Coming to America

Who: The St. Louis Symphony Orchestra conducted by David Robertson with violin soloist Gil Shaham
What: Music of Dvořák, Korngold, and Ingram Marshall
When: March 21 and 22, 2014
Where: Powell Symphony Hall

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Gil Shaham

Highlighting this weekend's St. Louis Symphony concerts is a pair impressive performances of works written right here in the good old USA (including one premiered in St. Louis) by visitors from abroad: Erich Wolfgang Korngold's 1945 "Violin Concerto" and Dvořák's 1893 "Symphony No. 9" ("From the New World").

Although separated by an almost fifty turbulent years in music history, the harmonic language of the two pieces isn't that much different—which is why the Korngold's concerto had to wait until the wave of Serialism and related compositional trends had begun to wane before it could start to get some respect.  Amply supplied with tunes recycled from Korngold's work as a film composer, the concerto has the late Romantic richness that you hear in the work of Richard Strauss and the other post Wagnerians coupled with ingenious and often unexpected bits of orchestration.  The celesta part (expertly played by Peter Henderson), for example, is large enough to almost make it a second solo instrument.  Combined with Allegra Lilly's fine harp work, the result was a kind of hallucinatory filigree that suggested a Hollywood dream sequence.

The concerto is probably familiar territory to soloist Gil Shaham (he recorded it with Andre Previn and the London Symphony back in 1994), so it's not surprising that he negotiated its many technically tricky passages with ease while not neglecting the lyricism that is at the heart of the piece.  "In spite of the demand for virtuosity in the finale," wrote the composer after hearing the concerto's premiere with Jascha Heifetz and the SLSO in 1947, "the work with its many melodic and lyric episodes was contemplated more for a Caruso than a Paganini."  There's a sense of longing in both the main theme of the first movement and (most notably) in all of the second movement "Romance" that needs to come through clearly, and we definitely got it from Mr. Shaham and Mr. Robertson Friday night.

That said, the balance between soloist and ensemble was less than ideal.  At least from our perch in row D of the dress circle, Mr. Shaham was often overwhelmed by the orchestra (which is, to be fair, a large one), even when he moved farther downstage.  I don't know how much of that was a performance issue and how much an acoustical one, although I'm inclined to suspect it's mostly the latter.

Mr. Shaham was warmly received by the audience Friday night, which applauded after every movement (something which was once commonplace in concert halls) and gave him a standing ovation at the end.  Mr. Shaham and Mr. Robertson responded with an encore: an echt Viennese (with really major luftpausen) of Kreisler's charming "Schön Rosmarin," including a bit of clowning around between Mr. Robertson and Mr. Shaham (who is, after all, his brother-in-law).

The concert concluded with a world class (or is that "new world class"?) Dvořák 9th from Mr. Robertson and the orchestra.  From the dramatically charged introduction to the electrifying final bars of the Allegro con fuoco, this was a "New World" that bristled with excitement and fine orchestral playing.  The famous "Goin' Home" English horn theme in the second movement was lovingly played by Cally Banham, the flute theme in the first movement got a particularly expressive treatment from Mark Sparks, and the brass section generally did itself proud.

Mr. Robertson intelligently shaped and paced this performance in ways that made the most of the work's strengths while minimizing its weaknesses (much as I love this piece, I understand how episodic it can be).  Tempi were well chosen, dynamics were just right—it all added up to a wonderfully coherent reading that revealed new aspects of a work which, I expect, many of us have heard so often that we could almost conduct it ourselves.

The concert opened with a relatively new work (it premiered in 2004): "Bright Kingdoms" by Connecticut-based composer Ingram Marshall.  Mr. Marshall is friend of composer John Adams (who is a major booster of Mr. Ingram's work) and a great lover of the compositional technique of mixing live and recorded sounds, which he's been doing since the 1970s.  Both approaches are evident in this music, which struck me as the sort of thing you might experience if you were listening to an Adams composition while someone in the next room was playing an old Tomita LP.

For me, the best thing about "Bright Kingdoms" was the lovely fugal central section for strings based on the hymn "Eventide" (most often heard with the words "Abide with Me").  The tune is also, apparently, the basis for a Swedish hymn, a distorted children's choir version of which is the basis for a long recorded section that takes up much of the final third of this 17-minute piece.  "Bright Kingdoms" rather wore out its welcome for me after that string chorale.  Judging from the polite applause, I probably wasn't the only one who thought so.

Next at Powell Hall:  David Robertson conducts the orchestra and soprano Karita Mattila in Wagner's Prelude to "Tristan and Isolde," Brahms's "Symphony No. 3," and Schoenberg's "Erwartung" on Friday  and Saturday at 8 PM March 28 and 29.  For more information: stlsymphony.org. 

