Review: A trancendent Mahler 9th at the St. Louis Symphony

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

Peter Oundjian

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In an increasingly ugly and paranoid culture, moments of transcendent beauty are rare, which is why I appreciate one all the more when I encounter it at a St. Louis Symphony concert, as I did this past Saturday (March 2nd).

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

It was more than a moment, actually, since "transcendent beauty" describes pretty much all of guest conductor Peter Oundjian's interpretation of Mahler's Symphony No. 9, which clocked in at around eighty minutes. Written towards the end of the composer's life (he died within two years of completing it and never heard it performed), the Ninth is often seen as Mahler's farewell to life. Mr. Oundjian's impassioned reading certainly honored that sense of departure, but did so in a way that suggested calm acceptance more than resigned despair.

That may not be a majority view of the work these days. The predominant idea of the Mahler Ninth for the past several decades seems to have been colored by Leonard Bernstein's contention, in the fifth of a series of six 1973 lectures at Harvard, that Mahler was anticipating not only his own death but the "death of music itself." Bernstein's own performance with the Vienna Philharmonic reflects that, wringing every last bit of angst out of the music. But, as Tom Service notes in a 2014 article for The Guardian, "there is another way of thinking about this music, and there's another way of conducting it, hearing it, and experiencing it. It turns on whether you think of this piece as a hymn to the end of all things, or instead, as an ultimately affirmative love-song to life and to mortality."

To my ears, Mr. Oundjian's approach was closer to the "ultimately affirmative" end of the spectrum, beginning with a first movement that had a strong rhythmic pulse and a kind of lilting lyricism that contrasted well with the first of the three massive orchestral climaxes the punctuate the rest of the movement. The tempo marking is Andante comodo, and Mr. Oundjian's tempo choices seemed to honor the fact that "andante" literally means "at a walking tempo." The orchestra played beautifully, with admirable solo moments such as the lovely duet with Principal Flute Mark Sparks and Principal Horn Roger Kaza that recalls Mahler's "Resurrection" Symphony.

The second movement, which is both an affectionate tribute to and parody of that rustic waltz known as the Landler, had all the requisite gusto and raucous humor. Musical jokes need to be played with consummate skill if they are to work, and the SLSO musicians certainly did not disappoint here. The final cheeky notes from Andrew Cuneo's bassoons and Ann Choomack's piccolo were perfect.

There's humor in the Rondo-Burleske third movement as well, but it's more along the lines of the snarling sarcasm you find in the works of Shostakovich. Mahler's tempo marking includes the words "sehz trotzig" (roughly "very defiant") and some have suggested that the mix of complex counterpoint and musical aggression here were the composer's angry response to critics who suggested, erroneously, that he couldn't write contrapuntal music. It was, in any case, performed with spectacular precision by the musicians, with a special nod due to Associate Principal trumpet Thomas Drake for the ethereal solo toward the end that, at least to my ears, harks all the way back to the deleted "Blumine" movement from Mahler's Symphony No. 1.

The final movement of Mahler's Ninth is perhaps one of the most moving things you can hear in a concert hall. It can be, at various points and to varying degrees, anguished, resigned, hopeful, or tranquil, but it's nearly always beautiful. Mr. Oundjian's interpretation reflected an ideal balance of the music's many moods, with powerful climaxes and moments of beatific stillness. This movement largely belongs to the string section, the SLSO players came through brilliantly, especially in the final, hushed pages when the music fades to nothingness.

Lars Vogt
Photo by Giorgia Bertazzi

In his Lucerne Festival Orchestra performance, Claudio Abbado famously held that final silence for a good two minutes. Mr. Oundjian didn't go that far, but the thirty seconds or so of absolute stillness he commanded at the end was a powerful as it was perfect. Amazingly, nobody coughed. Maybe they were all holding their breaths in the quiet: I think I might have been. It was the perfect end to a gripping, beautifully shaped performance by Mr. Oundjian and the orchestra that thoroughly deserved its standing ovation.

The concert opened with an equally intelligent and well-balanced performance of Mozart's Piano Concerto No. 21. First performed in Vienna on March 10, 1785 with Mozart himself at the keyboard, the concerto comes from a time in the composer's life when he was more or less the toast of the town. It radiates youth and optimism, and got an appropriately perky and joyful performance from Mr. Oundjian, the orchestra, and soloist Lars Vogt. I was especially taken with the Andante second movement, which managed to be lyrical without ever becoming sappy, but the noble first movement and jolly finale were gratifying as well.

