Review: A celebration of musical diversity at the St. Louis Symphony

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

Leonard Slatkin

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Last Saturday, November 12, former music director Leonard Slatkin conducted the St. Louis Symphony in a highly entertaining program of works by American composers. Ironically, given the outcome of our recent election, the evening was a celebration of our nation's diversity, with music informed by African-American and Jewish-American culture, as well as two major works by gay composers: Samuel Barber's Piano Concerto and Aaron Copland's Billy the Kid ballet suite.

Commissioned in 1959 by the piano manufacturer G. Schirmer as a vehicle for John Browning, the Barber concerto is heavily influenced by the big, muscular sound for which the late American pianist was famous. Resplendent in a shimmering turquoise gown, soloist Elizabeth Joy Roe -- a late substitute for the scheduled Olga Kern -- proved to be more than equal to the work's technical challenges, tearing the place up with a display of steely power that belied her diminutive appearance. You could hear that most obviously in her pristine rendering of the fire hose of notes that Barber pours out in the first movement cadenzas, as well as in the rapid-fire virtuoso flourishes of the last movement.

In a review for Classical Source, Colin Anderson called Ms. Roe's recording of the Barber concerto last year with the London Symphony "full of power and crusade and with no shortage of subtlety." I couldn't agree more. Her encore, a Rachmaninoff-esque arrangement of Gershwin's "The Man I Love," was an ideal choice, melding virtuosity to lyricism. This was a very promising local debut for the young Chicago-born pianist. I hope to see more of her here in the future.

Mr. Slatkin and the orchestra haven't played the concerto since 1992, when Mr. Browning was the soloist, but they sounded entirely comfortable with it Saturday night.

The second half of the concert opened with the suite from the 1938 ballet Billy the Kid by our second gay composer, Aaron Copland. Composed to a scenario by Lincoln Kirsten for Ballet Caravan, Billy the Kid was the first of Copland's two "cowboy" ballets (the other one is the popular Rodeo) and the first major work to display the popular "open" sound that would come to characterize his most often-played pieces.

Elizabeth Joy Roe

Mr. Slatkin and the SLSO recorded the entire ballet for EMI back in 1985, and it was interesting to compare the two performances. His tempi are more brisk than they were back then, but otherwise the grandeur, drama, and the flashes of droll humor in the score came through with the same clarity. The orchestra sounded great in the many solo and small ensemble moments Copland sprinkles throughout the work, and the percussion section deserves a shout-out for the "Gun Battle" sequence.

The concerts closed with Porgy and Bess: A Symphonic Picture for Orchestra by the noted composer and arranger Robert Russell Bennett. It's a work featuring African-American musical ideas translated for the stage by a Jewish-American composer and then arranged by a native Missourian who would go on to work with some of the biggest names in Broadway and Hollywood -- a quintessential example our nation's rich, multicultural heritage.

Bennett includes pretty much all of the "greatest hits" from Gershwin's original score, although the fact that they're out of sequence can feel a bit disconcerting if you know the opera well. Still, he intelligently expands on Gershwin's orchestrations while still respecting the composer's intent, and Mr. Slatkin conducted the musicians in a smartly turned out performance that did full justice to all of Gershwin's and Bennett's colors.

There was excellent work here by Cally Banham on English horn and Karin Bliznik on offstage trumpet in the opening sequence, and by the four additional sax players in the grand seduction of "There's A Boat that's Leavin' Soon for New York." "It Ain't Necessarily So" had real sinuous ease, "Bess, You Is My Woman Now" had true heart and soul, and the finale ("Lord, I'm on My Way") had the same mix of triumph and tragedy as the operatic original. I still love Gershwin's own Catfish Row suite, but Mr. Slatkin and the SLSO musicians made a fine case for the Bennett suite as well.

Mr. Slatkin followed the Gershwin up with an unexpected encore: an American folk music pastiche by his father, Felix Slatkin, titled "Devil's Dream." The original is from the 1962 LP Hoedown! The Fantastic Fiddles of Felix Slatkin that I still remember with fondness (it includes a truly memorable "Orange Blossom Special"). All of the original arrangements have been lost, but Leonard Slatkin's wife, composer Cindy McTee, has been painstakingly reconstructing them from the master recordings. If "Devil's Dream" was any indication, she's doing one hell of a job.

Speaking of Felix Slatkin, the concerts open with Kinah (Hebrew for "elegy") written by Leonard Slatkin and first performed by him last December with the Detroit Symphony, where he is currently Music Director. It's a memorial to his late father, who died at the tragically young age of 47 the day before he and his wife, the cellist Eleanor Aller, were scheduled to perform the Brahms Double Concerto in public for the first time.

Written in a style that is both obviously contemporary and deeply romantic, Kinah struck me, from the very first notes, with a sense of delicate beauty, longing, and loss. The work is based on a four-note motif drawn from the second movement of the Brahms concerto, but that actual passage isn't heard in its original form until the very end, after a vast wall of sound that could have come straight from the pen of Alan Hovhaness. In the ensuing hush, an offstage violin and cello try, but always fail, to complete the phrase, just as the elder Slatkin and Ms. Aller never completed their performance. It was profound and heartbreaking and beautifully done.

