Concert Review: Louis Lortie and Yan Pascal Tortelier deliver precise passion with the St. Louis Symphony, April 15 and 16, 2016

Louis Lortie
Photo: © Elias, rayfieldallied.com

Share on Google+:

Most folks come back from vacations with snapshots or souvenirs.  The great French composer Camille Saint-Saëns came back from a winter trip to Egypt with a piano concerto, which was performed with an ideal mix of power and style this weekend by Louis Lortie and the St. Louis Symphony under guest conductor Yan Pascal Tortelier.

First performed in May of 1896 with the 60-year-old composer at the keyboard, the Piano Concerto No. 5, Op. 103 quickly picked up the nickname "Egyptian" in part because Saint-Saëns himself wrote that the it "takes us, in effect, on a journey to the East and even, in the passage in F-sharp, to the Far East."  The music is filled with "Oriental" touches, especially in the second movement, the main theme of which Saint-Saëns said he got from boatmen on the Nile.  There are even brief passages where the pianist produces a kind of otherworldly sound by playing major tenths two octaves apart.  You can almost smell the exotic perfume.

Saint-Saëns was clearly a remarkable pianist, and his fifth concerto calls for a daunting combination of raw virtuosity and sensitivity.  Mr. Lortie clearly had plenty of both, delivering a performance with all the flash and power called for in the boisterous finale without short-changing the delicacy of that lyrical second movement.  He is, as I have noted in the past, a very visceral performer, with every emotion etched on his face and visible in his body language.  His emotional commitment to the music could not have been more total.

That makes him an excellent match for Mr. Tortelier, who seems to love the grand musical gesture as much as the intimate detail.  Working without a baton, he uses his very expressive hands to shape phrases one moment and then his entire body to raise a massive orchestral climax the next—which is exactly what he did in the work that opened the program, Paul Dukas's rarely heard Polyeucte Overture from 1891.

Inspired by a Corneille play about a Roman nobleman who converts to Christianity and suffers the usual deadly consequences, Polyeucte is big and dramatic—real Technicolor, wide-screen Romanticism.  Brooding, tragic passages are frequently interrupted by abrupt orchestral outbursts.  Mr. Tortelier attacked this music with real intensity, and the musicians responded with a perfect performance that deserved far more applause than it got from the Friday night audience.  It has been nearly a century since the SLSO last played this piece, so it was effectively new music for them, but they played as though they knew it all by heart.

Yan Pascal Tortelier
imgartists.com

The concert concluded with music the musicians probably do know by heart, Maurice Ravel's popular orchestration of Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition.  Inspired by an 1874 visit to a posthumous exhibition of the works of Russian artist Victor Hartmann, the piano original is colorful and evocative stuff, made all the more so by Ravel's expansion.  Justifiably regarded as an expert orchestrator, Ravel's work here is filled with ingenious touches, like the high woodwinds chirping away in the "Ballet of the Chicks in Their Shells", the alto sax playing the voice of a troubadour in "The Old Castle", the hair-raising evocation of "The Hut on Fowl's Legs", (home of the witch Baba-Yaga from Russian folklore) and the triumphant finale, based on a sketch for "The Great Gate at Kiev". 

That means there were multiple opportunities for individual members and sections of the band to show off, and they made the most of it.  For the first curtain call, Mr. Tortelier singled out Principal Horn Roger Kaza for his exemplary work as well as Principal Trumpet Karin Bliznik, whose ringing declamation of the recurring "promenade" theme got things off to such a stirring start and whose entire section performed with such impressive precision in the tricky "Samuel Goldberg and Schmuyle" movement. Principal Trombone Tim Myers on euphonium and Nathan Nabb on alto sax also got solo bows for their fine playing in the "Bydlo" and "Old Castle" movements, respectively.  Every section of the orchestra sounded stunning, in fact, and the strings had the wonderful richness that has come to typify their work.

Conducting without a score, Mr. Tortelier brought the same sense of high drama and nuance to this music that he had demonstrated throughout the evening.  His "Gnomus" had real menace, his "Ballet of the Chicks in Their Shells" was a masterpiece of brisk precision, and his powerful "Great Gate at Kiev" brought down the house.  The applause was loud, long, and entirely justified.

There is one more performance of this program at Powell Hall Saturday, April 16, at 8 p.m.  The St. Louis Symphony season continues next weekend, April 22 – 24, as Nathalie Stutzmann conducts the orchestra with violin soloist Karen Gomyo in music by Mendelssohn, Sibelius, and Dvorák.  Performances take place at Powell Symphony Hall, 718 North Grand.

