Review: The big score

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

David Robertson and the score of Elegie
Photo by Tim Munro

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

There was a sparse crowd for David Robertson and the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra concert Friday night (January 26, 2018), presumably because the program was heavily weighted towards newer music. That's a shame, because those who stayed away missed the USA premiere of the moving 2016 Elegie: Remembrance for Orchestra by Peter Ruzicka, a highly personal take on Mendelssohn's Violin Concerto by Julian Rachlin, and Harmonielehre, the first big, multi-movement orchestral work by John Adams.

"Beautiful" is a word I find myself applying all too rarely to much of what has been written for the concert hall in the last half-century or so, but beautiful is exactly what Mr. Ruzicka's Elegie is. Inspired by the "Porazzi theme," an enigmatic 13-bar fragment that Richard Wagner is said to have written the night before he died, the Elegie is scored for percussion, three flutes, and a string ensemble in which each player has a slightly different melodic line.

That sounds like a gimmick and rather looks like one, since the resulting score is around 3 feet tall and requires an extra-large podium, but the sound is breathtaking. The music begins so softly that it's almost inaudible and then, for the next nine minutes, alternates between sharply dissonant passages and bits of Wagner's original melody in a more conventional harmonic form. The music rises to a climax and then slowly subsides to a quiet, resigned conclusion, like the final breath of life. It was magical, and I'd be happy to hear it again.

Julian Rachlin in Tel Aviv
Photo from Wikipedia, public domain

Which is something I also don't find myself thinking very often about recent music.

Up next was the Mendelssohn Violin Concerto, a piece which is so well known that performances of it can become, as Mr. Robertson wryly observed in his pre-concert talk, a kind of "musical wallpaper." It's a fair point; it has been played so many times by so many great musicians that it can be difficult for any one performer to make us listen to it with fresh ears.

And yet, that's exactly what soloist Julian Rachlin did Friday night. Decked out in a double-breasted tux, black tie, and red pocket square, Mr. Rachlin cut a dashingly retro Fritz Kreisler-esque figure on the stage, and played with an idiosyncratic style that created the illusion of improvising the music on the spot rather than playing a work written over 160 years ago. This was especially apparent in the first-movement cadenza, with its wide dynamic range and marked dramatic contrasts.

Mr. Robertson had said earlier that what he liked most about Mr. Rachlin was that the violinist seemed to actually speak via his instrument. And, in fact, what we got from Mr. Rachlin Friday night was as much a conversation with Mr. Robertson and the orchestra as it was a performance. Closely attuned to Mr. Robertson and the band, Mr. Rachlin delivered a subtly shaded reading that made this venerable warhorse sound almost new, and did it with impeccable virtuosity.

John Adams
Photo by Vern Evans

I loved it, and so did the rest of the audience, who applauded long and enthusiastically enough to warrant an encore: Eugene Ysaÿe's dramatic Sonata No. 3 for solo violin. At nearly seven minutes, it was a lengthy choice for an encore, as well as a technically challenging one, and was very well received.

The second half of the concert was devoted to John Adams's Harmonielehre. The title refers to the music theory book of the same name by Arnold Schoenberg, the inventor of serialism and the teacher of Mr. Adams's teacher Leon Kirchner. Since Mr. Adams explicitly rejected serialism, the title can be seen as a kind of ironic declaration of independence from the 12-tone row. The work was also an attempt to find some kind of rapprochement between the simplicity of minimalism and the harmonic richness that Wagner (also Mr. Ruzicka's source of inspiration) created in his later works, mostly notably Tristan und Isolde, with its famed opening chord.

This is big, dramatic music that has its origins not in the arid mathematical world of serialism but in the more romantic world of dreams and Jungian psychology. The dramatic opening and closing movements, as a result, are musical realizations of dreams that Mr. Adams had when composing the work, while the middle movement, titled "The Anfortas Wound," is explicitly Jungian. In composing it, Mr. Adams notes that he "was deeply affected by Jung's discussion of the character of Anfortas, the king whose wounds could never be healed. As a critical archetype, Anfortas symbolized a condition of sickness of the soul that curses it with a feeling of impotence and depression."

Peter Ruzicka
Photo by Anne Kirchbach

Mr. Robertson and the SLSO have performed and recorded Harmonielehre (for the orchestra's Arch Media label) in the past, so the high quality of Friday night's performance was no surprise. I have never been a big fan of Mr. Adams's style, but even I was swept away by the power of this music. That second movement--with its meandering theme that rises, falls, and never goes anywhere--was the epitome of despair. And the final moments of the last movement, with Principal Horn Thomas Jöstlein and the rest of his section playing pavillons en l'air (bells up, to get a more potent sound), were just plain thrilling.

Up next: members of St. Louis Symphony perform next at the Pulitzer Foundation, with concerts of chamber works by George Crumb, Toro Takemitsu, and Kaija Saariaho on Tuesday and Wednesday, January 30 and 31. The full orchestra plays at Powell Hall Friday at 10:30 am and Saturday at 8 pm, February 2 and 3, with an all-French program under the baton of Music Director Designate Stéphane Dèneve.

Symphony Preview: Everything old is new again

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

Peter Ruzicka

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The big draw for the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra concerts this Friday and Saturday (January 26 and 27, 2018) is clearly Mendelssohn's popular 1844 Violin Concerto, with Lithuanian conductor and violinist Julian Rachlin in the solo spotlight and David Robertson conducting. The music on the rest of the program, though, is more recent--and that's what will be the focus of this preview.

How recent? Well, the concerts open the US premiere with Elegie: Remembrance for Orchestra by German composer Peter Ruzicka, which had its world premiere in 2016 by the Staatskapelle Dresden with our own David Robertson on the podium. And the entire second half of the evening consists of Harmonielehre, a sprawling 40-minute piece for large orchestra by John Adams that was first performed by the San Francisco Symphony in 1985. The SLSO gave the work its local premiere in 2005 and recorded it in 2007.

Ruzicka's Elegie is a short (nine-minute) work for strings along with three flutes and percussion that's based on 13 bars of piano music that Richard Wagner wrote just before his death. I'd like to tell you something about what Elegie sounds like, but it's so new that there are simply no recordings available--or none that I can find, anyway. Even that great repository of copyright violations and unofficial recordings, YouTube, has nothing. Fortunately, René Spencer Saller is able to quote the composer's own words for us in her program notes:

The last 13 bars that Richard Wagner wrote and played for his friends at the Palazzo Vendramin on the evening before his death are a declaration of love for [his wife] Cosima in the form of a mysterious question. The Elegie appears like a musical self-observation referring, as from afar, to Tristan and the circumstances surrounding its composition. Wagner's piano sketch has occupied me for a long time. Its openness and indefiniteness caused me to pursue the thought, and to undergo a highly personal musical rapprochement and distancing. For this, I selected the sonic potential of a string orchestra, underlain by the impulses and "shadowy sounds" of three flutes and percussion. Wagner's question ultimately remains. And it still seems unanswerable, even today.

