Symphony Preview: Very old school

I’ve been listening to a lot of Great Courses audio lectures these days on world history and archeology. It’s an enlightening and humbling experience. It’s also one I highly recommend for anyone who thinks a nation that has existed for over two centuries is somehow remarkable. Or you could just read Shelley’s poem “Ozymandias.”

[Preview the music with the SLSO's Spotify playlist.]

James Lee III
Photo courtesy of the SLSO

Or you could spend some time exploring the history of the Cahokia Mounds State Historic Site just across the river in Illinois. That’s what composer James Lee III  (b. 1975) did for “Visions of Cahokia,” the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra commission which has its world premiere this weekend (Saturday and Sunday, January 28 and 29) under the baton of Music Director Stéphane Denève. The Mississippian civilization flourished there for around 800 years (i.e., 550 years longer than the USA) before dissolving as a result of internal strife and economic hardship brought on, in part, by climate change (the so-called “Little Ice Age,” which ended around 200 years ago). I’ll leave you to contemplate that possibly awkward bit of reality while we shift the focus to Lee.

If his name is familiar, that’s probably because this will be the fourth work by him to be heard at Powell Hall, beginning with his “Emotive Transformations” in November 2021. That was my first exposure to his work, which I described as “unquestionably contemporary, but still listener-friendly—a hallmark of the new music that Denève has introduced to local audiences.” His next two works— “Chuphshah! Harriet's Drive to Canaan” last March and “Sukkot Through Orion's Nebula” last November reinforced that opinion, while demonstrating Lee’s skill as an orchestrator.

That said, since this is a world premiere, I have no idea what “Visions of Cahokia” will sound like. Fortunately, Lee provides a detailed description in this weekend’s program notes so there’s no need to repeat it here. You can, however, listen to some of his other compositions on Spotify.

Leonard Bernstein in 1955

Like “Visions of Cahokia,” the 1954 Serenade for solo violin, strings, harp and percussion by Leonard Bernstein (1918–1990) was inspired by an ancient civilization—specifically Athens in the late 4th century BCE. Subtitled “after Plato’s Symposium,” the Serenade consists of five movements, each of which refers to a specific episode in Plato’s fictional depiction of a drinking party in which each guest is challenged to make a speech in honor of Eros, the god of love. The speakers include real-life characters like Aristophanes, Alcibiades, Socrates, and even (as part Socrates’s speech) Diotima of Mantinea—who may or may not have been a historical figure but who is, in any case, the only woman whose voice is heard. She’s also portrayed as acting as Socrates’s teacher rather than his student, which is an interesting reversal of the role usually played by the former in Plato’s writings.

The day after completing the score, Bernstein wrote detailed notes explaining how each movement relates to its designated character in the Symposium. It’s not clear, though, to what extent these are actual primary inspirations. Bernstein biographer Humphrey Burton has suggested that they are more likely to be associations that occurred to him late in the composition process.

Having listened to both the Serenade and a dramatic reading of the Symposium, I’m inclined to agree. The serenity of the second movement (Aristophanes, Allegretto), for example, seems not entirely consistent with the cheerfully avuncular tone of the character’s speech in the Symposium. And the ominous drama of the Socrates section of the final movement seems out of synch with the quiet sense of authority that the noted philosopher projects in Plato’s text.

The real connection, as noted at the official Bernstein web site, may be more a matter of form than content. In the Symposium, each speaker takes up where the last one left off, using the last man’s ideas as a springboard for his own. Bernstein’s music does something similar, deriving the musical ideas of each movement, in part, from those of its predecessor.

If all that sounds a bit academic, fear not. The Serenade is a tremendously appealing work. You don’t need to look under the hood to appreciate the ride.

Sibelius in 1913
By fi:Daniel Nyblin (1856–1923) -
What We Hear in Music, Anne S. Faulkner,
Victor Talking Machine Co., 1913.,
Public Domain, 

The concerts conclude with a familiar favorite that’s a good match for the gloomy weather we’ve had recently: the Symphony No. 2 by Jean Sibelius (1865–1957). Like many of Sibelius’s works, the Symphony No. 2 evokes the darkness of the majestic, windswept Finnish landscape that rarely sees the sun for months on end. It's the kind of darkness you might appreciate from inside a cozy cabin. Like, say, the all-wood home (Sibelius didn't want to hear the sound of rain in metal gutters) on Lake Tuusula in the Finnish forest where the composer lived and worked from 1982 until his death.

It's dramatic and uplifting, and it conjures up potent images of the natural world that so inspired Sibelius. At the same time, it’s a reflection of the political darkness griping the composer’s homeland when the symphony was completed in 1902. Only three years earlier, the composer’s “Finlandia” was a defiant protest against attempts by Russia, which then ruled Finland, of the suppression of Finnish language and culture. Indeed, conductor Robert Kajanus, who first recorded the symphony in 1930, saw the Symphony No. 2 as a musical depiction of Finland’s struggle for independence. To him, the Tempo Andante second movement represented “the most crushing protest against all the injustice which today threatens to take light from the sun,” while the finale was “a triumphant closure which is capable of arousing in the listener a bright mood of consolation and optimism.”

Which, now that I think of it, is something we could use during our own current period of political darkness.

The Essentials: Stéphane Denève conducts the world premiere of "Visions of Cahokia" by James Lee III, Leonard Bernstein's “Serenade (after Plato's Symposium)” with violin soloist James Ehnes, and  the Symphony No. 2 by Sibelius. Performances are Saturday at 8 pm and Sunday at 3 pm, January 28 and 29 at Powell Hall in Grand Center. The Saturday concert will be broadcast on St. Louis Public Radio and Classic 107.3.

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

Review: All for the best

Union Avenue Opera has opened its 25th anniversary season with a splendid production of the 1988 Scottish Opera House version of Leonard Bernstein's Candide. The show was last seen locally at Opera Theatre of St. Louis the same year Union Avenue was born, and this is a worthy successor to that exemplary production in just about every respect.

The company
Photo by Dan Donovan

Candide has had a convoluted and difficult history. Even before its 1956 Broadway premiere, it had already gone through a string of lyricists (including Dorothy Parker and James Agee) and over a dozen revisions by Lillian Hellman of her original book. Various incarnations of the show continued to pop up here and there during the ensuing decades, including a 1973 Harold Prince revival that jettisoned half of the score and (after moving to the Broadway Theatre the following year) ended up over $150,000 in the red despite a string of Tony and Critics Circle awards. The 1988 revision UAO is doing was the last one Bernstein himself deemed satisfactory and, while it sags a bit in the second act, it's still effectively the composer's last word on the subject.

L-R: Jesse Darden, Thomas Gunther
Photo by Dan Donovan

Candide is based loosely on Voltaire's brief comic novel puncturing the absurdities of complacent optimism. Indoctrinated by their tutor Dr. Pangloss to believe that they live in "the best of all possible worlds," the handsome Candide and his beloved Cunegonde learn the hard way that human life, in its natural state, is (to quote Thomas Hobbes) "nasty, poor, brutish, and short."

The script puts them through a thoroughly incredible series of globetrotting adventures and (especially) coincidences that take satirical jabs at organized religion, politics, love, and nearly every other human institution. In the end, Candide and Cunegonde learn to accept the world as it is and make the best of it. In a chorale finale that contains some of Bernstein's most ecstatic music, they agree to "make our garden grow".