Symphony Preview, April 15 and 16, 2016: Saint-Saëns's selfies

My wife and I have become dedicated travelers over the last couple of decades, but we can't hold a candle to the French composer Camille Saint-Saëns. Over the course of his long (1835-1921) and prosperous life, his peregrinations took him all over Europe as well as to England, the United States, and even (in 1896) to Algeria and Egypt.

Saint-Saën in 1900
By Petit, Pierre (1831-1909)
Photographer Restored by Adam Cuerden

A musical souvenir of the latter trip closes the first half of this weekend's St. Louis Symphony concerts as pianist Louis Lortie joins guest conductor Yan Pascal Tortelier for the Saint-Saëns Piano Concerto No. 5 in F major, op. 103. As Michael Steinberg writes in his program notes for the San Francisco Symphony, the concerto picked up its nickname, "Egyptian", from the composer's own comments about the piece:

Saint-Saëns had written the concerto during a winter vacation at Luxor in Egypt, which has some bearing on the second movement and perhaps the third as well. One of the more notable features of the amiable and unpressured first movement is an allusion to Dalila's gorgeous aria "Mon coeur s'ouvre à ta voix" from Samson et Dalila. Of the second movement, Saint-Saëns himself wrote that "it takes us, in effect, on a journey to the East and even, in the passage in F-sharp, to the Far East." First comes an extended introductory section, much of it like recitative, and then the music settles into a pleasant and serene song for piano and strings. Saint-Saëns said that it was "a Nubian love song which I heard sung by boatmen on the Nile as I myself went down the river in a dahabieh." The F-sharp major music to which he refers is the pentatonic melody, delicately scored and including the occasional distant vibration of the tam-tam. Some of the orchestral detail in this colorful piece will remind us of the most famous of all "Egyptian" compositions, the Nile scene in Aïda.

The sound of that second movement is so exotic that pianist Steven Hough once wrote a tongue-in-cheek explanation of how to achieve it for the April Fool's Day, 2012, edition of his blog at the Daily Telegraph. It's worth reading.

The "Egyptian" concerto hasn't been heard on the Powell Hall stage since 1977, by the way, so this is a rare opportunity for local classical music lovers to catch it live.

The other big work on this weekend's bill is an old favorite: Modest Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition, last performed here in January of 2013. It, too, was inspired by a trip, but in this case it was just to an exhibit of work by the Russian artist and architect Victor Hartmann.

Mussorgsky in 1870

Hartmann may only have been 39 when he died in 1873, but he had already gained considerable fame for his inventive uses of Russian folk traditions in his work. He might have remained unknown outside Russia, however, had he not become friends with the equally innovative composer Modest Mussorgsky. Attending an exhibition of Hartmann's works a year after the artist's death, Mussorgsky was so moved that he immediately dashed off a piano suite based on ten of the pictures at that exhibition. Unfortunately, Mussorgsky himself died—at the age of 42—before the suite could be published.

And there it might have rested had not Maurice Ravel been commissioned by Serge Koussevitzky to produce an orchestral version of Pictures at an Exhibition in 1922. The work was a rousing success that guaranteed Hartmann a prominent place in musical history and Mussorgsky a larger share of concert programs than he might have gotten otherwise.

Ravel was not, of course, the first to orchestrate Mussorgsky's suite; that honor fell to fellow Russian Michail Tuschmalov in 1886, the year in which the suite was first published. But he only arranged seven of the ten pictures and the next attempt—by Britain's Sir Henry Wood in 1915—eliminated some of the reoccurrences of the unifying "Promenade" theme, which represents Mussorgsky wandering through the exhibition. Ravel wasn't even the first to orchestrate the entire piece; the Slovenian Leo Funtek pulled that one off in the same year as the Frenchman. Ravel's has, however, remained the most popular of the over two dozen arrangements of the original, for everything from full orchestra to jazz band to (oddly enough) solo guitar.

This weekend it's the familiar Ravel orchestration that Mr. Tortelier and the band will be performing. If you have never heard it before, I think you'll be delighted by the many opportunities it offers for individual musicians to take the spotlight. Ravel is justifiably regarded as an expert orchestrator, and his expansion of Mussorgsky's original is filled with ingenious touches, like the high woodwinds chirping away in the "Ballet of the Chicks in Their Shells", the alto sax playing the voice of a troubadour in "The Old Castle", and the hair-raising evocation of "The Hut on Fowl's Legs", home of the witch Baba-Yaga from Russian folklore. This is music that never fails to please.