After reading that a few times, I'm still not at all sure what to expect. The "Tristan" he mentions is Wagner's 1857 opera Tristan und Isolde, a work notable, as I wrote a few years ago, for both its Freudian erotic subtext and the way in which its opening chord anticipated the expanded harmonic palette of post-Wagnerian composers like Richard Strauss and Mahler.

The expansion eventually led to an active hostility to conventional notions of harmony and melody that is still more popular than it probably deserves to be in some compositional circles. What that might have to do with what we will hear this weekend, though, is not at all clear.

What is clear to me, after having listened to some of Mr. Ruzicka's other work, is that he doesn't seem to have much use for those conventional notions of harmony and melody even though, as his anonymous biographer at ArchivMusik notes, he often uses music by composers of the past as jumping-off points for his own works. His 1990 Metamorphoses for Large Orchestra, for example, has a kind of eerie stillness and a suspension of the usual concept of time that I associate with the work of Bruckner. His 1972 Feed Back, on the other hand, sounds like an explosion in a metal foundry combined with sound effects that wouldn't sound out of place in a Carl Stallings cartoon score. From his description, it sounds like Elegie might resemble the former more than the latter, but we'll see.

Mr. Ruzicka himself is an interesting character. Born in 1948 in Düsseldorf and currently professor of music at the Hochschule für Musik und Theater in Hamburg, his resume has the usual list of awards and notable job postings you see with any composer whose work has become prominent enough to capture the attention of major orchestras. What's less typical is that his education included studies in theater and law. The latter led to a law doctorate in 1977. As Chauncey used to remark to Edgar on The Bullwinkle Show, that's something you don't see every day.

John Adams

Whatever the Ruzicka work sounds like, it will almost certainly be different from John Adams's Harmonielehre. The title refers to the music theory book of the same name by Arnold Schoenberg, the inventor of serialism and the teacher of Mr. Adams's teacher Leon Kirchner. Since Mr. Adams explicitly rejected serialism, the title can be seen as a kind of ironic declaration of independence from the 12-tone row.

If you're heard any of the other works by Mr. Adams which David Robertson and the SLSO have performed locally, you will know what to expect. Adams himself, who always writes with impressive clarity, describes the piece as:

a large, three-movement work for orchestra that marries the developmental techniques of Minimalism with the harmonic and expressive world of fin de siècle late Romanticism. It was a conceit that could only be attempted once. The shades of Mahler, Sibelius, Debussy, and the young Schoenberg are everywhere in this strange piece. This is a work that looks at the past in what I suspect is "postmodernist" spirit, but, unlike Grand Pianola Music or [the opera] Nixon in China, it does so entirely without irony.

This is big, dramatic music that has its origins not in the arid mathematical world of serialism but in the more romantic world of dreams and Jungian psychology. The dramatic opening and closing movements, as a result, are musical realizations of dreams that Mr. Adams had when composing the work, while the middle movement, titled "The Anfortas Wound," is explicitly Jungian. In composing it, Mr. Adams notes that he "was deeply affected by Jung's discussion of the character of Anfortas, the king whose wounds could never be healed. As a critical archetype, Anfortas symbolized a condition of sickness of the soul that curses it with a feeling of impotence and depression."

Sandwiched between the contemporary sounds of Ruzicka and Adams will be the Mendelssohn concerto, a favorite of audiences for generations. The SLSO first performed it back in 1912. The soloist that first time was Albert Spalding, but when the orchestra played it in 1914 the soloist was none other than the noted virtuoso and composer Fritz Kreisler. Tickets for the princely sum of $1 and $2 were available, as the vintage program page reproduced in this week's program advertises, at the Main Floor Gallery of Famous-Barr.

The Essentials: David Robertson conducts the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra and violin soloist Julian Rachlin Friday and Saturday at 8 pm, January 26 and 27. The Saturday night performance will be broadcast, as usual, on St. Louis Public Radio. On Sunday at 3 pm, the orchestra is joined by The 442s and Compositions for L.I.F.E. for Rapped and Remixed, a modern-day twist on Prokofiev's Romeo and Juliet ballet score. Performances take place at Powell Symphony Hall, 718 North Grand in Grand Center. For more information: stlsymphony.org.

Review: John Adams provides the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra and Chorus with a spectacular showcase

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

Composer John Adams
Photo: Vern Evans

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It was a relatively sparse crowd that witnessed the local premiere of John Adams' 2012 oratorio/theatre piece The Gospel According to the Other Mary Friday night, April 24, by the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra and Chorus under the direction of David Robertson. I suppose that's not surprising, given how allergic local audiences can sometimes be to newer works, but it's a shame nevertheless. They missed a dramatic, inventive, and sometimes very powerful retelling of the Passion story that placed Jesus in a decidedly contemporary context.

Commissioned by the Los Angeles Philharmonic and first performed by them in 2012, The Gospel According to the Other Mary is a time-bending account of Christ's death and resurrection from the viewpoints of Mary Magdalene and Mary of Bethany (the same singer plays both roles), as well as Mary of Bethany's sister Martha, and Martha's brother Lazarus, who are sometimes their Biblical selves and sometimes contemporary people. Mr. Adams and his collaborator, the noted British director Peter Sellars, have mixed texts from the King James Bible in with poems by African-American writer June Jordan and Mexico's Rosairo Castellanos, along with the work of (among others) Italian author Primo Levi, Native American novelist Louise Erdrich, and American Catholic activist Dorothy Day.

There's even a strikingly graphic section inspired by a painting by Mexican artist Jose Clemente Orozco of Christ, Conan the Barbarian-style, brandishing the axe he as just used to chop down his own cross. Another potent sequence juxtaposes descriptions of Christ's arrest from the KJV with passages from Day's journals describing the arrest of protesters fighting for the rights of immigrant farm workers.

It's not, as the composer himself wryly observed in the pre-concert talk, the sort of thing likely to appeal to the strict traditionalist.

This could be a bit of a mess, and there are times when the archaic language of the Bible clashes oddly with the abstract imagery of the more contemporary poems. But for the most part the pairing of ancient and modern makes dramatic sense—in part because Adams' music acts as a strong unifying force.

I have not always been a major admirer of Mr. Adams' technique of building large structures from minimalist musical cells, but the approach works well here, creating a massive dramatic piece (over two and one-half hours, not counting intermission) derived largely from an ascending Aeolian mode chord sequence that first appears in the opening scene. It's an idea that informs the entire work, pulling sometimes wildly divergent ideas together into a (mostly) coherent whole.

Unification is provided as well by the almost constant presence of the cimbalom, a hammered dulcimer found throughout Eastern Europe and Greece—brilliantly played by Chester Englander. Cutting easily through Mr. Adams' massive post-Wagnerian orchestra, its metallic sound conjures up images of the ancient Mediterranean culture from which the story of Jesus sprang in the first place.

