Review: New kids on the block

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

Karina Canellakis
Photo: Chris Christodoulou

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This weekend's St. Louis Symphony Orchestra concerts gave us some notable local debuts, both on the stage and on the page.

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

On stage, Saturday night's concert (January 19, 2019) was a triumph for guest conductor Karina Canellakis, the newly appointed Chief Conductor of the Netherlands Radio Philharmonic Orchestra. In her first appearance with the orchestra, she showed an impressive grasp of a wide range of music, from Mozart's 1775 Violin Concerto No. 5 ("Turkish") to Paul Hindemith's 1944 "Symphonic Metamorphosis on Themes of Carl Maria von Weber." In his own local debut, Ray Chen (a last-minute substitute for an ailing Renaud Capuçon) made an equally strong impression as the soloist in the Mozart.

On the page, the new kid in town was Richard Strauss's "Symphonic Fantasy from Die Frau ohne Schatten." First performed in 1919 but making its first appearance with the SLSO, this 22-minute orchestral synthesis of scenes from the composer's massive fairy tale opera neatly captures the drama and fantastic atmosphere of the original. It's a typically Straussian exercise in orchestral excess, with over 100 musicians (including an expanded percussion section and an organ) delivering a captivating kaleidoscope of orchestral color.

It was all beautifully played and conducted with great authority by Ms. Canellakis, whose interpretation provided a cohesive view of this potentially very episodic work. In an interview for the SLSO program, she describes the music of "Die Frau ohne Schatten" ("The Woman Without a Shadow") as "unbelievable, impressive, and beguiling." You could hear that happy enthusiasm for the music in every minute of this stunning performance.

Ray Chen
Photo: John Mac

I heard and saw that same joy and sense of fun in the way both she and Mr. Chen delivered the Mozart concerto. The last of the composer's violin concertos, the Fifth is filled with unexpected turns of phrase, including the so-called "Turkish" interlude of the finale in which the cellos and basses strike their strings, col legno, to produce an exotic percussive effect. This was an interpretation that bubbled over with sheer delight in music making, and it was impossible not to smile in response. A violinist herself, Ms. Canellakis clearly had a strong connection with both this work and with Mr. Chen.

Enthusiastic applause moved Mr. Chen to return to the stage and play an encore: Paganini's Caprice No. 21--a nice contrast to the Mozart and expertly played.

The concert opened with a performance of Beethoven's "Lenore Overture No. 3" that covered a wide emotional range, from the hushed introduction to a coda that crackled with energy. Ms. Canellakis's conducting was incisive, with neatly shaped phrases and a fine sense of the drama of this very theatrical work. Associate Principal Tom Drake provided the authoritative offstage trumpet.

The evening ended with a virtuoso romp through the Hindemith "Metamorphosis." Originally intended (but never used) as a ballet score, the four-movement work is, like the Strauss piece that preceded it on the program, a riot of vivid orchestral color. Hindemith's transformations on Weber's original themes is striking in its originality and filled with great solo moments, performed with great polish here by (among others) Principal Flute Mark Sparks, Principal Oboe Jelena Dirks, and Principal Clarinet Scott Andrews. The brass section was in fine form, as was the percussion section, most notably in the "Chinoiserie" of the second movement, based on themes from incidental music for Schiller's play "Turandot."

It's always a pleasure to see new, young performers at Powell Hall. Based on their strong showing Saturday night, I would think both Ms. Canellakis and Mr. Chen would be strong contenders for more appearances with the SLSO in the future.

Next at Powell Hall: Gemma New conducts the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra in "Star Wars: A New Hope in Concert" Thursday through Saturday at 7 pm, and Sunday at 2 pm, January 24-27. Performances take place at Powell Hall in Grand Center. At this time, only "limited view" tickets are available.

Symphony Preview: Known unknowns

Beethoven by Joseph Karl Stieler, 1820

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It's an all-German program this weekend (January 18 and 19, 2019) as guest conductor Karina Canellakis leads the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra and violinist Renaud Capuçon in an evening of music by Beethoven, Mozart, Richard Strauss, and Paul Hindemith. The names are familiar to most music lovers, but some of the program might not be.