Brooklyn Snow
Photo by Dan Donovan

This ought to be the basis for biting parody and theatrical farce, and much of the time it is. Bernstein's final version adds some of sentimental and dramatic moments that would have the overall effect of soft-pedaling the irony if recent political events in the English-speaking world had not so forcefully illustrated the degree to which we were living in our own Panglossian fantasy world.

Great voices and generally first-rate performances dominate UAO's production, with pride of place going to the performers who carry the bulk of the story: the chorus. Under Scott Schoonover's expert direction, this remarkable 15-member ensemble takes on a bewildering variety of roles in the opera's many scenes. Some have named roles and some don't, but all of them are always thoroughly in character and singing with crystalline clarity.

There are more wonderful individual performances in the cast than I can list here, but two of the most obvious come from tenor Jesse Darden as the painfully naive Candide and soprano Brooklyn Snow as Cunegonde.

Christopher Nelson, Brooklyn Snow
Photo by Dan Donovan

Mr. Darden makes the evolution of his character completely credible and sings with authority and power. A graduate of the prestigious Indiana University Vocal Performance program, Ms. Snow displays a stunning combination of vocal athleticism and sparkling stage presence. Her performance of the celebrated coloratura aria "Glitter and be gay" got sustained and richly deserved applause. Together, they are "a practically perfect pair" (to quote Stephen Sondheim, who contributed lyrics to the Harold Prince version of Candide).

Baritone Thomas Gunther, an admirable Captain Corcoran in UAO's H.M.S. Pinafore last season, turns in another fine set of comic performances as Voltaire, Pangloss, and Candide's two traveling companions. Tenor Charlie Tingen gets plenty of laughs as Cunegonde's vain brother Maximillian. And tenor Christopher Nelson makes a striking UAO debut in multiple roles.

L-R: Gina Malone, Brooklyn Snow, Charlie Tingen,
Jesse Darden, Anthony Heinemann,
Thomas Gunther
Photo by Dan Donovan

Soprano Gina Malone (Peep-Bo in UAO's quirky Mikado in 2016) is a delight as the maid Paquette, a girl who can't say "no" in any language. Celebrated soprano Christine Brewer brings her usual finely honed instrument to the role of the cynical Old Lady, who is a bit short in the fundament department, but this cheerfully vulgar character doesn't seem a good match for her strengths.

Bernstein's score is extraordinarily rich, ranging from ingenious patter songs to massive, harmonically complex ensemble numbers. It's wonderful music and, in a work that runs three hours with intermission, there's a lot of it. Mr. Schoonover and his orchestral forces give a fine account of it, despite a few moments when the players and singers seemed not quite in synch.

Brooklyn Snow, Christine Brewer, Jesse Darden
Photo by Dan Donovan

Stage Director Annamaria Pileggi has done a fine job moving her substantial forces quickly through the opera's many scenes with minimal use of props and set pieces. Indeed, C. Otis Sweezey's set consists of little more than some platforms, a few ornate ladder-back chairs, and a set of poles on which the actors hang signs to let us know where the action is taking place. Teresa Doggett's costumes continue the theme of elegant minimalism, with most of the performers in white, Mozart-era outfits to which small items like hats or coats are added to suggest individual characters. It all keeps the show flowing smoothly and at a brisk pace.

Union Avenue Opera's Candide gets the company's new season off to a glorious start. There are two more performances this Friday and Saturday at 8 pm (July 12 and 13) at the Union Avenue Christian Church at 733 Union in the Central West End. Given the size of the crowd when I attended last Saturday, you'd be wise to get your tickets sooner rather than later.

Review: Slatkin takes flight with a diverse program at the symphony

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

Leonard Slatkin
Photo by Lewel Li

No doubt about, St. Louis Symphony Orchestra Conductor Laureate Leonard Slatkin got his two-week concert series off to a strong start Saturday night (April 27, 2019) with three very different and very fascinating pieces.

The concert started with Loren Loiacono's 2017 "Smothered by Sky." The composer describes this six-minute work as a "mini-concerto for orchestra" and, in fact, it bristles with flashy writing for most of the sections in the orchestra. She keeps the percussion section especially busy, banging away on a wide variety of devices, including rarely heard instruments like the flexatone (a popular item in cartoon soundtracks) and non-instruments like brake drums.

Quoted in the SLSO program, Ms. Loiacono says the work deals with the concept of "escape velocity" in physics but goes on to note that the piece "does not attempt to literally depict a rocket taking off or a satellite going into orbit. Instead, it embraces the metaphor behind that narrative, of barreling through atmospheric chaos in order to transcend gravity itself."

To my ears, though, there was a distinct sense, as the work began, of taking flight in the energetic percussion sounds, followed by a feeling of weightlessness in music for the high strings and woodwinds. Frantic brass outbursts increase in frequency until everything suddenly evaporates with a quick passage on the sizzle cymbal. Is that the sound of breaking earthly bonds or a flameout? It's up to the listener to decide.

It was, in any case, given a thrilling performance by the band, with especially impressive work by percussionists Will James, Alan Stewart, and Stephen Kehner with the reliable Tom Stubbs on tympani.

Olga Kern
Photo courtesy of St. Louis Symphony Orchestra

Next was an equally thrilling Rachmaninoff Piano Concerto No. 1. Originally written while Rachmaninoff was a student at the Moscow Conservatory, the concerto was later revised substantially on the eve of the Russian Revolution in 1917, and it's not hard to hear the faint echoes of that turbulence in the sweep and drama of this remarkably concise and vigorous work.

Soloist Olga Kern displayed the same virtuosity and keen musical insight that I heard when she played Rachmaninoff's "Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini" here with Mr. Slatkin in 2010. She pounded out those power chords in the first movement cadenza impressively and perfectly captured the wistful yearning of the second movement. In an interview with me n earlier in the week, Mr. Slatkin praised Ms. Kern's "wide variety and range of skills and styles," and you could certainly hear that in her performance.

Between the two of them, they generated positively volcanic energy in the opening pages and reveled in Rachmaninoff's unabashed Romanticism all the way to the end. Mr. Slatkin appears to have a solid sense of how to indulge Rachmaninoff without ever sounding indulgent. An enthusiastic standing ovation resulted in an electrifying encore from Ms. Kern: Prokofiev's motoric Etude Op. 2 No. 4, written when the composer was a brash young lad of 18.

The evening concluded with a stunning performance of Bernstein's highly theatrical Symphony No. 3 ("Kaddish"). Originally completed in 1963 just after the death of JFK and then revised in 1977, it's a work of wide-ranging theatricality and philosophical depth scored for massive forces (large orchestra, chorus, children's chorus, mezzo-soprano soloist, and speaker) that pushes everyone to their limits.

The work has not met with universal approval over the years. "Some of the responses to the new work were venomous," writes Tim Munro in his program notes. "The American press reactions to the original version," writes Jack Gottlieb in liner notes for Bernstein's 1978 recording of the revised edition, "read like notices of a controversial Broadway play: 'mustn't be missed!' and 'a melodramatic tearjerker!'"