Mozart was so much in demand when he wrote his concerto that he didn't bother writing down the cadenzas for the first and third movements, probably improvising them in performance. These days, soloists either use cadenzas composed by others or write their own. Mr. Vogt did the latter, deftly managing the trick of writing music that sounded both 18th-century and new at the same time.

Next at Powell Hall: Nathalie Stutzmann conducts the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra and Chorus, along with soprano Siobhan Stagg and baritone Stephen Powell, Saturday at 8 pm and Sunday at 3 pm, March 9 and 10. The program consists of Stravinsky's "A Funeral Song" and Brahms's "A German Requiem." The concerts take place at Powell Symphony Hall, 718 North Grand in Grand Center.

Delirious

Peter Oundjian

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This weekend at Powell Hall it's a classic example of musical storytelling, a cocky, nose-thumbing piano concerto by a musical wise guy in his 20s, and a bit of orchestral delirium.

The storytelling comes from the pen of Nikolay Rimski-Korsakov (1844-1908), one of the great Russian romantic masters and a genius at orchestration. He aggressively promoted Russian nationalism in his music, emphasizing folk and Middle Eastern/Oriental influences. All of those elements on on display in his 1888 symphonic suite Scheherazade, inspired by episodes in the One Thousand and One Nights (a.k.a. The Arabian Nights). It's almost certainly his most popular work and a favorite of audiences around the world.

As well it should be. This is music that conjures up striking images: the imperious Sultan, the sensual Scheherazade, Sinbad's ship, the stormy sea, the festival at Baghdad—it's a veritable widescreen extravaganza. There are also plenty of solo passages that will give individual members of the orchestra a chance to show off. Concertmaster David Halen has an especially prominent role to play as the voice of Scheherazade. It's tremendously entertaining stuff when done well.

Stewart Goodyear Photo: Victor Avila

Also tremendously entertaining is the Piano Concerto No. 1 for piano, trumpet, and strings Op. 35, written by the 27-year-old Dimitri Shostakovich (1906-1975) in 1933 and first performed by him with the Leningrad Philharmonic in October of that year. It's written for a small orchestra (strings plus that one very prominent trumpet) and manages to combine elements of both the Baroque and Classical periods with sounds that would not be out of place in the score of a silent film comedy. “Shostakovich wrote this when he was in his late 20s," notes Principal Trumpet Karin Bliznik (who will be playing the trumpet part his weekend) in the symphony program book. "He used to play piano accompaniment to silent movies. You can imagine some Charlie Chaplin or Keystone Kops slapstick for this piece.”

Thomas Adès

The concert opens with local premiere of three dance episodes from the 1995 chamber opera Powder Her Face by British composer Thomas Adès (1971- ). The opera is based on the life of Margaret Campbell, Duchess of Argyll (1912-1993) , whose elegant and fashionable life took a bizarre turn after a near-fatal fall down an elevator shaft in 1943. She emerged from the ordeal with no sense of smell or taste and a voracious sexual appetite—a great deal of which was on display in the notorious 1963 divorce trial that ended her marriage to Ian Douglas Campbell, 11th Duke of Argyll. A lavish lifestyle and bad investments eventually led to a penniless death but (to quote a Tom Lehrer lyric about a very different historical figure) "the body that reached her embalmer / was one that had known how to live."

I've never seen the opera (which includes, according to a review of the original production by Alex Ross was pretty explicit stuff) or heard these selections, so I'll take the lazy way out and quote the description from Paul Schiavo's program notes: "Dance rhythms inform each of the three movements that comprise this work. First comes an overture suggesting tango, foxtrot, and other steps being attempted in an inebriated state, with interjections of mocking laughter. The ensuing waltz has a music-box delicacy about it. But its mechanism seems flawed, the rhythms continually twitching or hiccupping or otherwise going awry. Similar rhythmic dislocations mark the finale, where Adès’s superimposition of figures moving at different speeds seems at once playful and disturbing in a fever-dream sort of way."

It does sound like good company for the Shostakovich, doesn't it?