In fact, some of the most compelling moments in The Gospel According to the Other Mary are musical rather than textual. A wild African drum solo performed with impressive vigor by Will James, for example, depicts the earthquake that precedes the rolling aside of the stone from Jesus' tomb. The suffering and death of Jesus at Golgotha is portrayed by a massive outburst of instrumental cacophony along with shouts and howls from the chorus. The Passover scene, on the other hand, is distinguished by a lovely aria for the resurrected Lazarus that wouldn't sound out of place on the Broadway stage.

There were other very compelling moments, including the groaning low strings that accompany Lazarus's death and the recorded piping of frogs that presages the coming of spring and the resurrection of Christ, but the bottom line is that there is much to admire in this score. I have not always found Mr. Adams' writing for the stage to be persuasive, but this is often a very theatrically smart piece.

It helps that the work got such a peerless performance from the orchestra and Mr. Robertson, who has been an admirer of it since he made a special trip to Los Angeles to witness its premiere. Mr. Adams has written some very challenging music for both the instrumentalists and singers; the precision with which they pulled it off deserves a round of laurel wreaths for everyone.

Mezzo Kelley O'Connor, for whom the role of Mary was created, was as compelling as you would expect her to be, forcefully conveying the character's passion and sorrow. Both she and fellow mezzo Michaela Martens, in the role of Martha, are often driven down to the bottom of their vocal range, but they projected even the lowest notes with authority, dishing up bravura performances.

The last time I saw tenor Jay Hunter Morris on stage, he was the chillingly arrogant Danforth in The Crucible at Glimmerglass last summer. This time around he was touchingly vulnerable as Lazarus, pouring out his heart in the "Supper at Bethany" scene while Roger Kaza poured his into the fiercely demanding horn solo that accompanied him. Countertenors Daniel Brubeck, Brian Cummings, and Nathan Medley rounded out the ranks of soloists as a trio of unearthly narrators who also sing the words of Christ.

As for Amy Kaiser's chorus, I just can't praise them enough. Adams asks them to not just sing, but to whisper, chatter, and shriek. They did it all superbly.

For reasons that were not entirely clear to me, all the vocal soloists wore wireless microphones, even though they seemed perfectly capable of projecting over the orchestra. The sound mix was, in any case, handled with remarkable skill; the voices rarely had the unnatural, directionless quality that often accompanies amplification.

The SLSO will be taking this performance to Carnegie Hall on Friday, March 31st, and I really can't think of a better showcase for Mr. Robertson and our hometown band. The Gospel According to the Other Mary may not be without its issues as a work of music drama, but as a demonstration of the virtuosity of the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra and Chorus, I think it is (in the words of Walt Kelly's Fremount) "Jes' fine."

Next at Powell Hall: Pianist Kirill Gerstein plays Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue and Concerto in F in a program that also includes Milhaud's La Création du Monde ballet and three dances episodes from Bernstein's ballet Fancy Free. David Robertson will conduct. Performances are Friday at 10:30 a.m. and 8 p.m., Saturday at 8 p.m., and Sunday at 3 p.m., April 7-9.

Symphony Preview: Points of Departure

Violinist Leila Josefowicz
Photo: Chris Lee

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David Robertson conducts the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra this weekend (Friday and Saturday, September 30 and October 1) in a program consisting of just two big works: John Adams's 1993 Violin Concerto and Beethoven's Symphony No. 3 in E-flat major, op. 55 ("Eroica") from 1803. Despite the 190 years that separate them, they have something in common: they both represent a distinct stylistic departure for their respective composers.

Beethoven's departure came about as a result of a re-evaluation of his life, described in an 1802 document now known as the "Heiligenstadt Testament." It is, as most classical fans will recall, a letter Beethoven wrote to his brothers Carl and Johann at the town of Heiligenstadt (now part of Vienna) in which he told of his despair over his increasing deafness and his struggles with thoughts of suicide. The letter was never delivered (it was found among his papers after his death in 1827) and seems, in retrospect, to have acted as a kind of catharsis for the composer. Before the "Testament" he was a composer/pianist. Afterwards, he would be exclusively a composer.

It also marked the beginning of the emergence of his unique compositional voice. His first two symphonies were clearly in the mold of Haydn and Mozart. But with the "Eroica" Beethoven created, as Paul Schiavo writes in his program notes, "a new musical genre, the Romantic symphony."

And what a symphony! Those first two big chords are almost like a gauntlet thrown down to challenge established notions of what a symphony should be. Indeed this first movement displays, in Mr. Schiavo's words, a "dramatic intensity [which] was unprecedented in symphonic composition and remains rarely, if ever, equaled two centuries and more later."

The drama continues with the heroic funeral march of the second movement, the restless energy of the third movement scherzo, and the towering finale-a set of elaborate variations followed by a powerful coda. It clocks in at around fifty minutes, which no doubt seemed absurdly excessive to audiences accustomed to symphonies half that length. "One early critic," writes Welsh musicologist David Wyn Morris, "described it as 'a very long-drawn-out daring and wild fantasia' which, at least, reveals a response to its emotive power."

Composer John Adams
Photo: Vern Evans

The finale is also a classic example of musical recycling. The theme that serves as the basis for the variations was originally part of a set of twelve "Contredanses" Beethoven wrote between 1791 and 1802. It seems to have been a favorite of his, popping up again in (among other places) his score for the 1802 ballet The Creatures of Prometheus. Composer and writer Drerk Strahan has suggested that Beethoven saw it as a "hero" theme. It certainly becomes heroic in the course of the final movement of the "Eroica."

The departure for John Adams was somewhat less dramatic, and it was the choice of the violin as the solo instrument that initiated it. "A concerto without a strong melodic statement is hard to imagine," recalls the composer. "I knew that if I were to compose a violin concerto I would have to solve the issue of melody. I could not possibly have produced such a thing in the 1980's because my compositional language was principally one of massed sonorities riding on great rippling waves of energy. Harmony and rhythm were the driving forces in my music of that decade; melody was almost non-existent."

"As if to compensate for years of neglecting the 'singing line,'" he continues, "the Violin Concerto (1993) emerged as an almost implacably melodic piece-a example of 'hypermelody.' The violin spins one long phrase after another without stop for nearly the full thirty-five minutes of the piece. I adopted the classic form of the concerto as a kind of Platonic model, even to the point of placing a brief cadenza for the soloist at the traditional locus near the end of the first movement."

Having listened to the concerto, though, I have to say that I'm not sure it's as big a departure from the composer's usual style as his comments suggest. His "hypermelody" does, indeed, unfold as described, but it's ultimately composed of the kind of individual motivic "cells" that characterize so much of the composer's other works. Add up enough minimalism, it seems, and you get a long and winding road of lyricism.

The singing first movement gives way to a second movement based on the old Baroque form of the chaconne, which features a series of increasingly elaborate variations on a simple theme repeated in the bass line. That theme might sound familiar to sharp-eared listeners since it's remarkably close to the little sequence that underscores the words "Space: the final frontier" in the theme of the classic TV show Star Trek. If you doubt me, take a few minutes to view CBC Radio 2 host Tom Allen's tongue-in-cheek video documentary on the lineage of that theme; it's fascinating stuff. I don't know whether Mr. Adams was ever a Star Trek fan or not but he's of the right vintage, so anything is possible.