Narrator Charlotte Blake Alston
Photo by Deborah Boardman

Some of the venom, no doubt, came from the narrator's confrontations with God, which condemn The Supreme Being for indifference to suffering and evil: "Tin God! Your bargain is tin! It crumples in my hand!" But as David Denby writes in a 2017 New Yorker article, this quasi-adversarial relationship with God is an essential facet of Bernstein's faith. "For Jews," he notes, "questioning not just God but the Old Testament itself--arguing with its contradictory assertions and laws--is an essential activity, central to the two-thousand-year-long project of interpretation."

Love it or hate it (I come down mostly on the "love it" side) the "Kaddish" Symphony can't fail to make a strong impression, especially in a performance as compelling as this one. A long-time champion of Bernstein's work, Mr. Slatkin pulled together the many disparate and complex elements of Bernstein's score into a powerful and consistently gripping whole.

That's not an easy task, given the sheer magnitude of the piece. The 90-piece orchestra and full chorus completely filled the stage, forcing the children's chorus and director Barbara Berner to perform on the orchestra floor in front of the stage. This could easily have been a recipe for chaos, but it all came together beautifully.

Narrator Charlotte Blake Alston delivered her lines with a gravitas that somewhat gave even the more melodramatic excesses of Bernstein's prose a sober dignity. Mezzo Sasha Cooke both sang and acted her part to perfection, most notably in the touching "Kaddish 2" portion of the second movement, which is a sort of lullaby for God.

Mezzo Sasha Cooke

I have praised Amy Kaiser and the St. Louis Symphony Chorus for their fine work in the past and they rose to the occasion once again in this challenging and complex score. The singers are required to hum, clap, and sing tricky counterpoint. At one point Bernstein breaks the chorus up into (at least) a half dozen small groups, each led by a different member of the chorus and each singing wildly divergent versions of '"amen." Only a chorus as polished as this one could make it all sound so coherent.

The first and only previous performance of this work by the SLSO was back in 1965, with Eleazar de Carvalho on the podium and Bernstein's wife, the actress Felicia Montealegre, as the narrator. That made it effectively a new piece for all concerned, which makes the high quality of the performance that much more impressive.

Leonard Slatkin concludes his two-week stint with the SLSO Friday at 10:30 am and Saturday at 3 pm, May 3 and 4, with a program of music by Tchaikovsky and Samuel Barber, along with the world premiere of "The Paper-Lined Shack" by Jeff Beal. Performances take place at Powell Hall in Grand Center.

Symphony Preview: "I try only to do the good stuff," a conversation with St. Louis Symphony Orchestra Conductor Laureate Leonard Slatkin

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

Leonard Slatkin

St. Louis Symphony Orchestra Conductor Laureate Leonard Slatkin has been a favorite of local audiences since his tenure as music director from 1979 to 1996. His time with the SLSO marked the ensemble's peak of international visibility and he left behind a significant recorded legacy.

Maestro Slatkin has made many appearances with the orchestra over the decades. Having left his post at the Detroit Symphony Orchestra, he has now returned to live in St. Louis and will conduct two sets of concerts with the orchestra this weekend and next (April 27-28 and May 3-4). I had an opportunity to chat with him between rehearsals. Here's our conversation, with some minor edits for clarity.

Chuck Lavazzi (CL): Many local music lovers may not be aware that in the late 1960s you had a relationship with community radio station KDNA, the predecessor of KDHX.

Leonard Slatkin (LS): That's exactly right. When I was the assistant conductor in 1968 the orchestra was on strike--hopefully not because I was the assistant conductor! I can't remember exactly how it happened but somebody contacted me and asked me if I'd come down to the station and do an interview. I didn't know anything about it and I was a bit surprised when I pulled up to what was basically the only building left standing in Gaslight Square.

We talked for about an hour and then I asked them if I could look at their classical music library. I looked through it and it was horribly out of order with no organization whatsoever. I offered to put it in some sort of order and they asked me if I'd be interested in doing a show. It had never occurred to me at all because I was quite shy back then but I thought "this could be interesting and could fill up some time," so I embarked on what became, for the next three years, a show called "The Slatkin Project" on Thursdays from 2 to 6 pm.

Back then you were the programmer, the producer, and the engineer for your show--one person doing everything in the little tiny room. We could do interviews, we could hook up four or five phone lines together and people could call in and talk on the air. There was a guy called "The Weatherbird" would call in every day at 5:30 pm to give a rather elaborate weather forecast. We used to tease him mercilessly.

I loved my time there because there was a lot of camaraderie at the station, not to mention a lot of drug busts, and it gave me an understanding of what the power of radio was, how--perhaps more than any other medium at the time--it had the power to spur on people's imaginations, to make their own images instead of having them put up on a screen for you.

So even though I could only do it for three years simply because I got too busy to devote any time to it, I always kept that radio stuff in the back of my head. Now I'm sort of resurrecting it in a way with another station in town. It will be sort of similar to the old show in that it's a mix of all kinds of stuff but the difference now is that I have adapted it to the 21st century. So I have ten thousand tracks on my iPad and I'm just going to hit the shuffle button and that's what I'll talk about and play.

Composer Loren Loiacono
Photo by Kenneth Kato

CL: That should be fun; I look forward to hearing that. Well, welcome back to St. Louis. You're conducting two concerts here over the next two weeks. I'd like to start out talking about what you're doing the first weekend, particularly two pieces that are very intriguing, beginning with the one you're going to open with, which is the local premiere of Loren Loiacono's "Smothered by Sky."

LS: Right. In my final season in Detroit, which was last season and which concluded a little too abruptly due to heart bypass surgery, I decided to do something a little different and I asked many composers, most of whom had associations with me here in St. Louis, to recommend either current or former students to write opening pieces for concerts. I picked seven of them and Loren was one. I found her work to be very attractive and very colorful for the orchestra.

The title, like most titles, was just something to create a starting point so she could create something that illustrated what the words mean to her. We have a feeling of air moving and currents, maybe in some cases a bit wildly and in others a bit calmly. I look at her as one of the bright lights in the composing firmament in the coming years.

There's so much emphasis now on inclusion of female composers and conductors so I thought that would be appropriate. We did many during my years in St. Louis, like Joan Tower and the person who is my wife, Cindy McTee. I've never chose to work with anybody on the basis of how they look or who they are, none of that, so I've never had to think about bias on my own part, but I certainly understand how it occurs in the industry, and I'm very happy that first piece I will do is by a female composer.

CL: I had a chance to watch the video of "Smothered by Sky" that you did with the Detroit Symphony and it stuck me as an extraordinarily fun piece. It also struck me as a bit like movie music in that it's so descriptive and so visual.

LS: I would say it's like music that creates imagery in your head, so you get to choose what movie it's going to be.

CL: Yes, it's very visual, and the visions you get are going to depend very much on who you are and what you bring to it.

LS: Exactly.

CL: It also sounded like a big playground for the orchestra. It's a huge ensemble and the percussion battery has some instruments you don't normally see there.

LS: Yeah, there are some different uses of traditional instruments. She has them quite busy. She's an expert colorist and orchestrator. That's one of the hallmarks of so many composers today, probably because they can get a better idea of the orchestra from the way they compose on computers and various devices. They create sound libraries with makes orchestration--I don't want to say "easier"--but you're able to hear on playback an approximation of what it's going to sound like in the orchestra. And that wasn't really available so much 25 years ago.