In an added personal touch, the offstage cellist was the man who played the part at the work's Detroit premiere, Mr. Slatkin's brother Frederick Zlotkin. The violinist was SLSO Associate Concertmaster Heidi Harris.

Next at Powell Hall: David Robertson conducts the orchestra and chorus with soloists Caitlin Lynch, soprano; Michelle DeYoung, mezzo-soprano; Nicholas Phan, tenor; and Kevin Thompson, bass in Mozart's Requiem and John Adam's On the Transmigration of Souls, along with The Unanswered Question by Charles Ives. Performances are Friday and Saturday at 8 p.m., and Sunday at 3 p.m., November 18-20, at Powell Hall in Grand Center.

Symphony Preview: E Pluribus Unum

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For Election Day weekend, former music director Leonard Slatkin will conduct the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra in a program of works by American composers. Ironically, given the outcome of that election, the evening is a celebration of our nation's diversity, with music informed by African-American and Jewish-American culture, as well as two major works by gay composers.

You can't say Fate doesn't have a dark sense of humor.

Leonard Slatkin

The concerts open with Kinah (Hebrew for "elegy") written by Mr. Slatkin and first performed by him last December with the Detroit Symphony, where he is currently Music Director. It's a memorial to his late father Felix Slatkin, conductor of (among others) the Hollywood Bowl Symphony Orchestra.

Mr. Slatkin's mother, Eleanor Aller, was a distinguished cellist who often played with the Warner Brothers Orchestra. In 1963, she and her husband were scheduled to present a public performance of a work they had often practiced at home but had never performed in public, the Brahms Double Concerto. That performance never happened. Between the Wednesday night rehearsal and the planned Saturday night performance, Felix Slatkin suffered a heart attack and died at the age of 47.

In prefatory remarks for the 2015 premiere, Mr. Slatkin described Kinah as "a tribute to my parents and in particular of my dad's passing because it's based on four notes that form the opening theme of the Brahms Concerto. It's heard in chords, and it's heard in fragments of melodies that occur throughout the work. It is only heard in more or less its complete form at the very end."

The scoring includes an offstage violin and cello (representing the composer's parents) that only play at the very end. They play fragments of the Brahms melody but never complete any of the phrases-a reminder that they never played the complete work. This weekend, the cello part will be played by the performer who performed at the world premiere, Mr. Slatkin's brother Frederick Zlotkin. The instrument he will be playing belonged to Mr. Slatkin's mother.

Listening to the work on line, I was struck immediately by a sense of delicate beauty, longing, and loss. If you can sit through all twelve minutes of this with a dry eye, you're a better man than I am, Gunga Din.

Samuel Barber, photographed by
Carl Van Vechten, 1944

Up next is a work premiered the year before the elder Slatkin's death, the first and only piano concerto by Samuel Barber (gay composer no. 1). Barber began writing the work while he was a student at Curtis Institute, gave up, and didn't try again for over three decades, when the piano firm of G. Schirmer commissioned him to write a new concerto for pianist John Browning. "Inspired by the muscular virtuosity of his chosen soloist," writes René Spencer Saller in her program notes, "Barber began working on the concerto the following spring. To reacquaint himself with the form, he pored over contemporary scores by Boulez, Copland, Webern, Berg, and Schoenberg. He finished the first two movements in 1960, but the finale remained in flux until only two weeks before the premiere, in September of 1962. Barber incorporated technical advice from both Browning and Vladimir Horowitz, who persuaded him that the third movement was unplayable at the original tempo."

Even at the designated tempo of Allegro molto, that last movement is a pretty wild ride-a fiercely energetic perpetual motion machine that requires a pianist of real skill and stamina. Olga Kern, the originally scheduled soloist, would have been a natural for this. Fortunately her substitute, Elizabeth Joy Roe, apparently knows the work well, having recorded it for Decca with the London Symphony Orchestra under Emil Tabakov.

The second half of this weekend's concerts starts with a suite drawn from the 1938 ballet Billy the Kid by our second gay composer, Aaron Copland. Composed to a scenario by Lincoln Kirsten for Ballet Caravan, Billy the Kid was the first of Copland's two "cowboy" ballets (the other one is the popular Rodeo) and the first major work to display the popular, "open" sound that would come to characterize his most often-played pieces. It was also the first time he incorporated American folk songs into his music (although he had already used Mexican tunes in El Salon Mexico two years earlier).

Aaron Copland, 1962
By CBS Television - eBay
itemphoto frontphoto back,
Public Domain

Copland's Billy the Kid is not the brutal killer of reality but rather a symbolic figure who is part outlaw and part tragic hero. In addition, as Richard Freed writes in his lines notes for the 1985 recording of the complete ballet Mr. Slatkin and the SLSO, "[o]thers have recognized in the music a symbolic representation of the various elements in the American 'frontier spirit' that made possible the westward expansion."