The concerto ends in a blaze of virtuoso fireworks with the driving "Toccare" third movement. It's the sort of thing that gives a truly proficient violinist a chance to show off and, as the composer notes, "many violinists have taken on the piece, and each has played it with his or her unique flair and understanding. Among them are Gidon Kremer (who made the first recording with the London Symphony), Vadim Repin, Robert McDuffie, Midori and, perhaps most astonishingly of all, Leila Josefowicz, who made the piece a personal calling card for years."

The soloist this weekend will, in fact, be Ms. Josefowicz. So it looks like we can expect an authoritative performance. Mr. Robertson has also shows a strong affinity for the music of John Adams, so the work will be in good hands.

The essentials: David Robertson conducts the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra with violin soloist Leila Josefowicz on Friday and Saturday at 8 p.m. September 30 and October 1. [The concerts take place at Powell Symphony Hall, 718 North Grand in Grand Center. The Saturday concert will be broadcast, as usual, on St. Louis Public Radio.

Symphony Preview, February 19 and 20, 2016: The Shakespeare celebration begins

Shakespeare has inspired an astonishing amount of music over the centuries, and over the next four weeks the St. Louis Symphony, in partnership with Shakespeare Festival St. Louis, is giving us a wonderfully varied sampler of it.

The "Chandos Portrait" of Shakespeare
en.wikipedia.org

The orchestra's four-concert Shakespeare series begins this Friday and Saturday with a program that spans over a hundred and fifty years, beginning with the overture to Hector Berlioz's 1862 opera "Béatrice et Bénedict," based on Shakespeare's comedy "Much Ado About Nothing."

Berlioz wrote the libretto himself (even though he neither spoke nor read English all that well), considerably condensing the original "battle of the sexes" comedy in the process. Huge swathes of plot were axed, along with great comic characters like Constable Dogberry. Nevertheless, it's still (to quote NPR's "World of Opera") "an appealing and insightful comedy" that combines "the signature brilliance and bombast" of Berlioz with " the sly, comedic insights" of Shakespeare's play. And while it doesn't make the world-wide top 50 at operabase.com, it does come in at number 32 in France, where both it and Berlioz's other big Shakespeare opera, "Romeo et Juliette," remain fairly popular.

The overture quotes extensively from the opera but, Berlioz being the skilled composer that he was, it's more than just a collection of tunes. "The Overture," writes Michel Austin at The Hector Berlioz web site, "is one of Berlioz's most delicate and subtle orchestral pieces, and its allusiveness constantly teases the listener...Though drawn from no less than six different arias or ensembles, the music is seamlessly fused by Berlioz into a coherent symphonic whole, much as Weber had done in his overtures to Der Freischütz, Euryanthe and Oberon." And it manages all that in just around eight minutes.

Harriet Smithson as Ophelia
en.wikipedia.org

Berlioz, as you may recall, became smitten with both Shakespeare and the Irish Shakespearean actress Harriet Smithson at the same time. He wooed her for years and finally won her after convincing her to attend a performance of the work that she inspired, his titanic "Symphonie Fantastique". They were married after Berlioz threatened to kill himself with an opium overdose if she didn't say "yes". Alas, the marriage, unlike Berlioz's fascination with Shakespeare, did not last.

In addition to operas, Shakespeare has inspired his share of great incidental music to accompany his plays. Probably the best-known Shakespearean score was composed by Mendelssohn for a production of "A Midsummer Night's Dream" in 1842. The symphony will be performing that next weekend, but this weekend we get selections from Sibelius's far less familiar score for a 1926 Royal Theatre of Copenhagen production of "The Tempest."

Written late in Shakespeare's career (it may, in fact, be the last thing he wrote without a collaborator) "The Tempest" has an autumnal feel to it. As Wikipedia notes, "early critics saw Prospero as a representation of Shakespeare, and his renunciation of magic as signaling Shakespeare's farewell to the stage." In this respect, Prospero's speech in Act IV becomes especially poignant:

Our revels now are ended. These our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits and
Are melted into air, into thin air;
And—like the baseless fabric of this vision—
The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve,
And like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep

Sibelius in 1923
Photo by Henry B. Goodwin
en.wikipeida.org

It seems only fitting, then, that Sibelius's score for "The Tempest" was one of the last things he wrote before the great compositional silence that marked the last three decades of his life. As Prospero put down his books, so Sibelius put down his pen—but not before creating a big, impressive score of 34 pieces (plus an Epilogue written a year later), for vocalists, mixed-voice choir, harmonium, and a large orchestra.

The composer would later reduce the music to two suites, but for this St. Louis premiere performance Maestro Robertson has pulled selections together from both suites and combined them with readings from the play by actors whose names and voices will likely be familiar to St. Louis theatre lovers. St. Louis stage veteran Joneal Joplin will play Prospero, with the versatile Ben Nordstrom and Webster Conservatory student Sigrid Wise and the lovers Ferdinand and Miranda. The sprite Ariel will be played by another Webster Conservatory student,t August Stamper. They'll be directed by Shakespeare Festival of St. Louis Associate Artistic Director Bruce Longworth and dressed by Festival costumer Abby Dorning. Michael B. Perkins, whose work has enhanced local theatre and opera productions, will be providing video design.

After intermission, Shakespeare takes a back seat to the "Thousand and One Nights" as violinist Leila Josefowicz joins the orchestra for John Adams's "Scheherazade.2." First performed last March by Ms. Josefowicz and the New York Philharmonic under Alan Gilbert, this "Dramatic Symphony" was inspired by a visit to an exhibit at the Institute du Monde Arabe in Paris, the theme of which was the history of the Arabian Nights stories.

What Mr. Adams took away from the exhibit, however, was not the exotic orientalism that inspired Rimsky-Korsakov's famous "Scheherazade," but—as he writes on his web site—something much darker:

The casual brutality toward women that lies at the base of many of these tales prodded me to think about the many images of women oppressed or abused or violated that we see today in the news on a daily basis. In the old tale Scheherazade is the lucky one who, through her endless inventiveness, is able to save her life. But there is not much to celebrate here when one thinks that she is spared simply because of her cleverness and ability to keep on entertaining her warped, murderous husband...

So I was suddenly struck by the idea of a "dramatic symphony" in which the principal character role is taken by the solo violin—and she would be Scheherazade. While not having an actual story line or plot, the symphony follows a set of provocative images: a beautiful young woman with grit and personal power; a pursuit by "true believers;" a love scene which is both violent and tender; a scene in which she is tried by a court of religious zealots ("Scheherazade and the Men with Beards"), during which the men argue doctrine among themselves and rage and shout at her only to have her calmly respond to their accusations); and a final "escape, flight and sanctuary" which must be the archetypal dream of any woman importuned by a man or men.

John Adams
Photo: Lambert Orkis, earbox.com

You can find a more detailed description of the work in René Spencer Saller's program notes and a complete performance on YouTube. Mr. Adams's music has become quite challenging lately, so I'd recommend taking the time to read the former and hear the latter. This is a highly dramatic and emotionally charged piece, often quite intense and even disturbing. You will want to be prepared.