CL: I guess it makes it easier to be more adventurous because of that immediate feedback.

LS: Yes, but it also makes it a little more possible to be facile in a quicker way because of the immediate response. You don't have to think in the same way. It's like, you have the music in front of you and you play it, and you say "yes, I like that" or "no, I don't like that, gonna change it." And you can put the changes in and you can hear them right away. That's what composers couldn't do before. It was a different skill set.

Leonard Bernstein in 1955

CL: The other big work on the program is also a piece that might not be familiar to a lot of audience members: the Symphony No. 3, the "Kaddish" symphony by Leonard Bernstein. He began work on this in 1955, completed it in 1963 shortly after President Kennedy was killed, and then the St. Louis Symphony performed it in 1965. He revised it in 1977. Would I be safe in assuming it's the 1977 version that you're doing?

LS: Yes. The revisions are more about the text than about the music. This is a very personal piece, as many of Bernstein's works are. In this, he's challenging God over faith. "How can you do these kinds of things to me and to the world and still call yourself a God?" It's a dilemma that so many people go through.

This is not so much a Jewish work. It's similar to Bernstein's "Mass," which is not a Catholic work. These are works that deal with, more generally, how people perceive faith in its many directions, not necessarily religious. The religious part might be: how do you define (or not) your relationship with God if you believe in one. Or if you don't. That's what Bernstein was about, looking at angst in society in so many different ways.

It's written for a huge orchestra, chorus, soloists, and children's chorus--it's a big mélange. And also stylistically, he weaves in and out of mid-20th century atonality and serialism but then reverts to customary Bernstein melody and harmony.

We're now in the point in Bernstein's life where he's very well known both as a composer and conductor. "West Side Story" was already out of the way, but that's what people wanted, they wanted "West Side Story" again in whatever he wrote, and he couldn't do that. He desperately wanted to be accepted by music critics and the academic establishment. In works from around the period, he tried, but ultimately even he realized that this was not his forte.

About midway through the piece, when we actually get to the prayer, he reverts to a more songlike texture and then never really leaves it. So he doesn't return much the kind of aggressive music that he set up for the first 20 minutes of the piece. It's as if he has consoled himself in realizing that he knows where his own gifts lie.

CL: I was listening to Bernstein's recording of this with the Israel Philharmonic a couple of days ago. In the "Kaddish 2" section the soprano solo sings a kind of lullaby to God that's beautiful and heartbreaking.

LS: It's gorgeous, and he brings that back again at the end. He has more or less resigned himself that he has to reach the public first, that it shouldn't be about the critics and the academics, it should be about what he feels deeply inside.

CL: On the Leonardbernstain.dot com web site , Jack Gottlieb and some comments about the piece. One of the things she says is that this somewhat adversarial relationship between humanity and God is part of a uniquely Jewish view of God.

LS: It's not just a Jewish view, it's a view we see all over the place in the world today and even in Bernstein's time. He was someone who was really involved with the social aspects of society. He was involved with the Black Panthers, for example. So the conflict is not just about Man and God, it's about Man and how he functions in society itself. You can take the religious part as part of the Jewish tradition because the prayer is in Hebrew, but remember that the original narrator was a woman and in the Jewish faith a woman is not supposed to recite the Kaddish.

CL: And, in fact, it's going to be a woman this time.

Charlotte Blake Alston
Photo by Deborah Boardman

LS: Yes, we hunted high and low for a speaker. I did it two years ago with Jeremy Irons in New York and that was really quite spectacular, and now we have a young woman [Charlotte Blake Alston] who's actually a real storyteller. She has done it with the Philadelphia Orchestra and I am truly looking forward to this collaboration.

CL: What is it about this piece that really made you want to do it? What is it that really spoke to you?

LS: Well, here we are at the tail end of the Bernstein 100th anniversary celebration. We started recording Bernstein here in St. Louis under my tenure. Bernstein was always surprised that we were doing so much and I just kept telling him that I really loved the music, the orchestra loved to play it. But this was one of the few Bernstein pieces that we did not do when I was conductor, so I thought it would be nice this year to add one of the major pieces for the first time for me with the St. Louis Symphony.

CL: It seems to me that Bernstein's symphonies are a bit neglected compared with his other works.

LS: Well, the Second Symphony, "The Age of Anxiety," comes up a little more frequently. The First Symphony, "Jeremiah," by the way, was recorded for the first time by Leonard Bernstein and the St. Louis Symphony [in 1945]. This piece is also getting a little more attention than usual. It's still to early to know what his place will be in what we call the traditional classical canon. I don't think it will supplant the success of "West Side Story" or "Candide," but certainly works like the "Chichester Psalms," his Serenade for Violin and Orchestra, and a couple of other pieces have been played often enough to recognize him as an important force on the concert hall stage.

CL: Back in 2013, during a symposium at The Van Cliburn Competition, you were talking about your feelings conducting works that had already been recorded by their own composers. You noted at the time that not all composers were great conductors. How to you feel about doing a work where the composer was a great conductor, like Bernstein?

LS: Well, it's interesting, I didn't meet Bernstein until five years before he died. We always tried to get together but it never worked out. And finally we did because I was conducting the Boston Symphony in Tanglewood and I saw that Bernstein was conducting the next night, so I figured if I programmed a piece of his, he would show up and I would have to meet him.

And that's exactly what happened. I did a work that we had recorded here called "Facsimile"--very rarely played. And I knew it wasn't the best performance I had ever given--it just somehow didn't hang together in my head--and in walks Bernstein, cape and all, and I was prepared for the worst. And he looked at me and he said, "you know, that wasn't what I intended when I wrote it, but I understand how you came to your interpretive decisions."

And that actually changed the way I looked at conducting any composer's music, much less ones who were also good conductors. It told me that they realized, in order for their works to survive into the future, that they must undergo some sort of transformation in other interpreters' hands, in the very same way that those conductors had done Haydn, Beethoven, Schubert, Mahler, Shostakovich--whatever it was. A composer cannot be locked in to one way of having his or her piece played. It needs to be subject to different people looking at it in different ways.

CL: And the composers who were also conductors understood that most deeply, because they did that themselves.

LS: Yes. Bernstein did, Benjamin Britten did. I'm not sure if [Pierre] Boulez did. But the few who I considered to be outstanding conductors realized that they had to separate themselves from being the creators of the piece. They realized that they were now just the composers.

Olga Kern
Photo courtesy of St. Louis Symphony Orchestra

CL: There is one other piece on the program this weekend: the Piano Concerto No. 1 by Rachmaninoff with Olga Kern. You've worked with her before, yes?

LS: Yes, we work together all the time. I adore her playing. She's so wonderful and expressive, especially in this Russian Romantic music. She has a wide variety and range of skills and styles. She'll just tear the house down with this--we've done it a couple of time before. She's a delight and a commanding stage presence.

