-flat clarinet, an instrument that doesn't get many solos, along with fellow single reeders Scott Andrews and Tina Ward) and, unexpectedly, a graceful little violin (David Halen, in a fine moment with the harps). And the third movement Largo clearly feels like lament for all the friends and family the composer lost to the Terror, memorialized with chorale-like string writing (rendered with great intensity by the symphony strings) that calls to mind the liturgy of the banned Russian Orthodox Church.

Mr. van Zweden's interpretation, while not downplaying the music's drama, sounded very much informed by the tragic and defiant subtext of this piece.  The trumpets in the first movement march had an aggressive and mocking snarl, for example, and the mournful little celesta figure that closes the movement was allowed to die into a brief and telling silence.  The dark comedy of the second movement came through loud and clear and the Largo was just as heartbreaking as it should have been.  I can only imagine what it must have meant to an audience in 1937, most of whom would have lost friends and family to the Terror (as did the composer himself).

The biggest challenge with the Fifth, though, is the finale.  Take it one way (usually with faster tempi) and it becomes, as Shostakovich wrote at the time of the work's premiere, "the optimistic resolution of the tragically tense moments of the first movement."  Change it just a bit, and it becomes a parody of militaristic triumphalism.  Mr. van Zweden's interpretation felt like it emphasized the latter while still allowing us to understand what Stalin and company thought they heard.  I'd say that's masterful.

The St. Louis Symphony's intoxicating pair of Fifths will be performed again tonight (Saturday, February 1) at 8 PM and Sunday at 3 PM at Powell Hall in Grand Center.  The Saturday concert will be broadcast live on St. Louis Public Radio at 90.7 FM, HD 1, and streaming from the station web site.  But, of course, it’s best heard live.

Next on the schedule: James Gaffigan conducts with soloists David Halen (violin) and Daniel Lee (cello) in the Brahms "Double Concerto," along with Mendelsshon’s "Symphony No. 3" and "The Fair Melusina Overture."  Performances take place on Friday at 10:30 AM, Saturday at 8 PM and Sunday at 3 PM, February 7 - 9, at Powell Symphony Hall, 718 North Grand.  For more information: stlsymphony.org.

Augmented fifth

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The St. Louis Symphony's "Beethoven Festival" concludes this weekend with Beethoven's Greatest Hit, the "Symphony No. 5 in C minor, Op. 67." In an ingenious bit of programming, it's paired with another fifth: the "Symphony No. 5 in D minor, op. 47," composed in 1937 by Dmitri Shostakovich. Jaap van Zweden conducts.

The pairing of these two symphonies isn't just a clever gimmick. Both works, as Paul Schiavo points out in his program notes, are works "of strife or pathos progressing to exultant finales. That progression makes for a musical drama that is both elemental and thrilling." The fact that, in Shostakovich's case, the finale might actually have a double meaning just makes things that much more interesting.

But first, the Beethoven. Given the immense popularity this work has enjoyed over the centuries, it's easy to forget that its premiere on December 22, 1808 in Vienna was not a great success. The Fifth was part of a mammoth five hour program that included the Sixth ("Pastoral") Symphony, the Fourth Piano Concerto, a couple of movements from the "Mass in C," a concert aria ("Ah, perfido"), and the Op. 80 "Choral Fantasy." Beethoven conducted and played the solo piano part in the Concerto and the Fantasy.

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

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

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

Shostakovich's Fifth had a more successful premiere. Indeed, it's possible that the Fifth saved not only the composer's career but his life as well.

Shostakovich in 1935

When Shostakovich began work on the Fifth, he was in hot water with Stalin's regime. Stalin's rise to power marked a chilling of the intellectual atmosphere in the Soviet Union. All art was expected to serve the political interests of the state and to be as accessible as possible. The exuberant experimentation that followed the overthrow of the Czarist regime was now strictly forbidden. Composers were expected to write upbeat, patriotic stuff—or else.