Paul Dukas

The concerts open with a work that hasn't been performed by the SLSO since 1920: the concert overture Polyeucte, written in 1891 by Paul Dukas. Inspired by a Corneille play about a Roman nobleman who converts to Christianity and suffers the usual deadly consequences, it was the composer's public debut, written the year he graduated from the Paris Conservatory. So it's probably not surprising (as Renée Spencer Saller writes in her program notes) that it shows the influence of someone who threw a very long shadow back then, Richard Wagner:

The overture opens with a threnody of low strings and moody woodwinds. Out of this luxuriant gloom, violins scurry; timpani rumble and roar. Piercing silences puncture orchestral swells. Plangent winds hint at the tragedy's romantic subplot. The subtle harmonic shifts and haunting timbres make the Wagner comparisons inevitable, but who cares? Fin-de-siècle Wagneriana doesn't get any better than this.

Too true. It's big, dramatic stuff: real Technicolor, wide-screen Romanticism and, at only a little over 15 minutes, considerably shorter than Corneille's five-act tragedy.

The Essentials: Friday and Saturday at 8 p.m., Yan Pascal Tortelier conducts the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra with piano soloist Louie Lortie in Saint-Saëns's Piano Concerto No. 5, Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition, and Dukas's Polyeucte Overture. Performances take place at Powell Symphony Hall, 718 North Grand. For more information: stlsymphony.org.

Isn't it Romantic?

Andrés Orozco-Estrada
Photo: © Werner Kmetitsch

Share on Google+:

Who: The St. Louis Symphony conducted by Andrés Orozco-Estrada with pianist Louis Lortie
What: Music of von Weber, Beethoven, and Bartók
When: Friday through Sunday, January 17-19, 2014
Where: Powell Symphony Hall

This weekend the second of the symphony’s four "Beethoven Festival" concerts brings us music of Beethoven, a younger contemporary of Beethoven, and a 20th century composer who acknowledged Beethoven as a major influence—all done up by guest conductor Andrés Orozco-Estrada in that dramatic, late Romantic Austro-German style I associate with the recordings of Bruno Walter and Otto Klemperer that were so much a part of my youth.

The concerts open with the overture to the 1823 opera "Euryanthe" by that younger contemporary of Beethoven, Carl Maria von Weber. Unlike Weber's "Der Freischütz," "Euryanthe" has never found a place in the active repertoire, probably because (as Paul Schiavo writes in his program notes) the libretto by German journalist, poet, and playwright Helmina von Chézy (once described by Mahler as a "poetess with a full heart and an empty head") "was an incompetent botch." Still, the overture is a real crowd pleaser, with engaging themes, plenty of dramatic contrast, and a rousing finale.

Here, as in the rest of the program, Mr. Orozco-Estrada made the most of those contrasts—part of that aforementioned echt Romantic approach. The "ghost" theme was (you should pardon the expression) haunting and the fugato run-up to the finale was nicely articulated. Mr. Orozco-Estrada was an exuberant and very physically demonstrative figure on the podium, with big but crisp gestures suggesting a good balance of emotional involvement and intellectual control.

This week's Beethoven is the "Piano Concerto No. 5 in E-flat major," op. 73 (a.k.a. the "Emperor"), a work which bristles with nobility and grace despite being written under the cloud of war and occupation. When Beethoven was writing the concerto in Vienna in 1809, the city was under heavy siege by Napoleon. "[L]ife around me", he wrote, "is wild and disturbing, nothing but drums, cannons, soldiers, misery of every sort." You can even hear a bit of that bombardment, I think, in the heavy piano chords that show up early in the development section of the first movement just as you can hear a kind of impassioned yearning for peace in the wistful second. It's a work of inescapable emotional power.

Louis Lortie

Soloist Louis Lortie channeled all that power beautifully. This was a very visceral performance; Mr. Lortie truly threw himself into the music, with every emotion etched on his face and visible in his body language. Like Mr. Orozco-Estrada, Mr. Lortie gave us a nearly perfect combination of head and heart. Between them, we got a powerfully noble first movement, a transcendent second and, after that wonderfully suspenseful transition, a completely engaging finale.