One quick word about the following week's program (May 3-5). This one has a premiere that's written in honor or my 50-year association with the St. Louis Symphony, but it's not a likely choice. The composer's name is Jeff Beal. He's known mostly for writing the music for "House of Cards." He's been active in television and film, but mostly in the concert hall. I wanted to do something a little bit different and he wanted to write a song cycle based on letters from his great-grandmother. And our soprano, also new to St. Louis but just mind-droppingly good, is Israeli-born singer Hila Plitmann. With her range, her virtuosity, and her acting ability, audiences are in for a real treat.

The piece is really beautiful. I think it's one of those pieces that will catch on very quickly. It's melodic and simple in its way. Keep looking out for Jeff Beal's name. He's going to be a force in concert hall composition and one of these composers to bridge the gap between popular culture and what we unfortunately call "sophisticated" culture. Although there shouldn't be a difference. It's like [Duke] Ellington said, there's only two kinds, good music and the other stuff. I try only to do the good stuff.

CL: That weekend you're also doing Samuel Barber's Symphony No. 1.

LS: Yes, a piece we recorded and which won a Grammy. And then the Tchaikovsky "Pathetique," the Symphony No. 6, his final work. It's another piece that we recorded. It's a performance that will perhaps remind audiences, sonically, of what that collaboration was like in the earlier days when I was music director. It has changed over the years, but for the next couple of weeks we old timers will show the kids how we used to play.

CL: And you have moved back to St. Louis now.

LS: Yes, my wife and I live in Clayton now. We're loving it. We went to a Cards game yesterday. I've got the barbecue ready to go. If I wasn't preparing to go to Europe in two weeks I'd be sitting on the porch for the entire summer.

CL: Welcome back, and I hope we see more of you in Powell Hall in the future.

LS: Oh, you will. I'll be around quite often.

---

The Essentials: Leonard Slatkin returns to conduct the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra and Chorus Saturday at 8 pm and Sunday at 3 pm, April 27 and 28. The program consists of Loren Loiacono's "Smothered by the Sky," Rachmaninoff's Piano Concerto No. 1 with soloist Olga Kern, and Bernstein's Symphony No. 3 ("Kaddish") with narrator Charlotte Blake Alston. He conducts the orchestra and soprano soloist Hila Plitmann Friday and Saturday at 8 pm, May 3 and 4, in Barber's Symphony No. 1, Tchaikovsky's Symphony No. 6 ("Pathetique") and the world premiere of "The Paper Lined Shack" by Jeff Beal. Performances take place at Powell Symphony Hall in Grand. Center

Review: The big sing

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

The St. Louis Symphony Chorus

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

It was a gala festival of the human voice this past weekend (February 9 - 11) at Powell Hall as Bramwell Tovey conducted the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra, Chorus, and Children's Chorus in two great 20th century works for chorus and orchestra--one of which is by a composer whose centenary the music world is celebrating right now.

That composer is Leonard Bernstein. Born in 1918, the famed conductor, composer, and media personality didn't produce a huge catalog of works, and not all of them have aged well. But when he was at the top of his game, he produced appealing music of tremendous power. And he was definitely at the top of his game when he wrote the opening work in last weekend's concerts, the 1965 Chichester Psalms.

Scored for "treble" voice (boy soprano/contralto or countertenor), solo quartet, choir, and orchestra, the work is quintessentially Bernstein with its yearning melodic lines, theatrical flourishes, and just enough dissonance to add spice without assaulting one's ears. It's a beautiful and moving plea for peace that feels every bit as timely now as it was over sixty years ago.

In her pre-concert remarks, SLSO Chorus director Amy Kaiser noted that the Chichester Psalms presents significant linguistic and musical challenges. The psalms are sung in Hebrew (not a language often encountered in the classical world) and the music uses unconventional time signatures like 7/4 and 10/4, which create a sense of urgency but can be difficult to sing. Her singers handled it all beautifully, though, with a seamless sonic blend and all the power a person could wish for. The brief SATB (soprano, alto, tenor, bass) quartet section towards the end was wonderfully clear, as was the lovely a cappella finale.

Amy Kaiser

Vocal soloist Devin Best's voice had an ethereal clarity in the second movement, with its setting of the well-known 23rd Psalm ("The Lord is my shepherd"), but even with amplification it was sometimes difficult to hear him.

A former student of Bernstein, Mr. Tovey conducted with an impressive feel for the theatricality of this music, and the orchestra responded with expert playing. The string sound, in particular had a wonderful richness, and there were lovely solo moments from Associate Concertmaster Heidi Harris along with cellists Melissa Brooks (the Associate Principal) and Anne Fagerburg.

It has been almost 16 years since the SLSO has tackled the Chichester Psalms, but I hope we don't have to wait that long to hear it again.

For most of the audience last weekend, I expect, big draw was the second work on the program, Carl Orff's 1936 "scenic cantata" Carmina Burana. It's a piece that has been performed many times here over the past several years, most recently in a fully staged version by the Nashville Ballet in 2015. The SLSO last did it in May, 2014 with Carlos Izcaray on the podium.

Mr. Tovey's was possibly the most unabashedly theatrical interpretation of the piece yet, and while I'm not convinced that all of his decisions were the best ones, there's no denying that this was a very exciting and entertaining Carmina Burana overall. He made smart use of dramatic pauses and wasn't shy about playing with tempos here and there. He brought out more of the bawdy humor in some of the poems than some conductors have in the past, most notably in the "In Taverna" (In the Tavern) section, and had the baritone and soprano soloists play a steamy love scene at the conclusion of "Cour D'Amours" (Court of Love).

That could have come across as artificially stagey, but the soloists made it work. Baritone James Westman and soprano Tracy Dahl clearly had great fun with their romantic scene, and Ms. Dahl handled the absurdly difficult upward glissando in "Dulcissime" with easy elegance. Mr. Westman's comically inebriated abbot in "Ego sum abbas" was a real crowd pleaser as well.

The tenor has only one number, but done properly "Olim lacut colueram"--a macabre number sung from the point of view of a roasted swan about to be eaten--is a neat little musical horror show. The melody lies at the very top of the tenor range, often forcing the singer into his falsetto, but Benjamin Butterfield sounded completely at ease with it. I'm not persuaded that playing the piece mostly for laughs, complete with avian shakes of the head and arms, really does the text justice, but Mr. Butterfield did it extraordinarily well.

The bulk of Carmina Burana, though, is carried by the chorus, which has to sing in Latin, Middle High German, and Old Provençal, and do it consistently for an entire hour. When we heard them Friday night, their articulation was crisp and clean and the sound well balanced. The Children's Chorus was in fine collective voice as well.

Next at Powell Hall: Singer/songwriter Rufus Wainwright performs with the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra on Friday, February 16, at 7:30 pm. Then Matthew Halls conducts the orchestra and clarinet soloist Scott Andrews (SLSO Principal Clarinet) Saturday at 8 pm and Sunday at 3 pm, February 17 and 18. The program consists of Schubert's Symphony No. 3, Carl Maria von Weber's Clarinet Concerto No. 1, and Mendelssohn's Symphony No. 1 (written when the composer was 15). The concerts take place at Powell Symphony Hall, 718 North Grand in Grand Center.

Symphony Preview: Chants sacres et profanes

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

Leonard Bernstein in 1955

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This weekend (February 9 - 11, 2018), the guest conductor Bramwell Tovey leads the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra, Chorus, and Children's Chorus in a program of two great works for chorus and orchestra-one sacred and one profane.

