Symphony Preview: A fall of spring

“Aprils have never meant much to me,” wrote Truman Capote in “Breakfast at Tiffany’s,” “autumns seem that season of beginning, spring.” Anyone involved with the performing arts would have to agree. Fall is when the new season starts; spring is just a continuation.

The arts missed their autumnal spring in 2020 because of the pandemic, although a few of the organizations with deeper pockets—our own St. Louis Symphony Orchestra (SLSO), for one—forged ahead after implementing HVAC upgrades and strict infection control measures, along with much smaller and physically distanced audiences.

Stéphane Denève conducts the SLSO
Photo courtesy of the SLSO

The pandemic is still with us thanks in part to people who would rather spend money on questionable and/or phony “treatments” than get a free vaccine, but with over half the population protected so far, the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra is open for business once again.  

It’s not business as usual, of course. Audience members must show proof of vaccination and wear masks except when eating or drinking, but the programs are back to their original two-hour length, the bars are open, and Powell Hall has been cleared for full occupancy. And, after a year of scaled-back concerts and digital offerings, it will be good to see and hear the band at full force.

For a look ahead at what the season will bring, check out my video interview with Music Director Stéphane Denève on my YouTube channel. If you want to know what’s on tap for the opening weekend concerts (Saturday and Sunday, September 25 and 26), read on.

As has been customary for a while now for the season opener, the concert begins with an arrangement of “The Star Spangled Banner” during which many of us in the audience join in and hope the key isn’t too high. The arrangement, as is also customary, is by American musical icon John Philip Sousa and long-time New York Symphony Orchestra conductor Walter Damrosch (he led the world premieres of Gershwin's "Concerto in F" and "An American in Paris").

Violinist and composer
Jessie Montgomery

The work that comes next, however, is anything but customary: “Banner” for chamber orchestra, written by Jessie Montgomery in 2014 in response to a commission by the Sphinx Organization and the Joyce Foundation to celebrate the 200th anniversary of our national anthem. Running around eight minutes, this inventive piece combines quotes from “The Star Spangled Banner” (or, to be more accurate, from John Stafford Smith’s “Anacreontic Song,” whence cometh Francis Scott Key’s melody) along with the uplifting “Lift Every Voice and Sing” (often referred to as “the Back National Anthem”) and, as the composer writes in notes for the Los Angeles Philharmonic, “historical sources from various world anthems and patriotic songs”.

There are also evocations of marching bands, a Native American drum circle, and even a brief, discordant parody of a crowd attempting to sing “The Star Spangled Banner” “each in his own key, of course” (to quote Tom Lehrer in a different context).  Charles Ives routinely did this sort of thing, and were he with us today, I think he’d enjoy the hell out of Montgomery’s work. You can check it out in advance in a fine performance by Gustavo Dudamel and the LA Philharmonic as part of a custom YouTube playlist I assembled for this weekend’s concert.

If Montgomery’s name is familiar to you, it might be because this is the third time her name has appeared on a SLSO program in the last year. The orchestra performed her sparkling “Starburst” last October and her exuberant “Strum” for string quartet in November as part of the orchestra’s chamber music festival. Montgomery’s music has also started to pop up on classical radio programs like MPR’s “Performance Today,” so her star is clearly on the rise, and justifiably so.

Innovation continues with “Dance” for cello and orchestra by another composer whose work has been gracing the Powell Hall stage since 2012, Anna Clyne.  Inspired by the poem of the same name by 13th-century Persian poet Jalāl ad-Dīn Mohammad Rūmī (more commonly referred to as Rumi), “Dance” bases each of its five brief movements (4 to 6 minutes each) on a stanza of the poem:

Dance, when you're broken open.
Dance, if you've torn the bandage off.
Dance in the middle of the fighting.
Dance in your blood.
Dance, when you're perfectly free.

In a 2020 video on her YouTube channel Clyne, herself a cellist, talks about what a pleasure it was to get back to writing for her instrument and what a positive experience it was to collaborate with Inbal Segev, who gave the work its world premiere with Marin Alsop and the London Philharmonic that same year and who is also the soloist this weekend. The short video is well worth watching, since it gives you a concise and fascinating description of how she set each line to music. It’s an ideal appetizer for Segev’s recording of the piece, which is also available on YouTube on the London Philharmonic’s channel as well as in my custom playlist.

Anna Clyne
Photo: Christina Kernohan

Personally, I find myself returning repeatedly to “Dance” and admiring the powerful and often surprising way in which Clyne has taken inspiration from the each of the five lines. She often does so in ways that are inventive and far from obvious. The phrase “when you’re broken open,” for example, finds expression in serene music in which the solo line floats over static chords in the orchestra, creating what the composer calls “a still, almost ethereal sound world,” as though light were shining through some of those broken fragments. There’s the expected violence for “if you’ve torn the bandage off,” but for “in the middle of the fighting” we’re transported not into the heat of battle but rather to the inner stillness that makes it possible to survive that battle.

In a 2019 interview, Maestro Denève said that it was “very important that the audience understand that the new music we will perform is music that I believe they can love.” I think you’ll find that promise fulfilled once again with his musical choices this weekend.