Performances are Friday and Saturday, October 25 and 26, at 8 PM at Powell Hall. The orchestra will be conducted by Peter Oundjian with Stewart Goodyear at the piano. For more information: stlsymphony.org.

Rach on

Who: Pianist Stephen Hough and The St. Louis Symphony Orchestra conducted by Peter Oundjian
What: Music of Glinka, Rachmaninoff, and Beethoven
Where: Powell Symphony Hall, St. Louis
When: May 4-6, 2012

Powell Hall was packed to the last row of the balcony Saturday night for a coruscating Rachmaninoff Third Piano Concerto with Stephen Hough (who had just performed the First Concerto the night before) earning a Purple Heart at the keyboard and a driving Beethoven 5th with Peter Oundjian at the podium. If that wasn’t the best way to end a St. Louis Symphony season then (to paraphrase the punch line of an old joke) it was way ahead of whatever’s in second place.

I’m at a loss to explain why the house was so much larger this weekend. Was it word of mouth about Mr. Hough’s impressive performances of the Rachmaninoff First and Second concerti last weekend? The presence of the Beethoven Fifth—a tried and true warhorse—on the bill? The simple fact that the last concert, like the first, is always a significant event? I don’t know the answer, but if the symphony could replicate this kind of attendance on a regular basis, all local music lovers would surely rejoice.

In any case, the capacity crowd got what they came for: an exciting evening of music making.

The Rach Third is the K2 of piano concerti. Fiercely difficult, it’s a reminder of what a prodigious pianist Rachmaninoff was. For many years after its 1909 premiere, its only real advocate was the composer himself. Even the virtuoso to whom the piece is dedicated, Josef Hofmann, never attempted to perform it in public. It wasn’t until the great Vladimir Horowitz recorded it in 1930 and began to actively promote it that it started to rise in popularity. Performances are probably more common today, but even so it’s not the sort of thing a pianist takes on lightly.

Stephen Hough, fortunately, has the combination of technique and musical sensitivity required to not only perform this remarkable piece but to make it sing as well. Sure, you need that strength and accuracy for the daunting first movement cadenza and the fireworks of the finale. But without a sense of poetry the lyrical (if not hallucinatory) flights of the second movement might, in the hands of a lesser pianist, fall flat. Despite what looked like minimal visual communication between Mr. Hough and Mr. Oundjian, it all worked beautifully Saturday night. Maybe they use telepathy.

The Third’s final movement is clearly written with an eye for the slam-bang finish, capped with the composer’s characteristic four-note signature (“Rach-man-in-OFF”), and that is certainly what we got Saturday night. The standing ovation was huge and hugely spontaneous, resulting in a lovely little encore: Federico Mompou’s "Jeunes filles au jardin" (“Young girls in the garden”) from his Scenes d’enfants.

Beethoven’s Symphony No. 5 poses its own set of difficulties. It’s so well known and has been performed so often. What does a conductor do to put his own stamp on it and make it sound fresh? Mr. Oundjian seems to have taken a leaf from the book of Roger Norrington and the other “original instrument” folks by respecting (as far as I could tell) Beethoven’s original metronome markings and conducting with a rather light hand.

The result wasn’t so much an interpretation as a realization. I wouldn’t say it was revelatory, but it did make it easier to understand why E.T.A. Hoffmann, enthusiastically reviewing the 1808 premier in the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung, described it as "one of the most important works of the time." Last night’s was a performance that generated tremendous momentum and excitement, garnering yet another thoroughly deserved standing ovation.

The program opened with joyous reading of the overture to Glinka’s nationalist fantasy opera Ruslan and Lyudmila. It’s one of those pieces that used to crop up often as “filler” on classical LPs in Olden Times, and it still serves that function on classical radio stations. It’s also a standard at “pops” concerts, with a pair of irresistible melodies and a neat little solo tympani part guaranteed to please—as they did Saturday night.

Although this weekend’s performances marked the conclusion of the official symphony season, a number of special event concerts will be popping up at Powell Hall in May and June, including The Music of Led Zepplin on May 11, an appearance by Michael Feinstein on the 13th, and a pops concert featuring Rhapsody in Blue with Sarina Zhang at the keyboard and Ward Stare at the podium on May 18. For details on these and other “one of” events, you may visit stlsymphony.org.