The sacred is represented by Leonard Bernstein's infrequently heard Chichester Psalms, last performed by the SLSO nearly 16 years ago. The work was commissioned in 1963 by the Very Rev. Walter Hussey (Dean of Chichester Cathedral in Sussex, England) for a 1965 music festival at the cathedral, although its actual premiere took place at a July 15, 1965 New York Philharmonic concert with Bernstein at the podium. That performance was not recorded as far as I know (although Bernstein did a studio recording with the NY Phil at around that time), but a 1977 performance by Bernstein and the Israel Philharmonic in Berlin was recorded on both audio and video, and is available on YouTube.

The piece runs around 20 minutes and is scored for boy soprano or countertenor, solo quartet, choir and orchestra (3 trumpets in B flat, 3 trombones, timpani, percussion, 2 harps, and strings). Bernstein also wrote a pared-down version in which the orchestra was replaced with organ, one harp, and percussion (presumably to make it more accessible to church-based music groups) but we'll be hearing the original this weekend.

René Spencer Saller provides a very detailed analysis of the music in her program notes. The only thing I can add is to note that this is a work that is quintessentially Bernstein. The rhythmic drive, the sense of yearning, the smart orchestration, the touch of dissonance-it's all there. You couldn't possibly mistake it for the work of anyone else.

About that touch of dissonance: when Bernstein was writing the Chichester Psalms in the early 1960s it was utterly unfashionable, in the classical music world, to compose in a style that actually sounded like most of what the Western world had thought of as musical for the past several centuries. Serialism was all the rage. Increasing complexity and a disregard of traditional ideas of harmony was seen as a kind of ideological imperative.

Music, as composer Milton Babbitt insisted in his controversial essay "Who Cares if You Listen?" (published almost exactly 70 years ago, in the February 1958 High Fidelity) had to "evolve," and it could do so only by abandoning any attempt to actually communicate with an audience. "I dare suggest," he wrote, "that the composer would do himself and his music an immediate and eventual service by total, resolute, and voluntary withdrawal from this public world to one of private performance and electronic media, with its very real possibility of complete elimination of the public and social aspects of musical composition". Ineed, the very definition of what constituted music had been stretched to the point where John Cage could "write" a piece titled 4'33" ("four minutes and 33 seconds") that consisted of nothing but the audience sitting quietly and listening to environmental sounds for four minutes and 33 seconds. And it was taken seriously.

Against that backdrop, the immediate appeal of the Chichester Psalms was, to say the least, heretical. Bernstein understood as much when he wrote the following bit of verse for the October 24, 1965 edition of the New York Times:

For hours on end, I brooded and mused
On materiae musicae, used and abused
On aspects of unconventionality
Over the death in our time of tonality…
Pieces for nattering, clucking sopranos
With squadrons of vibraphones, fleets of pianos
Played with forearms, the fists and the palms
And then I came up with the Chichester Psalms.
These psalms are a simple and modest affair
Tonal and tuneful and somewhat square
Certain to sicken a stout John Cager
With its tonics and triads in E flat major
But there is stands-the result of my pondering
Two long months of avant-garde wandering
My youngest child, old-fashioned and sweet
And he stands on his own two tonal feet.

The Nashville Ballet's Carmina Burana
Photo by Heather Thorne

I could (but won't) go on about how Mr. Babbitt got both biological evolution and the nature of music wrong, but for now let's just note that Mr. Bernstein did care if we listened, and history has come down firmly on his side.

The second half of this weekend's program will be taken up with Carl Orff's 1936 "scenic cantata" Carmina Burana. It's a piece that has been performed many times here over the past several years, most recently in a fully staged version by the Nashville Ballet in 2015. The SLSO last did it in May, 2014 with Carlos Izcaray on the podium.

I wrote extensively about the work back then, so rather than repeat all that here, I'll just invite you to take a look at the preview I wrote for that concert. The SLSO program notes have some good stuff in them as well. The important thing is that the piece that British critic Richard Osborne once described as “the best known new composition to emerge from Nazi Germany” is an irresistible celebration of live, love, drinking, eating, and sex.

It's also about how the wheel of fortune is always turning and that none of us should get too cocky, as the universe has a tendency to dope-slap the excessively smug-a lesson we should perhaps bear in mind in the USA right now.

The Essentials: Bramwell Tovey conducts the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra, Chorus, and Children's Chorus Friday and Saturday at 8 pm and Sunday at 3 pm, February 9 - 11. The concerts take place at Powell Symphony Hall, 718 North Grand in Grand Center.

Symphony Preview: All-American boys at Powell Hall October 16-18, 2015

Aaron Copland in 1970
en.wikipedia.org

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It's an all-American weekend at Powell Hall this Friday through Sunday as St. Louis Symphony Resident Conductor Steven Jarvi leads the orchestra in a program of Leonard Bernstein, Aaron Copland, and George Gershwin. It includes two Big Pieces, one of which—Copland's 1926 "Piano Concerto"—is not heard all that often.

As Paul Schiavo points out in his program notes, the concerto dates from a time when Copland—then a brash young man in his mid-20s—was making a name for himself with "works that vibrated with the exciting new rhythms of the Jazz Age." The popular style of more well-known works like "Rodeo," "Billy the Kid," and the "Symphony No. 3" was still a decade or more away, although you can still hear suggestions of that big, open sound in the opening measures of the concerto.

Serge Koussevitzky
en.wikipedia.org

"The Piano Concerto", writes Copland in the first volume of his 1984 autobiography (co-authored with Vivian Perlis), "was the last of my works to make explicit use of jazz materials. I have often described myself as a 'work-a-year' man—1926 was the year of the Concerto." He goes on to give a detailed description of how jazz elements are incorporated into the concerto, but since you can read much of that in Mr. Schiavo's notes there no reason for me to repeat it here.

The concerto was not particularly well received at its 1927 premiere with Serge Koussevitzky conducting the Boston Symphony Orchestra, with the composer at the piano. "If I felt I had gone to the extreme of where jazz could take me," writes Copland, "the audiences and critics in Boston all thought I had gone too far. One critic actually accused Koussevitzky of being a malicious foreigner who wanted to show how bad American music was!" These days the concerto, while still not a core part of the repertory, rarely meets with that kind of hostility.

The soloist for the concerto will be Israeli pianist Inon Barnatan, who currently serves as the New York Philharmonic's first Artist-in-Association—a position that guarantees him three years of performances with that prestigious ensemble. The orchestra's outgoing Music Director, Alan Gilbert, has described Mr. Barnatan as "the complete artist: a wonderful pianist, a probing intellect, passionately committed, and a capable contemporary-music pianist as well." Which certainly makes him sound like a good match for this material.

Inon Barnatan
Photo: Marco Borggreve, inonbarnatan.com

In his discussion of the "Piano Concerto" in his autobiography, Copland goes on at some length to point out that he was "often critically paired with [George] Gershwin" and that some critics suggested that the latter's "Rhapsody in Blue" and "Concerto in F" might have influenced Copland's own work. But he and Gershwin had, in fact, no contact with each other. "On one occasion," notes Copland, "when we were finally face to face at some party, with the opportunity for conversation, we found nothing to say to each other!"