Certainly the music vividly evokes the vast plains of the mythic west with wide, open harmonies as well as a bustling frontier town with lively polyrhythms and a climactic gun battle with percussion outbursts. This is cinematic stuff that makes it easy to conjure up the action of the ballet in the mind's eye.

The concerts close with Porgy and Bess: A Symphonic Picture for Orchestra by the noted composer and arranger Robert Russell Bennett. It's a work featuring African-American musical ideas translated for the stage by a Jewish-American composer and then arranged by a native Missourian who would go on to work with some of the biggest names in Broadway and Hollywood. In many ways it encapsulates our nation's rich, multi-cultural heritage.

Although Gershwin's Porgy and Bess is now widely regarded as one of the masterpieces of 20th century opera, it took (to quote one of the opera's lyrics) “a long pull to get there”.
With a book by DuBose Heyward (based on his own original novel and play) and music and lyrics by the Brothers Gershwin, the original 1935 Theatre Guild production was a financial failure, and critical reaction was mixed and, from a contemporary standpoint, clueless. New York Times drama critic Brooks Atkinson dismissed it out of hand, and the paper's music critic, Olin Downes, found the mix of vernacular musical elements and sophisticated symphonic form completely baffling (a position which he would later recant).

Despite revivals of interest in the 1940s and 1950s, Porgy and Bess remained an essentially marginal work until a 1976 production of the complete score by the Houston Grand Opera—one that restored nearly an hour of music that had been cut from earlier productions—demonstrated conclusively that Gershwin's crowning achievement was also a great work of musical art.

George Gerwhsin, 1937

Some expansions and alternations not withstanding, the 1942 Bennett arrangement sticks pretty closely to Gershwin's own orchestration and covers some of the same territory as the composer's 1936 Catfish Row suite (which the SLSO recorded with Mr. Slatkin in 1990) including the banjo solo for "I Got Plenty o' Nothing". If you're a fan of the opera, you'll find a lot to like here, including nearly all of the opera's "greatest hits." Although I have to say I miss the Act I fugue that accompanies the murder of Robbins from Gershwin's own suite.

The Essentials: Leonard Slatkin conducts the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra with piano soloist Olga Kern in Barber's Piano Concerto, Copland's Billy the Kid Suite, Gershwin's Porgy and Bess: Symphonic Picture for Orchestra, and Slatkin's own composition Kinah. Performances are Friday at 10:30 a.m., Saturday at 8 p.m., and Sunday at 3 p.m., November 11 - 13, at Powell Hall in Grand Center. For more information: stlsymphony.org. The Saturday concert will be broadcast on St. Louis Public Radio.

Mr. Slatkin will also conduct Wagner's Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg Overture as part of a concert by the St. Louis Symphony Youth Orchestra on Friday at 8 p.m. Gemma New conducts the rest of the program, which includes music by Copland, Grieg, and Beethoven.

The rainbow connection

“Identity’s difficult. I suppose it brings about social cohesion, but it’s not much fun if you don’t quite fit. Being gay, for example, used to be pretty miserable. Or being a Protestant in a place like Ireland when the Catholic Church ruled the roost. Or being a woman in Ireland under the thumb of all those priests. Those big, dominant entities have been weakened, I suppose, but I think that might be a good thing, on balance. It’s allowed other identities to flourish.” – Isabel Dalhousie in Alexander McCall Smith’s The Forgotten Affairs of Youth

Briefs logo by Michael Perkins

The fact that I read this passage the afternoon before the final dress rehearsal for the Vital Voice/That Uppity Theatre Company co-production of Briefs: A Festival of Short Lesbian and Gay Plays (which runs Friday through Sunday, February 24-26) is one of life’s little synchronicities. Ditto the fact that it followed hard on the heels of yet another revelation about Sen. Rick Santorum’s conviction that any divergence from his twisted mockery of Christianity is the work of The Prince of Darkness.

I’ll leave others to deal with the senator's weirdly Freudian politics. I’d like to talk about how that passage resonates with our show.

Because if Briefs is about anything, it’s about the fluidity of identity and the diversity that comes from it.

See pictures from Briefs.

Some of the characters in our seven plays are gay and lesbian, but others are straight, bi, transgendered, and even figments of other characters’ imaginations. They (and the actors playing them, including yours truly) represent the variety of ages, ethnicities, gender, body types, beliefs, and sexual preferences that is the real hallmark of America. We are and (for most of our history) have been a spectacular spectrum of a nation—a virtual rainbow of humanity.

If America is about anything, it’s about diversity.

And that, no matter what some people will try to tell you, is a good thing. Diversity in nature increases resistance to extinction. Diversity in the workplace leads to smarter teams and better problem solving. Diversity is a source of strength. E pluribus unum.

Briefs plays Friday through Sunday this weekend at Pa Perla, 312 North 8th Street, across from the Old Post Office. The initial run of tickets has sold out, so the producers have added seats for each show. Order yours at brownpapertickets.com and join us in our celebration. There’s a bar, a DJ, and valet parking. And while it might not be obvious, there’s even a rainbow.