Unfortunately for Shostakovich, his most popular work at the time was his surreal and lurid 1934 opera "Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District". It had been playing to packed houses in Leningrad, but when Stalin decided to attend a performance in Moscow in January of 1936 he was not amused. The dissonant score baffled him and he was reportedly put off by the graphic violence on stage—ironic, considering the total body count of the Stalinist Terror. Stalin left at intermission and the next day an anonymous article on the front page of Pravda (approved and possibly even written by Stalin) condemned the music and libretto in the harshest terms. "Muddle Instead of Music," ran the headline. Not good.

"The opera disappeared overnight," notes Michael Tilson Thomas in an episode of the PBS series "Keeping Score" on the Fifth, "and every publication and political organization in the country heaped personal attacks on its composer." The 29-year-old composer started sleeping in the stairwell of his apartment building, hoping that doing so might spare his family when the secret police came to drag him off to a Gulag or worse. They never did, but he lost many friends and even family members to that outbreak of official violence now known as the Stalinist Terror.

After writing and then withdrawing a Fourth Symphony, Shostakovich finally began work on the Fifth in April of 1937. He completed it in less than three months. He set out to produce a work that would appear, at least on the surface, to meet the demands of heroic socialist realism. He even went so far as to accompany the first performance with an article in the Moscow newspaper Vechernyaya Moskva titled "A Soviet Artist’s Reply to Just Criticism"—lest there be any doubt that he had Learned His Lesson.

And it worked. Official response to the November 21 1937 premiere by the Leningrad Philharmonic under Evgeny Mravisnky (who would become a great champion of the work) was enthusiastic. Alexei Tolstoy set the official tone in a review in which he praised the "enormous optimistic lift" of the final movement. Shostakovich was officially rehabilitated.

But is the Fifth really the model of Soviet patriotism the commissars thought it was? In his liner notes for the St. Louis Symphony's 1986 recording of the Fifth (with Leonard Slatkin conducting) Richard Freed writes that the work "was born of [Shostakovich's] determination to be a survivor, and to keep his protests private—except insofar as the perceptive listener could hear them in his music." And, indeed, it appears that the audience at the symphony's premiere heard a deeper and less superficial message. "Many in the premiere audience were seen to weep openly," writes Mr. Freed. "[T]hey wept, Shostakovich himself felt, because 'they understood; they understood what was happening around them and they understood what the Fifth was about.'"

Listening to it now, it's impossible not to hear despair and defiance instead of patriotic uplift, especially in the ominous mock fanfare of the opening and the succession of aggressive march tunes in the finale. The second movement Allegretto is a Mahlerian parody of a waltz, complete with squawking clarinet and, unexpectedly, a graceful little violin. And the third movement Largo clearly feels like lament for all the friends and family the composer lost to the Terror, memorialized with chorale-like string writing that calls to mind the liturgy of the banned Russian Orthodox Church.

This disconnect between what Soviet officials heard and what the composer intended is most evident, I think, in the final movement. The Soviet bureaucrats heard triumph, affirmation, and apotheosis. As well they might have, since Shostakovich, at the time of the symphony's premiere, described that finale as "the optimistic resolution of the tragically tense moments of the first movement." Even in the West, symphony program notes and liner notes for recordings described the finale with phrases like "the utmost in orchestral power and brilliance" (David Hall for the 1958 Stokowski recording) and "lusty and boisterous" (an unnamed annotator for the 1962 Karel Ancerl LP).

That all changed with the publication, in 1979, of "Testimony" by the Russian musicologist Solomon Volkov. Allegedly based on memoirs of Shostakovich, the book states unequivocally that the final movement of the Fifth was intended as a parody of militaristic triumphalism: "The rejoicing is forced, created under threat, as in Boris Godunov. It's as if someone were beating you with a stick and saying, 'Your business is rejoicing, your business is rejoicing,' and you rise, shaky, and go marching off, muttering, 'Our business is rejoicing, our business is rejoicing.'" Richard Freed writes, as well, that "Shostakovich is on record as having stated that he intended no apotheosis in this finale."

Some recent performances and recordings, as a result, tend to emphasize the caustic and satirical aspects of the Fifth (Mr. Slatkin's is a good example). What approach will Mr. van Zweden take? We won't know until Friday night.