This sort of big, colorful, high-wattage reading might not work for some of the earlier Beethoven concerti, but for the Fifth I think it's very valid. The piano part, in particular, seems to cry out for the fuller tone and wider range of the modern, metal frame concert grand—a type of piano that wouldn't be perfected until shortly before the composer's death. Mr. Lortie's muscular approach couldn't have been a better fit.

The Hungarian composer Béla Bartók was a great admirer of Beethoven, so it seems only right that this weekend's concerts should conclude with what may be Bartók's most famous work, the 1943 "Concerto for Orchestra." Written, like the "Emperor" concerto, at a time of great personal travail, the "Concerto" is nevertheless a dramatic, appealing, and sometimes even humorous work. Indeed, as Paul Schiavo points out in his program notes, Bartók, although impoverished and suffering from leukemia, declared that the commission to compose this work was "the wonder drug I needed to bring about my own cure."

And it really is a wonder. The "Concerto" provides an opportunity for the members of the symphony to show off, either individually or in small groups—and on Friday morning they did it beautifully. If I were to list everyone who managed to "shine with a virtue resplendent" this morning, I'd just be listing all the principal and assistant principal players in each section, which might make for tedious reading. So I'll merely note that, once again, the St. Louis Symphony lived up to its reputation as an ensemble of virtuosi. Mr. Orozco-Estrada gave all the featured musicians a chance to stand and receive their applause at the end, which they fully earned.

For his part, Mr. Orozco-Estrada gave Bartók the widescreen, Technicolor treatment the "Concerto" deserves. The little dance of the second movement "Giuoco delle coppie" ("The Game of Pairs," featuring a series a duets) was appropriately jaunty; the interjection, in the third movement "Intermezzo interotto" ("Interrupted Intermezzo"), of a theme from the Shostakovich Seventh Symphony (which Bartók heard in a live broadcast while composing the "Concerto") was thoroughly cheeky; and the finale was charged with wild energy. Lively and completely captivating stuff it was, and a welcome antidote to a chilly and blustery winter morning.

Next at Powel Hall: David Robertson continues the "Beethoven Festival" with the "Symphony No. 3" (the "Eroica") along "Testament" and a "Viola Concerto" by contemporary composer/violist Brett Dean. Mr. Dean will be the soloist for his concerto. The concerts are Friday and Saturday, January 24 and 25, at 8 PM. For more information: stlsymphony.org.

For more information on the music, check out the symphony program notes and my symphony preview article.

Wiener blut

Share on Google+

The “Beethoven Festival” continues this Friday through Sunday with what is probably his grandest piano concerto—the Fifth, known as the “Emperor Concerto”—along with a concerto of a very different sort from Béla Bartók and an overture to a failed Medieval fantasy opera by Carl Maria von Weber.  Andrés Orozco-Estrada conducts with piano soloist Louis Lortie.

Its noble character not withstanding, Beethoven’s “Piano Concerto No. 5 in E-flat major, op. 73” was written under the cloud of war and occupation.  When Beethoven was writing the work in 1809, Vienna was not so much the fabled “City of Dreams” as a metropolis of nightmares.  The French laid siege to it with shelling so fierce that at one point the composer took refuge in his brother’s house and covered his head with pillows to escape the din.  “[L]ife around me”, he wrote, “is wild and disturbing, nothing but drums, cannons, soldiers, misery of every sort.”  The royal family—including Beethoven’s friend and patron Archduke Rudolf—fled, along with many of the notable families with whom the composer had become close.

Left alone and, once the French occupation began, in difficult financial circumstances due to rapid inflation, Beethoven had little else to do but compose.  The Fifth Concerto is probably the most famous work to emerge from this difficult period, although the Op. 81a piano sonata (“Les Adieux”) is probably a close second.  Both were dedicated to Rudolph.

Much has been written about the “Concerto No. 5”, so I won’t presume to waste your time with my own analysis, especially when there are concise and informative articles on Wikipedia and at the Classy Classical blog.  The magisterial first movement, the wistful second, and the jolly concluding rondo all show Beethoven at his best. 

Louis Lortie

They offer a wealth of opportunities to shine for soloist and conductor.  This week’s soloist, the French-Canadian Louis Lortie has, according to his biography in the symphony program, “extended his interpretative voice across a broad range of repertoire rather than choosing to specialize in one particular style.”  He has also, however, studied “in Vienna with Beethoven specialist Dieter Weber, and subsequently with Schnabel disciple Leon Fleisher,” so I’d expect that the “Emperor” would hardly be foreign territory for him.