The concerts open, appropriately, with an overture. Specifically, it's the second of four overtures Beethoven wrote for his opera "Fidelio" (originally titled "Lenore") so, naturally, it's known as the "Lenore" Overture No. 3.
Allow me to explain.

With a libretto adapted from Pierre Gaveaux's 1798 opera "Léonore, ou L'amour conjugal," Beethoven's opera is the story of Lenore's efforts to free her husband Florestan from a political prison by disguising herself as a guard named Fidelio. In fact, management at the Theater an der Wein, where the opera was first performed, insisted on changing the name from "Lenore" to "Fidelio" to avoid confusion with the earlier opera.

With each production, "Fidelio" got a new overture. The overture now labeled "Lenore" No. 2 was actually the one performed at the first production in 1805. An 1806 revision got the overture we'll hear this weekend, "Lenore" No. 3. A planned performance in Prague in 1808 never happened, but the revised overture was discovered after the composer's death and labeled "Lenore" No. 1 on the mistaken belief that it was his first attempt. These days when the opera is performed, it's in the 1814 revision.

Of the four overtures, "Lenore" No. 3 gets the most attention, primarily because it's the one that best encapsulates the story of the opera. As Michael Steinberg writes in notes for the San Francisco Symphony, it's "too strong a piece and too big, even too dramatic, to be an effective introduction for a stage action, something that Beethoven realized almost at once. It does, however, stand as one of the great emblems of the heroic Beethoven, a potent and controlled musical embodiment of a noble humanistic passion." In short, what works as a concert opener doesn't necessarily work as an opera opener.

Mozart, ahead of his time

Up next is Mozart's Violin Concerto No. 5 ("Turkish"), performed by Ray Chen. It's a late substitute for the originally scheduled Schumann Violin Concerto due to the illness of the original soloist, Renaud Capuçon. The last and most sophisticated of Mozart's violin concertos, the fifth is, as Blair Johnson points out at Allmusic.com , a forward-looking piece "very nearly in line with the instrumental concerto of the next century":

Though the piece itself is clearly within the Classical chamber concerto tradition, its scale (better than 25 minutes, usually) and the degree of its technical demands mark the work as something new for the violin. Many pieces with equal or greater raw physical demands had already been composed by the time of the Concerto No. 5, but none of them has survived the test of time, and certainly none is as formidable a piece of music -- it is not without reason that this is the only one of the five to regularly receive as much attention from musicologists and historians as do the crown jewels of Mozart's piano concerto catalog. A warhorse of the student repertory and a staple of the professional's diet, this may well be the most frequently played violin concerto ever written.

Regarding this weekend's soloist, Ray Chen began to attract attention when he won First Prize in the 2008 Yehudi Menuhin and 2009 Queen Elisabeth Competitions for young violinists. Since then he has appeared with orchestras in Europe, Asia, and North America. This season his schedule includes the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the Singapore Symphony Orchestra, and the Barcelona Symphony Orchestra.

Richard Strauss in 1938

Up next is Richard Strauss's "Symphonic Fantasy from Die Frau Ohne Schatten" composed in 1946 and based on themes from his 1919 opera "Die Frau Ohne Schatten" ("The Woman Without a Shadow"). Like "Fidelio," the opera has a troubled history. The complex fairy tale libretto by Strauss's frequent collaborator Hugo von Hofmannsthal tended to leave audiences cold, and the serious technical demands of the work placed it outside the capabilities of all but the most well heeled companies.

"If ever an opera was weighed down by its creators' joint ambition," writes John Shirley in a review of the Royal Opera's 2014 production, "it is Die Frau ohne Schatten." Strauss and Hofmannsthal saw the work as their masterpiece but "it turned into a complex and unwieldy embarrassment of riches, albeit a glorious one. The charge that this enormous fairy tale represents the librettist and composer at their most pretentious and overblown is difficult to refute."