New World records

Ingram Marshall

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This weekend David Robertson conducts the symphony in three "American" works. Granted, only one was written by an American; but all three were composed here and one even had its premiere in St. Louis.

The music that opens the concerts, Ingram Marshall's "Bright Kingdoms," was first performed in Oakland, California, back in 2004. It's unusual in that it uses both live and recorded sounds—a compositional technique that Mr. Marshall has been playing with since his days as a graduate student at Columbia University in the 1960s. In 1971 a summer study trip to Indonesia exposed him to gamelan music with its altered sense of time and so that, too, became part of his vocabulary.

In his notes for the 2004 premiere, Mr. Marshall wrote that the recorded sound consists of "processed recordings" of a Swedish children's choir, including a boy singing a hymn whose words, in English, are: "Through the bright kingdoms of this early, go we to paradise with song."

"Unconsciously," he went on, "the music turned out to be about innocence, the kingdoms of innocence and the dissolution of those kingdoms. Several sections of the piece are for orchestra alone, one in particular being a threnody for strings about half way through, another being a series of brightly orchestrated passages near the beginning that might be heard as 'kingdoms.' Otherwise, the orchestra and 'soundtrack' are cohabitants."

Erich Wolfgang Korngold

The orchestra has plenty of experience playing along with recorded sounds—they did an entire program of it last week with "Bugs Bunny at the Symphony II," for example—so this is nothing new for them. Although I expect Mr. Marshall's stuff might be a bit more challenging than "I Tawt I Taw a Puddy Tat."

Up next is Erich Wolfgang Korngold's "Violin Concerto in D major," op. 35, which first saw the light of day right here in Mound City back in 1947. Jascha Heifetz was the soloist, and on the podium was the French conductor Vladimir Golschmann. Golschmann was music director of the SLSO from 1931 to 1958 (the longest-reigning SLSO music director to date) and made a number of recordings with the orchestra.

Korngold's name will be familiar to classic film fans. Born in Moravia in 1897, Korngold was a child prodigy hailed as a "musical genius" by Gustav Mahler. He composed his first ballet at age 11 and his most famous opera, "Die tote Stadt," at 23. In 1934 director Max Reinhardt enticed Korngold to Hollywood to write the music for his lavish film version of "A Midsummer Night's Dream" (well worth seeing, despite the many cuts in Shakespeare's text). He returned to Austria, but was drawn back to California in 1938 to write the score for "The Adventures of Robin Hood." While he was there, Hitler's Anschluss of Austria took place, and Korngold became an émigré ("We thought of ourselves as Viennese," he would recall later; "Hitler made us Jewish.")

Dvořák with his friends and family in New York

Even if you didn't know Korngold was a film composer, you could guess it by the lush romantic sound of this music. You might also recognize some of the themes, as he recycled material from the films "Juarez" (1939), "Anthony Adverse" (1936), "Another Dawn" (1937), and—in the lively finale—"The Prince and the Pauper" (1937). It's flashy stuff and should fit nicely under the hands of soloist Gil Shaham (who is Mr. Robertson's brother-in-law).

Closing the concerts is the "Symphony No. 9 in E minor," op. 95, (“From the New World”) by Antonín Dvořák. The Czech master wrote it during a visit to America in the early 1890s and while he never explicitly quotes any American folk material, there's still something about this music that strongly suggests America. From the flute theme in the first movement that seems to echo "Swing Low, Sweet Chariot," to the second movement Largo that has (at least for me) always evoked the majestic solitude of the plains (Dvořák said he wrote it after reading Longfellow's "Hiawatha"), to the "bluesy" flatted seventh chords of the finale, Dvořák "New World" symphony just shouts "USA"—even if it does so with a strong Czech accent.

Some critics have complained of the symphony's structural weaknesses and its episodic nature, but even they have had to confess that it's never anything less than tremendously appealing. It's one of the first "classical" works I ever encountered, and I've never lost my affection for it. If you've never heard it before, I'd bet it will strike you the same way.

The essentials: David Robertson conducts The St. Louis Symphony Orchestra and violin soloist Gil Shaham in Marshall's Bright Kingdoms, Korngold's Violin Concerto, and Dvorak's Symphony No. 9, "From the New World" on Friday at 10:30 AM and at 8 PM, and Saturday at 8 PM March 21 and 22, at Powell Symphony Hall, 718 North Grand. For more information: stlsymphony.org. The Saturday concert will be broadcast live on St. Louis Public Radio, 90.7 FM, HD 1, and on the Internet from the station web site.