The essentials: Jaap van Zweden conducts the St. Louis Symphony in the "Symphony No. 5 in C minor, op. 67" by Beethoven and the "Symphony No. 5 in D minor, op. 47" by Shostakovich. Performances are Friday and Saturday at 8 PM and Sunday at 3 PM, January 31 - February 2, at Powell Symphony Hall in Grand Center. For more information: stlsymphony.org. The Saturday concert will also be broadcast on St. Louis Public Radio at 90.7 FM, HD 1, and on line at stlouispublicradio.org.

Delirious

Peter Oundjian

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This weekend at Powell Hall it's a classic example of musical storytelling, a cocky, nose-thumbing piano concerto by a musical wise guy in his 20s, and a bit of orchestral delirium.

The storytelling comes from the pen of Nikolay Rimski-Korsakov (1844-1908), one of the great Russian romantic masters and a genius at orchestration. He aggressively promoted Russian nationalism in his music, emphasizing folk and Middle Eastern/Oriental influences. All of those elements on on display in his 1888 symphonic suite Scheherazade, inspired by episodes in the One Thousand and One Nights (a.k.a. The Arabian Nights). It's almost certainly his most popular work and a favorite of audiences around the world.

As well it should be. This is music that conjures up striking images: the imperious Sultan, the sensual Scheherazade, Sinbad's ship, the stormy sea, the festival at Baghdad—it's a veritable widescreen extravaganza. There are also plenty of solo passages that will give individual members of the orchestra a chance to show off. Concertmaster David Halen has an especially prominent role to play as the voice of Scheherazade. It's tremendously entertaining stuff when done well.

Stewart Goodyear Photo: Victor Avila

Also tremendously entertaining is the Piano Concerto No. 1 for piano, trumpet, and strings Op. 35, written by the 27-year-old Dimitri Shostakovich (1906-1975) in 1933 and first performed by him with the Leningrad Philharmonic in October of that year. It's written for a small orchestra (strings plus that one very prominent trumpet) and manages to combine elements of both the Baroque and Classical periods with sounds that would not be out of place in the score of a silent film comedy. “Shostakovich wrote this when he was in his late 20s," notes Principal Trumpet Karin Bliznik (who will be playing the trumpet part his weekend) in the symphony program book. "He used to play piano accompaniment to silent movies. You can imagine some Charlie Chaplin or Keystone Kops slapstick for this piece.”

Thomas Adès

The concert opens with local premiere of three dance episodes from the 1995 chamber opera Powder Her Face by British composer Thomas Adès (1971- ). The opera is based on the life of Margaret Campbell, Duchess of Argyll (1912-1993) , whose elegant and fashionable life took a bizarre turn after a near-fatal fall down an elevator shaft in 1943. She emerged from the ordeal with no sense of smell or taste and a voracious sexual appetite—a great deal of which was on display in the notorious 1963 divorce trial that ended her marriage to Ian Douglas Campbell, 11th Duke of Argyll. A lavish lifestyle and bad investments eventually led to a penniless death but (to quote a Tom Lehrer lyric about a very different historical figure) "the body that reached her embalmer / was one that had known how to live."

I've never seen the opera (which includes, according to a review of the original production by Alex Ross was pretty explicit stuff) or heard these selections, so I'll take the lazy way out and quote the description from Paul Schiavo's program notes: "Dance rhythms inform each of the three movements that comprise this work. First comes an overture suggesting tango, foxtrot, and other steps being attempted in an inebriated state, with interjections of mocking laughter. The ensuing waltz has a music-box delicacy about it. But its mechanism seems flawed, the rhythms continually twitching or hiccupping or otherwise going awry. Similar rhythmic dislocations mark the finale, where Adès’s superimposition of figures moving at different speeds seems at once playful and disturbing in a fever-dream sort of way."

It does sound like good company for the Shostakovich, doesn't it?

Performances are Friday and Saturday, October 25 and 26, at 8 PM at Powell Hall. The orchestra will be conducted by Peter Oundjian with Stewart Goodyear at the piano. For more information: stlsymphony.org.