Lee's summit

Who: Cellist Daniel Lee and The St. Louis Symphony Orchestra conducted by Peter Oundjian
What: Music of Smetana, Dvořák, and Tchaikovsky
Where: Powell Symphony Hall, St. Louis
When: April 20-22, 2012

[Download the complete St. Louis symphony program notes in PDF format]

If St. Louis Symphony Principal Cello Daniel Lee isn’t feeling extraordinarily pleased with himself right now, it must mean that his virtuosity is exceed only by his modesty. Certainly the spontaneous applause that burst forth after the first movement of the Dvořák Cello Concerto and the standing ovation at the end are the sorts of things guaranteed to gladden the heart and increase the self-esteem of any performer.

For that matter, Peter Oundjian can feel pretty proud of his impassioned reading of Smetana’s Šárka from Má vlast and a snappy Tchaikovsky Symphony No. 2 (Little Russian). It all made for an entertaining evening of late-19th century music with, to quote symphony program annotator Laurie Shulman, “an emphasis on native rhythms, harmonies, and melodies composed at a great distance from the music capitals of London, Paris, and Vienna.”

The cello doesn’t appear in the symphonic spotlight that often. It’s not that there aren’t concerti out there (although far fewer than for violin or piano), it’s just that most of them are relatively obscure. The Dvořák A minor concerto is probably the most popular—right up there with the Elgar—and justifiably so. Written during the composer’s final year in America, it’s a mature and deeply felt work of genuinely symphonic proportions. It’s also technically challenging without being superficially flashy. There are no cadenzas, for example, and the demands on the soloist’s technique arise naturally out of the concerto’s dramatic narrative.

To play this concerto well, then, you need not only nimble hands but also a warm heart. This is music of deep sorrow and overflowing joy. The soloist had better be open to all of it.

Mr. Lee has all that and then some. Sure, his performance on Friday night was technically proficient. But more importantly it was emotionally genuine. You could see the play of Dvořák’s feelings echoed on his face and in his body. He was, as we say in the theatre, completely in the moment and in tune with not only the music but with his fellow players as well. I have always loved this concerto, and Mr. Lee’s exemplary performance reminded me why.

The concert began and ended with a pair of virtuoso orchestral works. The opener, Smetana’s Šárka, is perhaps an unusual choice. It’s based on an incident from the legendary twelfth-century “Maiden’s War” in which the titular heroine seduces the warrior Ctirad and then, with the help of her fellow Amazons, slaughters him and his men in their sleep. Smetana’s tone painting is fairly literal (even including a snoring bassoon as the men fall asleep) and concludes with a particularly violent orchestral outburst. Mr. Oundjian’s interpretation made the most of the composer’s dynamic contrasts, with an especially hair-raising coda. I’d love to hear him tackle the entire Má vlast.

The evening concluded with Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 2, nicknamed the “Little Russian” for its use of folk material from the Ukraine (a.k.a. “Little Russia”). Tchaikovsky’s first three symphonies don’t get nearly the respect they deserve, in my view, so it was delightful to hear this one at Powell Hall for the first time in nearly twenty years.

The symphony abounds in flashy writing, especially for the winds, and the orchestra’s players were more than up to the task. Even Mr. Oundjian’s breakneck pace in the finale posed no challenge. Everything, including the cheerful little piccolo solo, came through with perfect clarity.

Mr. Oundjian, as I have noted in the past, appears to run a tight musical ship. His podium style is less aerobic than Mr. Robertson’s and more traditional in approach, with the right hand mostly keeping time with the baton and the left cueing soloists and shaping dynamics. The dynamic contrasts he shapes can be extreme, but to my ears they always make sense and serve the music well. He appears to have an excellent rapport with the musicians, which may be one of the reasons he has appeared so often here—and will be returning May 4 and 5.

Next at Powell Hall: The much-heralded “Rach Fest” Friday through Sunday, April 27-29, with Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 1 (Friday morning at 10:30) and Piano Concerto No. 2 (Saturday at 8 and Sunday at 3) along with Shostakovich’s youthful Symphony No. 1 and Rimski-Korsakov’s Op. 29 Skazka (“Fairy Tale”). Hans Graf is at the podium with Stephen Hough at the keyboard. For more information you may call 314-534-1700 or visit stlsymphony.org.