This weekend’s performances of “Dance” are not only the first to the heard in St. Louis, by the way. They are also the first ever to be accompanied by actual dancing, courtesy of choreographer Kirven Douthit-Boyd and a quintet of dancers from St. Louis’s own Big Muddy Dance Company.

The concerts will conclude with my favorite Tchaikovsky symphony—his Fourth, in F minor, last heard in Powell Hall in 2017 when John Storgårds was on the podium.  He began writing it during a winter of discontent (to paraphrase Shakespeare) in 1876-77.  "Since we last met," he wrote to his friend Klimenko, "I am very much changed—especially mentally.  Not a kopek's worth of fun and gaiety is left in me.  Life is terribly empty, tedious, and tawdry.  My mind turns towards matrimony, or indeed any other steady bond.  The only thing that has not changed is my love for composing.  If the conditions of my life were different, if my desire to create were not balked at every step…I might write something really decent."

His disastrous attempt at marriage in 1877 to a former student, Antonina Miliukova didn't help matters any.  He was gay, she didn't get it, and the entire business collapsed after only a few months.  The following year, Tchaikovsky would refer to his marriage in a letter to his brother Anatoly as "my brief insanity. That man who in May took it into his head to marry Antonina Ivanovna, who during June wrote a whole opera as though nothing had happened, who in July married, who in September fled from his wife, who in November railed at Rome and so on—that man wasn't I, but another Pyotr Ilyich".

Still, by the beginning of 1878, all that Sturm und Drang had resulted in the creation of "something really decent."  Although initially dismissed by critics who were baffled by the first movement's length of (at just over 17 minutes, it takes up about half of the symphony's total time) and unusual structure, the Fourth would gradually gain acceptance and acclaim.  It's now one of Tchaikovsky's most popular symphonies.

As well it should be.  The composer poured all of his hope and despair into this most compact and dramatically expressive of all his symphonies.  From the commanding "fate" motive first intoned by the brasses at the beginning to the nearly hysterical triumph of the finale, this is a piece that grabs you by the lapels and doesn't let go until the end.  I've loved this work from the first time I heard it in a recording by Sir John Barbirolli and the Halle Orchestra on my parents' old console stereo over fifty years ago.  I think you will as well.

The essentials: Stéphane Denève conducts the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra with cellist Inbal Segev and dancers from the Big Muddy Dance Company on Saturday at 8 p.m. and Sunday at 3 p.m., September 25 and 26.  The program consists of Jessie Montgomery’s “Banner,” Anna Clyne’s “Dance,” and Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 4. The concerts take place at Powell Symphony Hall, 718 North Grand in Grand Center.  The Saturday performance will be broadcast live on St. Louis Public Radio.

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

Review: The St. Louis Symphony Orchestra celebrates a return to Powell Hall with a small but mighty Beethoven "Eroica"

The mood was muted but celebratory Thursday night (October 15th) as Music Director Stéphane Denève and the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra (SLSO) took to the Powell Hall stage for the first time in almost seven months with the first in a series of chamber music and small-orchestra concerts scheduled to run through the first week of November.

A physically distanced tune-up

It was muted mostly because, due to pandemic concerns, the audience was kept small (100 people, around 3% of Powell's capacity) and physically distanced. The celebration came from the band's outstanding performances of music by Beethoven and contemporary violinist/composer Jessie Montgomery. Although the members of the SLSO haven't appeared together on the Powell Hall stage in what seems like ages, their playing Thursday night was accomplished and precise, and their teamwork as flawless as usual. For us, at least, it felt like a kind of homecoming.

Before the first note was played on stage, the party started with a video of Maestro Denève leading a quartet of SLSO trombones in the Part 5 of Joan Tower's six-part "Fanfare for the Uncommon Woman." The short piece built to a powerful conclusion, after which Mr. Denève took the stage with a heartfelt welcome message for the audience. "We are back," he said, "and you are, too!"

Jessie Montgomery
Photo by Jiyang Chen

He then led the symphony strings in a sparkling rendition of Ms. Montgomery's 2012 "Starburst." Originally composed for a nine-piece string ensemble and later arranged for string orchestra by Jannina Norpoth, "Starburst" is a delightful sonic explosion which, in the composer's words, refers to "the rapid formation of large numbers of new stars in a galaxy at a rate high enough to alter the structure of the galaxy significantly." To my ears, "Starburst" also calls to mind musical depictions of fireworks by composers like Stravinsky and Debussy while still speaking in a sonic voice that is entirely Ms. Montgomery's own.  Rapidly ascending motifs shoot up, expand into musical stars, and then start over again in what the composer describes as "a multidimensional soundscape" that constitutes "a play on imagery of rapidly changing musical colors."

When I interviewed Mr. Denève back in February of last year, he observed that, when it came to new music, "my preference is for music that is very emotional, that is often very tonal, and that has a lot of melodies." That has certainly been true of the newer works he has conducted thus far, including "Starburst." Performed with pinpoint accuracy by the SLSO strings, it was an invigorating way to herald the orchestra's return to live performances at Powell.