The "Fantasy," in any case, captures the drama and fantastic atmosphere of the opera in a mere 22 minutes and without the need for elaborate scenery. Besides, Tim Munro's program notes provide a handy breakdown of the themes used and their placement in the opera. The music requires a great orchestra but, of course, we already have that.

Paul Hindemith, age 28

A great orchestra is also a requirement for the last work on the program, Paul Hindemith's "Symphonic Metamorphosis on Themes by Carl Maria von Weber." Originally intended as a ballet for the dancer and choreographer Léonide Massine, the work became a purely symphonic piece when Hindemith and Massine were unable to agree on its final format.

The Weber originals transformed by Hindemith are three piano duets and, in the second movement Scherzo, the overture to Schiller's play "Turandot," an Italian translation of which would later become the basis for Puccini's opera of the same name. Hindemith's reworking of this relatively modest material is striking and colorful. As D. Kern Holoman of the University of California at Davis writes:

The Weber originals serve as mere starting points for Hindemith's invention. Both the first and the last movements are marches, by turns whimsical and rambunctuous; both begin simply with Weber's tunes and transform themselves -metamorphose -into intricate display as the role of Hindemith's countermelodies grows ever more significant. The lovely Andantino, based on a Weber siciliana, consists of increasingly ornamented treatments of the melody first begun in the clarinet; the restatement is dominated by an obbligato for solo flute. The big movement, however, is the Chinese scherzo, where the simple tune works itself into a perpetual motion, ever grander in dimension. The wind and percussion work is for a time in the style of the Turkish band, with brash trills in the woodwind, snare drum, and triangle. When the percussion take over completely it is as though some huge musical clock has come unsprung, the last section discombobulating into irregular cycles of the constituent parts in multiple meters.

Not surprisingly, the percussion section of the orchestra will be a large one for this work, with six musicians (including Principal Tympani Shannon Wood and Principal Percussion William James) banging away at timpani, snare drum, bass drum, cymbals, small cymbals, triangle, tambourine, small gong, wood block, tom-tom, glockenspiel, and chimes. Back in the day, this work was a favorite for audio enthusiasts looking to show off their stereo systems.

The Essentials: Karina Canellakis conducts the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra and violinist Ray Chen Friday at 10:30 am and Saturday at 8 pm, January 18 and 19. The concerts take place at Powell Symphony Hall, 718 North Grand in Grand Center.

Getting with the program

Who: Pianist Kirill Gerstein and The St. Louis Symphony Orchestra conducted by David Robertson
What: Music of Richard Strauss, Hindemith, and Thomas Adès
Where: Powell Symphony Hall, St. Louis
When: November 30 – December 2, 2012



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As anyone who has ever taken a “music depreciation” course will recall, “program music” is the label applied (sometimes dismissively) to any composition either inspired by or intended to depict something non-musical. That usually means the dramatic, literary, or visual arts, although history, nature, and even architecture figure prominently as well.

The weekend of November 30, 2012, the symphony offered an ambitious quartet of works that all qualify as “program music” but haven’t much in common otherwise—which just shows you how little that label really means. Richard Strauss’s Don Juan, for example, takes its inspiration from a poem by Lenau while his Till Eulenspiegel’s Merry Pranks harkens back to German folklore. Paul Hindemith’s Symphonie Mathis der Maler, written under the lengthening shadow of fascism, draws on the life and work of 16th century painter Matthias Grünewald who, like Hindemith, found himself caught up in violent political strife. And British composer Thomas Adès’s In Seven Days, written in 2008 and making its local debut, turns the seven mythical days of creation into a seven-movement virtuoso piece for piano and orchestra.

In Seven Days is the new kid on the block, so let’s spend a bit of time with it first.