Ms. Josefowicz is not the only soloist in " Scheherazade.2," by the way. The work also features a prominent role for the cimbalom, a hammered dulcimer commonly used in Hungary and nearby nations like Poland, Croatia, the Czech Republic, and Greece. The cimbalom is featured prominently in Zoltán Kodály's "Háry János" suite as well as in works by Stravinsky, Liszt, and Bartók. Adams uses it for a variety of atmospheric effects, including a somewhat delirious duet with the violin in the second movement, "A Long Desire (Love Scene)". The cimbalom soloist this weekend is Chester Englander.

The essentials: David Robertson conducts the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra and violin soloist Leila Josefowicz in music by Sibelius, Berlioz, and John Adams at 10:30 a.m. and Saturday at 8 p.m., February 19 and 20. There will also be a special " Tales from Shakespeare" Family Series concert on Sunday at 3 p.m. Performances take place at Powell Symphony Hall, 718 North Grand. For more information: stlsymphony.org.

Concert Review: Adams and Mahler programs displays the St. Louis Symphony's strengths, January 23, 2016

David Robertson

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David Robertson and The St. Louis Symphony Orchestra are getting their act together and taking it on the road to sunny California this week and next, with appearances in Aliso Viejo, Palm Desert, Berkeley, and Los Angeles, January 27 through February 2. If what I saw in Powell Hall Saturday night is any indication, they're going to take the West Coast by storm.

Saturday's double bill of the John Adams "Saxophone Concerto" and Mahler's "Symphony No. 5" is one of two programs they'll be performing (the other is last weekend's multimedia version of Messiaen's "Des canyons aux étoiles...") and it couldn't be a better showpiece for both the orchestra and Mr. Robertson. That's because although the two works have little in common musically, they both present significant technical and artistic challenges.

Originally performed and recorded (for Nonesuch) by the SLSO in 2013, the concerto is not the most approachable of Adams's works, building its two movements from brief motifs that are so closely related it can be hard to tell them apart. It's edgy, aggressive music that requires a high degree of precision from both the orchestra and soloist. It also demands real endurance from the latter, since the solo sax is rarely silent for the concerto's thirty-minute length. Up on the podium, meanwhile, the concerto demands a conductor who can keep this musical express train from going off the rails and coming across as more a barrage of notes than actual music.

As they demonstrated both in 2013 and again Saturday night, Mr. Robertson and his forces can navigate this tricky score with ease. The jazz-inflected call and response sections, in particular, had the kind of snappy precision that called to mind the big band work of Stan Kenton. Mr. Robertson is obviously very comfortable with the concerto and made the compelling case for a work which, even upon second hearing, still sounds like a rather tough nut to crack.

Tim McAllister

The saxophone soloist, both here and on the road, is the man for whom Adams wrote the piece, Tim McAllister. Mr. McAllister is a brilliant performer, combining classical discipline with the freewheeling style of the great jazz and rock players whose work inspired Mr. Adams. He may have been dressed for the symphony but his stance—knees bent, head thrust forward in concentration—was that of the jazz soloist entirely wrapped up in the music. Mr. McAllister, as Eddie Silva points out in his program notes, was a champion stunt bicycle rider in his youth, and he brought that same daredevil-level fearlessness to his playing here.

Playing and conducting Mahler's "Symphony No. 5" (or any Mahler, if it comes to that) also requires a certain level of chutzpah. That's because it's both a massive work—five movements running around 70 minutes—and a complex one.

The first of what can be regarded as the composer's mature symphonies, it was the also the first of his symphonies with neither vocal soloists nor explicit musical references to Mahler's song cycles. And, as Michael Steinberg points out in his program notes for the San Francisco Symphony, there are other major structural changes as well:

After a run of unconventional symphonies, Mahler comes back to a more “normal” design, one that could be described as concentric as well as symmetrical...The music becomes leaner and harder. About this time Mahler acquired the complete edition of Bach. At least partly in consequence of his excited discovery of what was in those volumes, his textures become more polyphonic. But this new “intensified polyphony,” as Bruno Walter called it, demanded a new orchestral style.

Then there's the fact that Mahler, like John Adams, often drew inspiration from popular music styles. In Mahler's symphonies, it's not unusual to hear a saccharine ländler, an "oom-pah" march, or a clarinet wailing in the style that would later be labeled "klezmer"—sometimes rubbing shoulders with passages of real profundity. Some of Mahler's contemporaries sneered at what they regarded as vulgarity, but ultimately the composer's wide-ranging musical interests are really just a manifestation of his idea that, as he once told Sibelius, a symphony "must be like the world. It must embrace everything."

All of this means that conducting Mahler, to my mind, requires not only a deep understanding of the capabilities of the orchestra's musicians but also a profound grasp of musical structure, along with musical sympathies that extend beyond those of the traditional concert hall.

Over the years, Mr. Robertson has demonstrated that he has those skills and knows how to apply them. His classical credentials are unimpeachable, of course, but he has shown that he's equally comfortable with film music and non-classical styles in general. Yes, I have not always been 100% persuaded by his Mahler symphonies in the past, but that's mostly a reflection of my personal taste. If I set that aside, I am obliged to acknowledge that his interpretations have always been of a very high order and sometimes (as was the case Saturday) superb.

From the first solo trumpet notes of the opening Trauermarsch (played so authoritatively by Karin Bliznik) to the wildly exuberant Rondo finale, this was a Mahler 5th that can stand with the best of them. I'd compare it favorably with Bernstein's 1964 New York Philharmonic recording, and that's saying something. At every point, Mahler's structure was clear, tempi were perfectly chosen, and all the elements of the work were in perfect balance.

Mahler's orchestration is filled with wonderful details that give nearly every section a chance to stand out. For example, Karin Bliznik and her fellow trumpeters Jeff Strong, Tom Drake, and Mike Walk carry a lot of narrative weight in the first two movements and on Saturday night did so beautifully. Roger Kazaa's horns (there are seven of them; Mahler doesn't stint) gave a real sinister rasp to their trills in the first movement and Mr. Kazaa himself was both poetic and powerful in the solo horn parts in the third movement Scherzo. Mr. Robertson had Mr. Kazaa move to the front of the orchestra for that movement; a smart decision that clarified the exchanges between the solo horn and the rest of the section.

The little major key chorale passage for trumpets and trombones in the second movement simply glowed. The famous fourth movement Adagietto for harp and strings (which the orchestra performed alone as part of Friday's "Music You Know" concert) was a touching mix of beauty and tragedy, with sensitive work by Principal Harp Allegra Lilly and the orchestra strings. And so it went, moment by impressive moment. If this doesn't knock their sandals off out there on the West Coast, I don't know what will.

The St. Louis Symphony returns to Powell Hall on Friday and Saturday, February 5 and 6, as violinist Anthony Marwood conducts an evening of chamber music by Bach, Dvorák, and Peteris Vasks. For more information, visit the SLSO web site, where you can also purchase tickets for all of the California performances.