Rach and roll, part 1

Who: Pianist Stephen Hough and The St. Louis Symphony Orchestra conducted by Hans Graf
What: Music of Rimski-Korsakov, Shostakovich, and Rachmaninoff
Where: Powell Symphony Hall, St. Louis
When: April 27, 2012

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[Download the complete St. Louis symphony program notes in PDF format]

Pianist Stephen Hough has both tremendous power and a delicate touch. Hans Graf is a conductor who, while he maintains a disciplined presence on the podium, can nevertheless be passionate and lyrical. Put them together and you have a killer beginning to the two-week “Rach Fest" at the Powell Hall.

Friday morning’s program featured compelling performances of Rachmaninoff’s “Piano Concerto No. 1” (in the 1917 revision) and Shostakovich’s dark and acerbic “Symphony No. 1”, as well as the local premiere of Rimski-Korsakov’s colorful “Skazka” (“Fairy Tale”). It was, to say the least, a tremendous success and was warmly received by a larger than usual audience.

It has been almost exactly a year since the multi-talented Mr. Hough (he’s a composer and writer on music and theology as well as a virtuoso pianist) graced the stage at Powell Hall. Last time it was a knockout reading of Tchaikovsky’s “Piano Concerto No. 2”. This time around his Rachmaninoff First was at least as impressive. Mr. Hough has done the Rach First with the symphony before—in February of 2007 under Maestro Robertson. At that time I noted that he “played with the ease and confidence that are the hallmarks of solid keyboard technique” and see no reason to change that assessment now.

Originally written while Rachmaninoff was a student at the Moscow Conservatory, the concerto was later revised substantially on the eve of the Russian Revolution in 1917, and it's not hard to hear the faint echoes of that turbulence in the sweep and drama of this remarkably concise and vigorous work. Mr. Hough has the chops to give full vent to that drama, cruising through all the flashy writing in the opening and closing movements, but he was equally convincing in the nocturnal yearning of the Andante. Mr. Graf matched him with a soulful reading that made effective use of rubato at key moments without ever losing the concerto’s sense of momentum. His tempo for the finale was brisk, but the symphony musicians handled it with ease.

Friday morning Mr. Hough acknowledged his well-deserved standing ovation with a delightful encore: his own mashup of the Russian song “Leningrad Nights” (known here in the West as both “Midnight in Moscow” and “Moscow Nights”) with motifs from Rachmaninoff’s “Piano Concerto No. 2”. It reminded me of the clever Piano Puzzlers that Bruce Adolphe provides for PRI’s “Performance Today” radio broadcast and was much appreciated.

Much as I love Rachmaninoff, the most interesting thing about these concerts to me was the presence of the rarely heard Shostakovich symphony and the even rarer Rimski-Korsakov.

Written as a Leningrad Conservatory graduation piece and first performed in 1926 (when the composer was only 19), Shostakovich’s First Symphony is a remarkable study in contrasts, with chamber music-style solo passages cheek by jowl with the full-tilt bombast of the composer’s more popular works. There are wonderful moments, for example, for the principal oboe, bassoon, flute, clarinet, and cello as well as piano part that calls to mind Stravinsky’s “Petrushka”—a piece that was very likely in the composer’s mind at the time. Perky melodies reminiscent of the stuff Shostakovich probably heard during his work as a cinema pianist pop up in the first and second movement, standing in stark juxtaposition to the brooding and sporadically anguished gloom of the third, while the final Allegro molto wraps everything up in a classic flourish of brass and percussion which manages to sound both triumphant and sarcastic at the same time.

With so many “concerto for orchestra” solo passages, the Shostakovich First is rife with opportunities for individual players to shine—which is exactly what they did Friday morning. Mr. Graf’s interpretation was, I thought, very transparent to the music, allowing Shostakovich to come through pretty much unfiltered. It was tremendously exciting stuff.

This was my first opportunity to see Mr. Graf perform live, by the way. His style, it seemed to me, was marked by equal parts of precision, warmth, and good humor. His podium presence is not overly demonstrative, but I was nevertheless left with the sense that he takes great joy in the music he conducts. That appeared to communicate itself to both the musicians and the audience.