Which brings us to the second Big Piece on the program this weekend: Gershwin's wildly popular tone poem "An American in Paris." Begun during a trip to Paris in the same year that Copland spent working on his concerto and completed during a longer visit to the City of Light in 1928, the work is a reminder of just how much solid craftsmanship lurks behind Gershwin’s irresistible tunes.

"This new piece," observed Gershwin in a 1928 interview in Musical America, "really a rhapsodic ballet, is written very freely and is the most modern music I've yet attempted. The opening will be developed in typical French style, in the manner of Debussy and The Six, though the themes are all original. My purpose here is to portray the impressions of an American visitor in Paris, as he strolls about the city, listens to the various street noises, and absorbs the French atmosphere."

Gershwin in 1937
Photo: Carl Van Vechten
en.wikipedia.org

As someone who has just returned from another trip to Paris, I have to say it works beautifully. The lively opening with its colorful evocation of the city's lively sidewalk cafes and bustling boulevards (complete with honking taxi horns in the percussion section) is a masterful bit of musical imagery. And the bluesy central section evokes not only the homesickness of the traveler but also the charm of Paris at night.

"An American in Paris" is also reminder of how far Gershwin came in such a short period of time. This is, after all, a guy who went from being a Tin Pan Alley "song plugger" to an accomplished composer and orchestrator in only thirteen years. In another seven years he would write one of the mainstays of twentieth century American opera, "Porgy and Bess". What might he have done had he not died so young?

The concerts open with a pair of suites by Leonard Bernstein: the "Three Dance Episodes" from his first major Broadway hit "On the Town" (which opened in December 1944) and the "Symphonic Suite" from his score for the 1955 Elia Kazan film "On the Waterfront."

Listening to the score for "On the Town" may feel like a nostalgic exercise now, but back in 1944 this story of three sailors out to see as much of New York as possible in one day had real resonance for a country that had been at war for four years. The D-Day invasion was just six months old and while the Third Reich was crumbling, the war with Japan still raged. Everyone in the audience understood that Chip, Ozzie, and Gabey were so desperate to see it all today because, for them, there might not be a tomorrow. You can hear that in the melancholy of the second movement ("Lonely Town") as well as in the frantic bustle of the finale ("Times Square: 1944").

Leonard Bernstein, 1945
Photo: Carl Van Vechten
en.wikipedia.org

"It was very hard for any of us on opening night to have a clear idea of what our show was really like," recall original cast members and lyricists Betty Comden and Adolph Green in the liner notes for the 1961 studio recording of the show for Columbia. "World War II was on, and the theme of young people caught in it, and the urgency of their desperately trying to cram a lifetime of adventure and romance into a moment, seemed to move the audience and give the show an underlying poignancy, while never having to ask for sympathy."

The music from "On the Waterfront"—Bernstein's only film score—shows a different side of his musical personality. It's haunting, lyrical, and, in its final pages, builds to exultant climax. In the film, the music accompanies a scene in which Marlon Brando's character, despite being beaten to a pulp by goons hired by Lee J. Cobb's crooked union organizer, shakily gets to his feat and defiantly returns to work. It's an inspiring moment, even if the film itself sometimes comes across as anti-union agitprop from a director who, a few years earlier, had cooperated with McCarthy's anticommunist witch-hunt.

The essentials: Steven Jarvi conducts the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra with piano soloist Inon Barnatan on Friday at 10:30 a.m., Saturday at 8 p.m., and Sunday at 3 p.m., October 16-18. The concerts take place at Powell Symphony Hall, 718 North Grand in Grand Center. For more information: stlsymphony.org.

Bernstein and Gershwin rule in an all-American Thanksgiving weekend with the St. Louis Symphony

Kirill Gerstein

Who: The St. Louis Symphony Orchestra
What: Music of Bernstein, Gershwin, Michael Daugherty, and Andrew Norman
Where: Powell Symphony Hall, St. Louis
When: November 28-30, 2014

St. Louis residents had a great alternative to the teeming multitudes at the malls and movie theaters Thanksgiving weekend: a bracing concert of American music for that most American of holidays.

This weekend's concerts open with a fanciful bit of low comedy and high musical invention: Michael Daugherty's "Hell's Angels." Scored for bassoon quartet and large orchestra (a plethora of percussion, including the massive "Mahler box" and a thundersheet), the piece is a cinematically vivid send-up of the obnoxious noise-making that seems endemic to motorcycle culture in the USA. The composer says it's "the musical tale of a gang of hot-rodding motorcycling bassoonists who ride into town and take over a concert hall" and, in fact, that's how David Robertson has staged it. The orchestra began playing the minuet from Boccherini's Op. 11 string quartet, only to have it rudely interrupted by Daugherty's aggressively discordant opening as SLSO bassoonists Andrew Cuneo, Andrew Gott, and Felicia Foland and contrabassoonist Gregg Henegar swaggered on to the stage all punked up in black leather to play their fiercely difficult solos. The joking suggestion, in my preview article, that Mr. Cuneo, as Principal Bassoon, should be wearing a black leather jacket with an eagle on the back turned out to be unintentionally prophetic.

As you might expect from the composer of the Peter Schickele-esque "Le Tombeau de Liberace" (which the SLSO did back in 2003), "Hell's Angels" is long on visual and musical jokes and features some spectacular virtuoso writing for the soloists, with lightning runs, leaps that employ the full range of the instruments, and what the composer describes as "devilishly difficult polyrhythms." Granted, the noisy movie music orchestrations swamped some of it, but Daugherty has written some wonderfully transparent passages as well.

For me, "Hell's Angels" wore out its welcome a bit before it ended, but it was still great fun. It was also a nice prologue for another work inspired by testosterone-fueled acting out, Leonard Bernstein's "Symphonic Dances from West Side Story."

If your only exposure to the dance music from Bernstein's "West Side Story" is via the film or touring productions of the show, you might not be aware of just how brilliantly scored it is. Theatrical pit bands rarely have enough players to do it justice, so much thanks is due to the composer and his orchestrators, TV and film arrangers Sid Ramin and Irwin Kostal, for putting together this nine-movement suite in 1960. It's a remarkable piece, filled with tricky polyrhythms, dissonance, flashy orchestration (including an expanded percussion battery), and a raft of other touches that remind us of how effectively Bernstein bridged the worlds of concert hall and Broadway theatre.

As you might gather from that last paragraph, this is music that requires great precision and drive from the orchestra (to say nothing of the ability to snap fingers and shout "mambo" on cue). I'm happy to report that Mr. Robertson and his forces passed the score's tests with flying colors. The percussion section covered itself with glory, and they weren't alone. Everyone played with such fluid skill that it was easy to forget what a challenging piece this is.

Even in the standard repertoire, by the way, Mr. Robertson has an uncanny knack for reminding us of the dance rhythms that underlie so much of Western music. In openly dance-inspired pieces like this, he is thoroughly in his element.