“In my youth,” wrote the Hungarian composer Béla Bartók in a 1929 letter to Edwin von der Nüll, “Bach and Mozart were not my ideals of the beautiful, but rather Beethoven.”  It seems only fair, then, that the other Big Piece on the program this weekend should be Bartók’s 1943 “Concerto for Orchestra”—a dramatic, appealing, and sometimes humorous work that, ironically, was written when the composer’s health and fortunes were both at a low ebb.

Forced by the rise of Fascism to flee to the USA in 1940, the composer found himself marooned in a strange land where he was known primarily as an ethnomusicologist and teacher rather than as a composer.  Unable to find steady work and suffering from the leukemia that would soon kill him (he died on September, 26, 1945), Bartók found himself unable to summon the will to compose anything. 

A more prosperous Bartók in 1927

That all changed in 1943.  Prompted by conductor (and former Bartók student) Fritz Reiner and violinist Joseph Szigeti—both fellow Hungarians and Bartók admirers—Serge Koussevitzky, famed music director of the Boston Symphony, came to Bartók with a commission for a new orchestral work.  The commission worked like a tonic.  Bartók threw himself into the project and the final result has been part of the core orchestral repertoire ever since.

Why a “Concerto for Orchestra”?  As Thomas May pointed out in his program notes for a performance by Chrisoph Eschenbach and the National Symphony last January:

The idea of a concerto featuring not just a soloist, as in Mozart's classical example of the genre, but for the whole ensemble as a collective of virtuosos did not begin with Bartók…At the same time, Bartók revives something of the Baroque concept of the concerto-the so-called "concerto grosso"- which juxtaposes various smaller groupings of instruments against the texture of the larger ensemble. And of course the Concerto for Orchestra also serves to showcase the expressive power and versatility of a modern orchestra. Indeed, instrumental timbre turns out to be a significant dimension of this music, along with its innovative formal design and the manner in which Bartók develops his thematic material.

It is, in short, an opportunity for the members of the symphony to show off, either individually or in small groups.  The second movement (titled “Giuoco delle coppie “ or "The Game of Pairs"), for example, unfolds as a series of duets for pairs of bassoons, oboes, clarinets, flutes, and trumpets, while there are neat little solos for trombone and oboe in the first movement.  Pretty much every section gets a chance to join in the fun.

Andrés Orozco-Estrada
Photo: © Werner Kmetitsch

It will offer guest conductor Andrés Orozco-Estrada a chance to show what he can do as well.  Although born in Columbia, Mr. Orozco-Estrada was trained in Vienna and, according to his biography in the program, “first came to international attention in 2004, when he took over a concert with the Tonkünstler Orchestra Niederösterreich at the Vienna Musikverein. For that performance he was celebrated by the Viennese press as a ‘wonder from Vienna.’  He became Music Director of the Tonkünstler in 2009 but will be leaving that in 2014 when he takes up the positions of Music Director of the Houston Symphony Orchestra and Chief Conductor of the Frankfurt Radio Symphony Orchestra.  He has tended to specialize in the Romantic and Viennese repertoire as well as contemporary Spanish and South American works, but it doesn’t look like he has done much Bartók recently.  Still, it looks like he’s no stranger to early 20th-century music, so it will be interesting to see the results.

The concert opens with the overture to Carl Maria von Weber’s 1823 opera “Euryanthe,” based on a 13th-century tale of a knight who is conned into doubting his lady’s fidelity (full title: "L'Histoire du très-noble et chevalereux prince Gérard, comte de Nevers et la très-virtueuse et très chaste princesse Euriant de Savoye, sa mye.").  It’s the sort of Medievalism that was all the rage among 19th-century Romantics and might have been a hit if it hadn’t been for the libretto.  As Paul Schiavo writes in his program notes for these concerts, the text by German journalist, poet and playwright Helmina von Chézy “was an incompetent botch, and its dramatic deficiencies have kept Euryanthe out of the active opera repertory.”

Still, the overture is enormous fun and remains and is performed often.  The symphony hasn’t taken it on in over twenty years, though, so it will be good to welcome it back.

Andrés Orozco-Estrada conducts the St. Louis Symphony and pianist Louis Lortie in von Weber’s “Euryanthe” Overture, Beethoven’s “Emperor” Concerto, and Bartók’s “Concerto for Orchestra” Friday at 10:30 AM, Saturday at 8 PM, and Sunday at 3 PM, January 17-19.  For more information: stlsymphony.org