Symphony Preview, January 22 and 23, 2016: As the world turns

John Adams
Photo: Lambert Orkis, earbox.com

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The second and more substantial half of this weekend's St. Louis Symphony double bill consists of only two works: John Adams's "Saxophone Concerto," which the SLSO recorded in 2014, and Mahler's powerful "Symphony No. 5," which hasn't been heard here since 2009.

The Adams was a joint commission from the SLSO, the Boston Symphony, the Sao Paulo Symphony, and David Robertson’s Other Orchestra, the Sydney Symphony (where it had its first performance in August of 2013). When I first heard it in 2013, I found the concerto a tough nut to crack from a musical structure standpoint, largely because Adams’s style had developed to the point where entire movements were constructed from brief motifs that were so closely related it was often hard to tell them apart.

The long first movement of the concerto, for example, unfolds from a short, snappy rising arpeggio for the solo sax. That sense of rapid upward movement remains even when, towards the end, the mood shifts to the kind of sultry nocturne that wouldn’t be out of place in a film noir. The second and final movement—based on a two-note descending figure often embellished with cascades of notes in the solo part—ups the ante with a hyperkinetic solo line that rises to a classic jazz wail just before the final notes.

Timothy McAllister
timothymcallister.com

At the time I wasn't sure whether the concerto itself warranted repeated hearing, so it will be good to get reacquainted with the piece. Better yet, the soloist is once again the ferociously talented Timothy McAllister, whose 2013 performance melded classical virtuosity with a real jazz sensibility.

At well over twice the length of the Adams concerto, the Big Dog on the program is the Mahler symphony. It's a work of sharp contrasts, with moments of pure poetry alternating with massive orchestral assaults. "Doors suddenly open to totally unfamiliar scenes," writes Eddie Silva in his program notes, "or to themes you thought had been used up, only to return, sometimes menacingly.”

But then, that's quintessential Mahler. "[A]ll of Mahler's music", wrote his great champion, Leonard Bernstein, in 1967, "is about Mahler—which means that it is about conflict."

Think of it: Mahler the Creator vs. Mahler the Performer; the Jew vs. the Christian; the Believer vs. the Doubter; the Naïf vs. the Sophisticate; the provincial Bohemian vs. the Viennese homme du monde; the Faustian Philosopher vs. the Oriental Mystic; the Operatic Symphonist who never wrote an opera. But mainly the battle rages between Western Man at the turn of the century and the life of the spirit.

That paragraph is also quintessential Bernstein, and its verbosity could not be more appropriate for its subject. For Mahler was nothing if not musically verbose. His musical gestures are invariably grand and, surprisingly for a man who essentially wrote nothing for the stage, brilliantly and aptly theatrical. Here's Bernstein again:

He took all (all!) the basic elements of German music, including the clichés, and drove them to their ultimate limits. He turned rests into shuddering silences; upbeats into volcanic preparations as for a death-blow. Luftpausen became gasps of shock or terrified suspense; accents grew into titanic stresses to be achieved by every conceivable means, both sonic and tonic. Ritardandi were stretched into near-motionlessness; accelerandi became tornadoes; dynamics were refined and exaggerated to a point of neurasthenic sensibility. Mahler's marches are like heart attacks, his chorales, like all Christendom gone mad. The old conventional four-bar phrases are delineated in steel; his most traditional cadences bless like the moment of remission from pain. Mahler is German music multiplied by n.

Bernstein could have been Mahler reincarnated. Given that he was born several years after Mahler died, maybe he was.

But I digress.

"Photo of Gustav Mahler by Moritz Nähr 01"
by Moritz Nähr (1859–1945)
Licensed under PD-US via Wikipedia

Mr. Silva provides a concise road map to the symphony in his notes, so there's no point in my providing one here. The Wikipedia article on the work is also worth a read, especially since it includes examples of the principal themes and shows how they're developed over the symphony's 70-minute (or thereabouts) length. Allow me to recommend as well Michael Steinberg's San Francisco Symphony program notes for their in-depth analysis and their illumination of the relationship between the 5th and its predecessor, which briefly (and somewhat mysteriously) quotes the opening trumpet fanfare in its own first movement.

According to musicologist Donald Mitchell, Mahler once told Sibelius that a symphony "must be like the world. It must embrace everything." Mahler's 5th, with its incredible dynamic and emotional range and the kaleidoscopic brilliance of its orchestration, is the composer's world, to be sure. But its triumph, tragedy, and even its grotesque comedy are our world as well.

The essentials: The St. Louis Symphony Orchestra conducted by David Robertson presents John Adams's "Saxophone Concerto," with soloist Timothy McAllister, and Mahler's "Symphony No. 5" Friday at 10:30 a.m. and Saturday at 8 p.m., January 22 and 23. Performances take place at Powell Symphony Hall, 718 North Grand. For more information: stlsymphony.org.

Symphony Preview: Old friends and new

David Robertson

It’s a mix of the first run and the familiar this weekend at Powell Hall, with music of the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries.

The most familiar thing on the program is Sibelius’s 1895 tone poem “The Swan of Tuonela.” A tone poem, for those of you who have never gone through a “music depreciation” class, is an orchestral work that describes and/or is inspired by something non-musical. In this case, the inspiration comes from the Finnish national epic “The Kalevala”—specifically, its description of the island of Tuonela, where the spirits dead reside. The island is surrounded by a black river, on which a lone swan floats and sings a mournful song. The music is vividly descriptive, which is why it’s a favorite of those same music depreciation classes.

Sibelius assigns the swan’s song to the English horn, a relative of the oboe with with a darker and richer sound (it’s pitched a fifth lower) that is a perfect match for the music’s imagery. Cally Banham, who holds the Solo English Horn chair with the orchestra, will be the soloist. She has done fine work with the orchestra over the last several years, so expect good things from her this weekend.

The English horn is, amusingly, neither English nor a horn (it’s a member of the woodwind family). When I was a kid, the story (since discredited) was that the the name came from a mistranslation of the Middle French phrase, cor anglé (“angled horn,” referring to the fact that the mouthpiece is at a slight angle to the body of the instrument). Current thinking is that it actually goes back to the old German word for the instrument’s ancestor (the oboe da caccia) which was know as an “engellisches” (“angelic”) horn because of its resemblance to horns played by angels in Medieval paintings. Its sound, in any case, is unmistakable.

The first run this week is “My Father Knew Charles Ives,” composed in 2003 by John Adams, whose work is often performed by the SLSO. The title is not literally true. While the elder Adams was a musician—he taught his son to play the clarinet and the two played together in local bands—he never actually met the famously craggy composer/businessman.

He did, however, share Ives’s eclectic musical sensibility. As Paul Schiavo relates in his program notes, Adams “credits his father with introducing him to both classical and popular music without prejudicial favoring of one over the other.” He goes on to note that, according to Adams, “the two men had experiences and interests in common, and the composer imagines that they would have liked each other.”