Like the Shostakovich, Rimski-Korsakov’s brief tone poem “Skazka” (“Fairy Tale”) is also filled with lovely solo passages, particularly for clarinet, flute, oboe, and violin. Its episodic structure suggests an underlying narrative related to the work’s literary inspirations—Russian folk tales and Pushkin’s Ruslan and Lyudmila—but the composer declined to be specific, allowing the listener’s mind to conjure up whatever exotic images the colorful music suggests.

Mr. Graf’s performance made the most of the music’s many contrasting moods and the symphony musicians responded with their usual fine playing. The solo passages were beautifully realized, even if the flute had to briefly contend with cell phone accompaniment at one point.

Which brings me to the only negative aspect of Friday morning’s concert: the clueless conduct of some audience members. It’s bad enough that Mr. Graf was obliged to hold the opening downbeat for a minute or two while waiting from some folks on the house floor to stop yakking. What was really rather embarrassing was the applause that broke out during the transition between the third and fourth movements of the Shostakovich. Concert etiquette says you don’t start applauding until the conductor lowers his baton. For many composers (like, say, Shostakovich) silence is an element of composition. Conductors usually respect that. So should audiences.

Next at Powell Hall: The Rach Fest concludes May 4-6 with the “Piano Concerto No. 1” (Friday at 8 PM) and “Piano Concerto No. 3” (Saturday at 8 and Sunday at 3). Stephen Hough is at the keyboard again with Peter Oundjian at the podium. The program for all three concerts includes Glinka’s Ruslan and Lyudmila Overture and Beethoven’s “Symphony No. 5”. For more information you may call 314-534-1700 or visit stlsymphony.org.

From Russia, con fuoco

Who: The St. Louis Symphony Orchestra with Yefim Bronfman, piano
What: Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No. 1 and Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 10
Where: Powell Symphony Hall, St. Louis
When: April 15 through 17, 2011

I’m not big on standing ovations as a rule, but this Friday found me on my feet at the end of both halves of the program – first for a lively Tchaikovsky Piano Concerto No. 1 with volcanic pianism from Yefim Bronfman and then for a powerful Shostakovich Symphony No. 10.

The Tchaikovsky is, of course, an enduring chestnut that always gets a warm response. The lively melodies (some appropriated from Ukrainian folk sources) and flashy piano part never fail to appeal. What distinguished this performance for me, though, was the way in which conductor David Robertson and pianist Yefim Bronfman brought out the dance elements that, while clearly present, are not always recognized in the concert hall. The famous first theme, in particular, sounded more like a waltz than usual. The strong rhythmic pulse carried right through the lilting second movement and into the third, winding up with a spectacular finale that was emphatically “con fuoco”.

Dimitri Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 10, by contrast, isn’t easy to love. An often somber and deeply felt reflection on grim oppression of the Stalin years, the 10th is, even by Shostakovich standards, a work of extremes. Moments of crystalline delicacy alternate with vast outpourings of orchestral sound. Deceptively simple-sounding melodic material is spun out in increasingly complex ways, especially during the long and sometimes harrowing first movement. It’s a piece that demands and deserves the kind of intense concentration that audiences are not, sadly, always ready to grant in our current era of mass distraction.

Mr. Robertson and the orchestra were more than up to the challenges of this highly personal testament to the endurance of the human spirit. Although scored for a large orchestra, the 10th is nevertheless filled with long solo and small ensemble passages. The winds, in particular (especially the double reed contingent), are given many opportunities to shine, and on Friday night they unquestionably did. This is a symphony that requires the musicians to be not only skilled ensemble players but solid soloists as well. The members of the SLSO clearly meet both requirements with ease.

A great performance always makes me want to go back and listen to the work again. It’s a testimony to the quality of Friday’s reading of the 10th that I went back the next day to listen to my CD of the Leonard Slatkin/SLSO performance from 1987. The band sounded pretty terrific back then as well.

Next up on the symphony schedule are a pair of lesser-known works by well-known composers: Tchaikovsky’s Second Piano Concerto and Scriabin’s Second Symphony April 28 and 29, 2011. Ward Stare will conduct with Stephen Hough at the piano. For more information, you can call 314-534-1700, visit slso.org, or follow @slso on Twitter.