The big attraction for me this week, though, was the original 1924 jazz band version of Gershwin's "Rhapsody in Blue." Usually heard in Ferde Grofe's full-orchestra expansion of 1937, the "Rhapsody" didn't get back to its roots until Samuel Adler reconstructed and recorded the 1924 arrangement in 1971. The jazz band version has a kind of snap and flash that a full orchestra can't seem to match, especially when played by an ensemble as good as this one. Scott Andrews gave the famous opening clarinet solo all the limpid, bluesy grace it needs, nicely seguing into Tom Drake's "wah-wah" trumpet. The addition of saxophonists Nathan Nabb, Paul DeMarinis, and Adrianne Honnold added considerably to the '20s ambience, as did James Betts on banjo.

Pianist Kirill Gerstein played the solo part with all the technical skill you might expect, combined with an impressive sensitivity to the improvisatory nature of this piece. He freely embellished the music more than once Friday night (and even more so on Saturday), but always in a '20s jazz style that was very true to Gershwin. It was a reminder that the composer himself did some improvising when he played the work's Aeolian Hall premiere.

It was, in short, a joy to finally see and hear a live performance of an arrangement that I had previously known only on recordings.

Preceding the Gershwin and, in fact, leading into it without pause, was Andrew Norman's "Try" for piano and orchestra. Composed on a commission in 2011, the work is, according to Mr. Norman, about the difficult process of trying different musical ideas until you come up with one that "finally (fingers crossed) gets it right." It's an interesting notion, but in practice it sounded like a compilation of every "new music" cliché of the last fifty years. After 15 long minutes, it slowly winds down to a single descending figure in the piano repeated well past the point of tedium. It was, you should pardon the expressing, trying.

Throughout the evening—and especially during the last two works—artist S. Katy Tucker provided projections and a light show. They enhanced the Norman and the Gershwin, and provided some mood-setting footage from the film version of "West Side Story" as a prelude to the Bernstein. I don't know that any of it was particularly essential, but it was a nice addition nevertheless.

Next at Powell Hall: Steven Jarvi conducts the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra along with violin soloists Jessica Cheng, Angie Smart, Jooyeon Kong, and Alison Harney Friday at 10:30 a.m. and 8 p.m., Saturday at 8 p.m., and Sunday at 3 p.m., December 5-7. The program features Vivaldi's "Four Seasons" along with music by Barber and Wagner. The concerts take place at Powell Symphony Hall, 718 North Grand in Grand Center. For more information, visit the symphony web site.

Symphony Preview: A musical experiement recreated at Powell Hall Thanksgiving weekend

Whiteman in the trailer for the film
"Rhapsody in Blue"
en.wikipedia.org

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"An Experiment in Modern Music" was how bandleader Paul Whiteman billed the February 12, 1924 concert by his Palais Royal Orchestra at New York's Aeolian Hall. This weekend at Powell Hall, the St. Louis Symphony will recapture some of the excitement attendant on that legendary program.

The most memorable piece to emerge from Whiteman's experiment is, of course, Gershwin's "Rhapsody in Blue" (although I have a fondness for the piece that preceded it: an arrangement of Elgar's "Pomp and Circumstance March No. 1" complete with plunking banjo). Until 1971, though, most people who heard the work weren't hearing what the New York audience heard in 1924. That's because it was Samuel Adler's 1971 recording that reconstructed the original Whiteman jazz band arrangement (by composer Ferde Grofe of "Grand Canyon Suite" fame) using parts from the original score. Before then, the "Rhapsody" was always heard in what conductor Maurice Peress (in the notes for his 1986 recreation of the Aeolian Hall concert for the Musicmasters label) calls the "Hollywood version" for symphony orchestra.

He (and I) grew up with that version—as have most classical music fans of a certain age. Hearing a reconstruction of the original, as you will this weekend at Powell, will probably come as something of a revelation. It certainly did to me when I first played that Adler disc. The jazz band version has a kind of snap and flash that the full orchestra can't seem to match, no matter how skilled the musicians.

The soloist for the Gershwin has a fair amount of snap and flash himself. It's Kirill Gerstein, who gave us a surprisingly lyrical Tchaikovsky 1st last September and a bravura performance of British composer Thomas Adès's “In Seven Days" two years ago. A Gilmore Artist Award winner, Mr. Gerstein has shown himself to be equally at home with both Romantic classics and new music—some of which he has commissioned himself.

Bernstein in 1955
en.wikipedia.org

The other big familiar work on the program is Bernstein's "Symphonic Dances from West Side Story," an orchestral suite assembled from the score for the 1957 musical by Bernstein in 1960. The orchestration by TV and film veterans Sid Ramin and Irwin Kostal is irresistibly colorful and the piece as a whole does a nice job of distilling the essence of the play down into a nine-movement set lasting just over 20 minutes.

There are two local premieres on the program this weekend as well: "Hell's Angels" (written in 1999 by Michael Daugherty) and "Try" (written in 2011 by Andrew Norman).

Symphony program annotator Michael Durchholz describes the former as "a roaring, chaotic mini-concerto based on the titular outlaw biker gang" which "substitutes long, tubular bassoons for the unmuffled drag-pipes of Harley-Davidson motorcycles, creating a commotion sure to upset the neighborhood. Somebody call the authorities!" The composer himself says it's “the musical tale of a gang of hot-rodding motorcycling bassoonists who ride into town and take over a concert hall.” Appearing in the roles of the biker gang are SLSO bassoonists Andrew Cuneo, Andrew Gott, and Felicia Foland, along with contrabassoonist Gregg Henegar. Mr. Cuneo is the Principal Bassoon, so presumably he gets the "black leather jacket with the eagle on the back" (to quote a famous Leiber and Stoller lyric).

Andrew Norman
andrewnormanmusic.com

"Try," on the other hand, is less aggressive. In his notes on the piece, composer Norman says the music is at lot like him. "It's messy, and fragmented," he writes, "and it certainly doesn't get things right on the first try. It does things over and over, trying them out in as many different ways as it can. It circles back on itself again and again in search of any idea that will stick, that will lead it forward to something new. And, at long last, after ten minutes of increasingly frantic trying, it finds one small, unlikely bit of musical material it likes enough to repeat and polish and hone until it finally (fingers crossed) gets it right."

Scored for solo piano and chamber ensemble (string quintet plus winds), "Try" will segue directly into "Rhapsody in Blue." Which makes more sense than you might think since Gershwin, like Norman, was still trying a lot of things out when he wrote the "Rhapsody." Indeed, at the February 12 premiere Gershwin—who was also the soloist—hadn't quite decided when he wanted the band to enter, so the piano part wasn't actually written down. When he wanted the band to play, he just nodded to Whiteman.

A final bonus with these concerts is that the music will be accompanied by a light show created by artist S. Katy tucker, known for her design work at (among other venues) Carnegie Hall, the San Francisco Opera, and the Sydney Symphony (where Mr. Robertson is Artistic Director and Chief Conductor). Far out.

The essentials: David Robertson conducts the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra along with Kirill Gerstein, piano; bassoonists Andrew Cuneo, Andrew Gott, and Felicia Foland; and Gregg Henegar, contrabassonon; Friday and Saturday at 8 p.m. and Sunday at 2 p.m., November 28-30. The concerts take place at Powell Symphony Hall, 718 North Grand in Grand Center. For more information: stlsymphony.org. The Saturday performance will be broadcast on St. Louis Public Radio at 90.7 FM, HD 1, and web streaming.