“My Father Knew Charles Ives” is, in short, a tribute both to the elder Adams and to Ives. Laid out in three movements and running just under a half hour, the work (as described in Mr. Schiavo’s notes) seems very much like the kind of thing Ives himself might have written. The first movement, “Concord,” is a musical picture of the New Hampshire town where Adams grew up and which inspired some of Ives’s most notable music. The second, “The Lake,” “conveys the lulling movement of water and a poetic spirit in the form of a melody for oboe. From across the lake comes the sound of dance music, the indistinct bits of melody blending with the watery sonorities” (Ives does something similar in his “Three Places in New England,” especially in the “Putnam’s Camp” and “Housatonic at Stockbridge” movements).

The last section, “The Mountain,” “was inspired by boyhood memories of Mount Kearsarge, in New Hampshire, but also by more recent experiences hiking in California’s high country.” It ends with what Adams calls “a moment of sudden, unexpected astonishment” as the climber sees the view for the top.

The concerts conclude with Prokofiev's 1944 Symphony No. 5, last seen on the Powell Hall stage in November of 2010 in what I called a “highly charged” and “triumphant” performance by conductor emeritus Leonard Slatkin (his 1985 recording with the SLSO is still available on line at archivmusic.com). Composed at the artists' colony of Ivanovo east of Moscow just as the war with Germany was turning in Russia's favor, the symphony was described by Prokofiev as "a hymn to free and happy Man, to his mighty powers, his pure and noble spirit" and while there is certainly an air of triumph, especially in the majestic opening theme, it has always seemed to me that the war was never far from the composer's mind. You can hear it in (among other places) the militant percussion of the first movement and the anguished climax of the third.

The aura of triumph is also leavened by Prokofiev's characteristic irony. The composer of the Sarcasms for piano always seems to have a raised eyebrow or cynical smile behind his most demonstrative music. In the 5th symphony sarcasm takes various forms, including caustic comments from the brass and percussion and the deliberate interruption of the boisterous Allegro giocoso finale by a short, dissonant passage for string quartet and trumpet.

The essentials: David Robertson conducts the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra and oboe soloist Cally Banham in Sibelius's "Swan of Tuonela," John Adams's "My Father Knew Charles Ives," and Prokofiev's "Symphony No. 5" Saturday at 8 p.m. and Sunday at 3 p.m., September 27 and 28. The Saturday concert will be broadcast on St. Louis Public Radio, 90.7 FM, HD 1, and on the station web site. The concerts take place at Powell Symphony Hall, 718 North Grand in Grand Center. For more information: stlsymphony.org.

Sax and violins

Gershwin

Who: The St. Louis Symphony Orchestra conducted by David Robertson with saxophonist Timothy McAllister and pianist John Kimura Parker
What: Music of John Adams and George Gershwin
Where: Powell Symphony Hall
When: October 5 and 6, 2013

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Saturday night’s concert began with Gershwin's fiery Cuban Overture and ended with an appropriate Latin encore from pianist John Kimura Parker—Joplin's wistful Solace: A Mexican Serenade.  In between was a high-energy evening from which the spirit of jazz was never entirely absent.

The official program for this weekend's symphony concerts featured music by two composers: George Gershwin and John Adams.  Although their musical styles could not be more different, they both broke from the musical establishments of their time and carved out their own personal compositional approaches.  Gershwin's music is more immediately appealing; Adams's more formal.  But hearing them together on the same program made me realize how much they have in common.

John Adams

Adams was represented by his whimsical The Chairman Dances: Foxtrot for Orchestra (composed for and then cut from Nixon in China) and the local premiere of his brand-new Saxophone Concerto, a joint commission from the SLSO; the Boston Symphony; the Sao Paulo Symphony; and David Robertson’s Other Orchestra, the Sydney Symphony (where it had its first performance in August).  The former got an appropriately charming and even danceable treatment from Mr. Robertson and his forces.

I found the concerto a tough nut to crack from a musical structure standpoint, largely because Adams’s compositional style has now developed to the point where entire movements are constructed from brief motifs (I hesitate to call them themes) that are so closely related it’s often hard to tell them apart.  The long first movement of the concerto, for example, unfolds from a short, snappy rising arpeggio for the solo sax.  That sense of rapid upward movement remains even when, towards the end, the mood shifts to the kind of sultry nocturne that wouldn’t be out of place in a film noir.  The second and final movement—based on a two-note descending figure often embellished with cascades of notes in the solo part—ups the ante with a hyperkinetic solo line that rises to a classic jazz wail just before the final notes.

Quoted in Paul Schiavo's program notes, Adams says that his "lifelong exposure to the great jazz saxophonists" inspired him to write the concerto.  And, in fact, it’s easy to hear echoes of Charlie Parker and the other great sax men of the '50s and '60s in this music with its driving beat, call and response sections, and improvisatory feel.  It sounds difficult as hell, but the brilliant playing of Timothy McAllister (for whom the work was written) was more than up to the challenge.  He may have been dressed for the symphony but his stance—knees bent, head thrust forward in concentration—was that of the jazz soloist entirely wrapped up in the music.

Timothy McAllister

My mental jury is still out on whether the concerto itself warrants repeated hearing, but I have no doubts about the excellence of Mr. McAllister’s performance.  Ditto for the symphony under Maestro Robertson.  Unlike Mr. McAllister, they haven’t been playing the music for several months now, which made the polish of their sound that much more impressive.  A good thing, too, since this weekend’s performances of the concerto were being recorded by Nonesuch for a CD that will include the performance of Adams’s City Noir that the orchestra recorded back in February.

The concert opener, Gershwin's Cuban Overture is, a kind of musical postcard of a 1932 trip to Havana.  Composers have been drawing on their travels for inspiration for centuries, of course.  Mendelssohn's Hebrides Overture, Tchaikovsky's Capriccio Italien, Saint-Saëns's "Egyptian" piano concerto—the list goes on and on.  Gershwin did them all one better, though.  He brought back not only some Afro-Cuban tunes (including Ignacio Piñeiro's "Échale Salsita") but some traditional percussion instruments as well. The haul included a bongo, claves, gourd, and maracas—all of which are prominently featured in this sunny souvenir.

It has been over a decade since the symphony did this piece, but you’d hardly guess that from the high gloss of their performance.  The Cuban instruments came through surprisingly well, given that they were embedded with the rest of the percussion section at the back instead of being placed downstage in front of the conductor (as Gershwin requests in the autograph copy of his score).

John Kimura Parker

Closing the official program was Gershwin's 1925 Concerto in F with John Kimura Parker at the keyboard.  The concerto isn't particularly complex from a purely structural point of view, but I still find it amazing to contemplate that it was written only a year after the far more rudimentary Rhapsody in Blue. Gershwin's development as a serious composer took place with an almost supernatural rapidity, as though he somehow knew that his life on this planet would be tragically short (he died of a brain tumor just a few months short of his 40th birthday).