In Seven Days is, essentially, a series of variations on a brief motif tossed around by skittering strings in the opening “Chaos—Light—Dark” section. As the piece progresses that little motif becomes the basis for an increasingly elaborate musical structure that reaches its peak in the fugue of the fifth and sixth movements (“Creatures of the Sea and Sky—Creatures of the Land”) which, as Mr. Robertson noted in his pre-performance comments, depicts the “amazing joy and wonder” of the newly minted animals in their home. In the final section, “Contemplation,” the main theme shows up in its original form and the music winds down into a silence that says, “to be continued”. Because creation isn’t an event, it’s a process.

Mr. Robertson noted that In Seven Days depicts “Genesis in its sophistication and childlike wonder,” but to my ears it worked just as well as a musical depiction of real-world creation, with complexity arising from very simple organisms. So maybe there’s ambiguity there and, so, just a bit more Art.

The piano is as much a part of the orchestra as it is a solo instrument here, although the writing is often very flashy and demanding. There is, for example, a particularly striking section in the fourth movement, “Stars—Sun—Moon,” where sparkling cascades of sound at the very top of the instrument’s register segue into brass fanfares, and another in the opening “Chaos” movement when the soloist bursts out of a cluster of bass notes into a duet with the congas. Mr. Gerstein, reading from an iPad rather than a printed score (first time I’ve seen that outside of a Parisian piano bar), navigated his way through this treacherous terrain with ease, as did the orchestra. This is my first exposure to In Seven Days, so while Mr. Gerstein's technique was impressive, I can’t say much about his interpretation. I will say that it sounded impressive and he appeared wholly caught up in the music.

It should be noted, by the way, that Mr. Adès’s work was apparently conceived as a multi-media piece. The original title was In Seven Days (Concerto for Piano With Moving Image), with projected video by artist Tal Rosner. More recent performances have apparently dropped the images but if the brief excerpts on YouTube are any indication, they add considerably to the experience. Without them, there were times when the music felt a bit repetitious.

Hindemith’s Symphonie Mathis der Maler isn’t a new work, but it does rather lie somewhat outside the core repertory of contemporary orchestras. It was last heard locally over fourteen years ago under Hans Graf. Hindemith intended it as a kind of preview for his opera Matis der Maler (Matthias the Painter), which he was working on at the time. The Symphonie was a popular success when Wilhelm Furtwängler premiered it in 1934, but Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels saw the anti-authoritarian subtext of both the Symphonie and the developing opera as suspiciously leftist and banned the composer’s “degenerate” music—starting a process the eventually led to Hindemith’s departure to Switzerland (where the opera finally had its first performance) and finally, his emigration to the United States.

Each of the symphony’s three movements refers to a panel of Matthias Grünewald’s “Isenheim Altarpiece”: “Angelic Concert,” “Entombment,” and “Temptation of St. Anthony”. Together, they constitute a striking blend of post-Romantic orchestral color and the neoclassical counterpoint that characterizes so much of Hindemith’s music. Mr. Robertson’s performance brought out all those orchestral details and did full justice to the work’s dramatic origins (the opening of the final movement, for example, was most striking) without sacrificing any of its clarity.

The two Strauss tone poems that opened the first and second halves of the concert were more familiar stuff. Till Eulenspiegel was last heard here in a nifty reading by JoAnn Falletta in March of 2009 and Don Juan was last performed by the symphony under Ward Stare just a month earlier. They are, of course, brilliantly showy works from a young composer who was just beginning to make his mark. Mr. Robertson’s interpretations favored bold strokes and strong contrasts. His Don Juan had swashbuckling flair, languorous romance (clearly, to quote a 1951 Dominoes lyric, a “sixty minute man”), and a poignant demise, while his Till Eulenspiegel played pranks that were not just merry but somewhat manic as well. The orchestral playing was first rate, with impressive solos from (among others) Diana Haskell on clarinet, Cally Banham on English horn, Roger Kaza on horn (the famous opening of Till Eulenspiegel), and concertmaster David Halen.

Next on the calendar: A series of holiday concerts begins with Christopher Warren-Green conducting Handel’s Messiah December 7 through 9. For ticket information: stlsymphony.org