As it is, the Concerto is a beautifully crafted piece: lean, powerful, without a spare note.  Reviewing the December 3, 1925, premiere of the concerto for the New York World, critic Samuel Chotzinoff noted that Gershwin's "shortcomings are nothing in the face of the one thing he alone of all those writing the music of today possesses.  He actually expresses us.  He is the present, with all its audacity, impertinence, its feverish delight in its motion, its lapses into rhythmically exotic melancholy."  You can feel and hear that "jazz age" urgency in every note of this music.

Gershwin was a pretty formidable pianist, so the concerto bristles with technical challenges—none of which were an obstacle for Mr. Parker.  Working without a score, he approached this music with an ideal combination of concentration and joy.  I wasn’t sure I was going to be equally enthusiastic about Mr. Robertson’s interpretation—I was afraid that his tempo contrasts in the opening measure were going to kill the rhythmic drive—but I needn’t have worried.  He made it all work, and brought out some interesting nuances in the process.

There was impressive solo work by members of the orchestra as well as by Mr. Parker.  The famous muted blues trumpet solo in the second movement, for example, had all the mournful soul one could hope for in the hands of Karin Bliznik (singled out by Mr. Robertson for a bow during curtain calls), and its later echoes by Mark Sparks (flute) and Barbara Orland (oboe) were also quite effective.

Mr. Parker got spontaneous applause after the spectacular first movement and a “standing O" at the end.  He responded with that Joplin piece I mentioned at the top of this review as an encore, describing the great ragtime composer as the "third icon of American music" alongside Gershwin and Adams.  It was a romantic, rubato-filled reading that served as a nice contrast to the Gershwin and helped bring the evening back to its Afro-Latin beginnings.

Next on the regular calendar: British violinist Anthony Marwood is both soloist and conductor an all-Mozart program consisting of the Symphony No. 1 and Symphony No. 35 (“Haffner) as well as the 2nd and 3rd violin concertos.  Performances are Friday and Saturday at 8 PM and Sunday at 3 PM, October 11-13. For ticket information: stlsymphony.org.

And all that jazz

Gershwin
in a characteristic pose

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Music with a heavy jazz and Afro-Cuban influence takes center stage at Powell Hall this weekend as the St. Louis Symphony presents an evening of music by George Gershwin and John Adams. Saxophone virtuoso Tim McAllister and pianist Jon Kimura Parker join music director David Robertson for what promises to be a high-energy evening.

Things kick off with Gershwin's "Cuban Overture," a kind of musical postcard of a 1932 trip to Havana. Composers have been drawing on their travels for inspiration for centuries, of course. Mendelssohn's "Hebrides Overture," Tchaikovsky's "Capriccio Italien," Saint-Saëns's "Egyptian" piano concerto—the list goes on and on. Gershwin did them all one better, though. He brought back not only some Afro-Cuban tunes (including Ignacio Piñeiro's "Échale Salsita") but some traditional percussion instruments as well. The haul included a bongo, claves, gourd, and maracas—all of which would be featured in a piece originally titled "Rhumba" (and performed under that title for the first time in August, 1932) and later retitled "Cuban Overture." It's lively stuff, made even livelier and more visually interesting by Gershwin's instructions (in the autograph version of the score) to place the Cuban percussion downstage in front of the conductor instead of off in the percussion battery. I don't know whether Maestro Robertson plans to follow that instruction or not, but the results should be interesting in any case.

John Adams

Next up is the local premiere of John Adams's newly minted "Saxophone Concerto," first performed on August 22nd by the Sydney [Australia] Symphony with Mr. McAllister (for whom Adams wrote it) as the soloist. Mr. McAllister's performance of the piece here is being recorded for Nonesuch on a disc that will also contain the recording of Adams's "City Noir" he made with the SLSO last season. Mr. McAlliser had some interesting insights into both pieces in the "minterview" I did with him, and I invite you to read what he said there.

Quoted in Paul Schiavo's program notes, Adams says that his "lifelong exposure to the great jazz saxophonists" inspired him to write the work. When he met Mr. McAllister and realized both his virtuosity and "exceptional musical personality," he knew he had found the perfect match of performer and composition.

The SLSO has had a close relationship with John Adams during Mr. Robertson's tenure, performing many of his works and recording four discs worth. Indeed, the orchestra's 2009 recording of the "Doctor Atomic Symphony" (based on themes from the Adams opera of the same name) was named "Classical Album of the Decade" by The Times of London. The symphony has always done well by Mr. Adams, in my view, so I'm looking forward to the concerto.

Tim McAllister

Adams is, along with Philip Glass, one of the most well-known advocates of a school of composition known as "minimalism," a term borrowed from the visual arts and first applied to music by composer, filmmaker, and photographer Michael Nyman in the early 1970s. "Prominent features" of minimalism, sayeth Wikipedia, "include consonant harmony, steady pulse (if not immobile drones), stasis or gradual transformation, and often reiteration of musical phrases or smaller units such as figures, motifs, and cells." I'm not entirely convinced that the emotional scope of the approach isn't a bit limited, but in the hands of composers like Adams it often generates a tremendous amount of excitement.

The music of John Adams is featured again after intermission, with a performance of "The Chairman Dances, Foxtrot for Orchestra," written for but eventually dropped from his ground-breaking opera "Nixon in China." It was intended to accompany a surrealistic scene in which a painting of Chairman Mao comes to life and dances with his widow during a state dinner. It has since had a life of its own as a concert piece, and is probably one of the composer's most commonly heard short works.

Jon Kimura Parker

Next is the other Big Piece of the evening, Gershwin's 1925 "Concerto in F" with John Kimura Parker at the keyboard. The concerto isn't particularly complex from a purely structural point of view, but I still find it amazing to contemplate that it was written only a year after the far more rudimentary "Rhapsody in Blue." Gershwin's development as a serious composer took place with an almost supernatural rapidity, as though he somehow knew that his life on this planet would be tragically short (he died of a brain tumor just a few months short of his 40th birthday).

As it is, the "Concerto" is a beautifully crafted piece: lean, powerful, without a spare note. Reviewing the December 3, 1925 premiere of the concerto for the New York World, critic Samuel Chotzinoff noted that Gershwin's "shortcomings are nothing in the face of the one thing he alone of all those writing the music of today possesses. He actually expresses us. He is the present, with all its audacity, impertinence, its feverish delight in its motion, its lapses into rhythmically exotic melancholy." You can feel and hear that "jazz age" urgency in every note of this music. Soloist Jon Kimura Parker is both an experienced virtuoso as well as an ardent advocate for music in the popular media, so he looks like an ideal choice for this piece.

The St. Louis Symphony's jazz-inflected concerts this weekend are Saturday at 8 PM and Sunday at 3 PM. For more information: stlsymphony.org, where you can also download the program notes. The Saturday concert will be broadcast live on St. Louis Public Radio at 90.7 FM and HD 1, as well as via their web site. My experience has been that the web stream has the best sound quality.

If want to really geek out, you can also download the scores for the "Cuban Overture" and "Concerto in F" (only the two-piano reduction for the latter, alas) and follow along with the music. The Adams scores are, of course, under copyright and not available on line.