The hour-long concert continued and concluded with one of Beethoven's Greatest Hits: the Symphony No. 3 in E-flat major, known as the "Eroica." It's a work that, as Mr. Denève points out in this weekend's program notes, is "a universal masterpiece. Something essential. The ‘Eroica’ is full of hope, and this is the right piece to begin making music together again." I couldn't agree more, especially with a performance as fine as the one we heard Thursday night.

The two big E-flat major chords that opened the symphony set the scene for a dramatic first movement that radiated energy and resolve. Here, as in the rest of the performance, clean, clear melodic lines and crisp articulation were the order of the day. The Marcia funebre second movement had dramatic heft, with especially plaintive oboe lines by Xiomara Mass and Cally Banham. That potent sense of tragedy made the contrast with the energetic Scherzo third movement that much more notable. The horn section under Thomas Jöstlein really distinguished themselves both here and throughout the performance. The triumphant finale, with its variations on what was apparently one of Beethoven's favorite themes, brought everything to a most satisfying conclusion.

Nobody does tragedy and triumph quite like Beethoven, and heaven knows the pandemic has brought us an ample sufficiency of both.

Stéphane Denève
Photo courtesy of the SLSO

One of the more remarkable things about this "Eroica" was the size of the orchestra. The need to provide safe physical distancing for the musicians limits the number of them who can be on stage at any one time—40 total, in this case.  That's about half the size of most contemporary orchestras, but fairly typical of the forces that would have been available to conductors back in Beethoven's day. As a result, some musical details that are sometimes lost in "big band" performances came through clearly here. I was thinking, for example, of the burbling clarinet arpeggios in the finale as well as the fugal passages in the second movement. Everything was very clear and transparent, but still with plenty of power.

The small audience size also changed the acoustics of the hall. With fewer bodies to absorb the sound, the acoustic fog that I have sometimes noticed at Powell was lifted, and everything could be heard in greater detail. Maybe I'm just looking for silver linings here, but I thought the overall result was a bit of a revelation.

Performances of "Starburst" and the Beethoven 3rd continue Saturday at 7:30 pm and Sunday at 3 pm, October 17th and 18th. With only 100 tickets available for each performance, I expect the remaining two concerts to sell out quickly. You can find more information and program notes at the SLSO web site, along with details on the many changes that have been made in seating, ticketing, and even the hall's infrastructure in response to the pandemic. To purchase tickets, though, you have to call the box office at 314-534-1700; they're not being sold on line.  Note that Saturday performances of this and other concerts in the "re-imagined" fall season will not be broadcast on St. Louis Public Radio, which continues to present rebroadcasts of earlier SLSO concerts every Saturday night at 8.

Next at Powell Hall: Maestro Denève conducts a program of Richard Strauss's "Metamorphosen for 23 Solo Strings," Takashi Yoshimatsu's "And birds are still...," and Dvorak's D-minor Serenade for winds Thursday through Saturday at 7:30 pm as well as Friday at 11 am, October 22-24. As with other programs in the fall series, the concerts will run around one hour with no intermission. 

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

Review: Young at heart

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

Matthew Halls
Photo by Eric Richmond

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

The accent was on youth this past Sunday (February 18, 2018) as guest conductor Matthew Halls made his St. Louis Symphony Orchestra debut with a program of music by a trio of early 19th-century composers who flourished early, died young, and left behind a sizeable body of music.

The concert opened with Symphony No. 3 in D major by Franz Schubert, dashed off in July 1815, when the composer was 18 years old. It opens with a slow, majestic introduction but the mood quickly turns sunny with a lilting main theme on the clarinet and remains cheerful for the next 25 minutes or so.

Conducting without a baton (as he did for the entire concert), Mr. Halls summoned those dramatic opening chords with a big, sweeping two-armed gesture and took the Adagio maestoso introduction at a relaxed pace that made the brisk first appearance of that main theme, expertly played by Associate Principal clarinet Diana Haskell, that much more energizing. It's marked Allegro con brio, which roughly translates as "quickly with energy," and it had energy in abundance.

In fact, his entire approach to the symphony made the most of the strong contrasts in the score. The Allegretto second movement was gracefully balletic, with a folksy charm in the contrasting middle section, while the Menuetto third movement danced along with subtle shadings of tempo and dynamics. The Presto vivace finale, with its tarantella-style 6/8 rhythm, raced along with fleet-footed playing by the strings and a satisfying sonic blend overall. Mr. Halls had Ms. Haskell stand for well-earned applause at the end along with her fellow woodwind leaders Philip Ross (Associate Principal oboe) and Andrew Gott (Associate Principal bassoon), but the fact is that everyone played extremely well.

The first half of the concert concluded with the Clarinet Concerto No. 1 in F minor, which Carl Maria von Weber wrote in 1811 at the age of 24. As befits a composer best known for his operas, the concerto is a work that often feels like it should be sung, with a dark and technically challenging first movement, a second that could pass for an opera aria, and a flashy Rondo finale.

Scott Andrews

SLSO Principal Clarinet Scott Andrews was the soloist, delivering a performance that had plenty of heart and soul (to cite an old song title) along with an easy virtuosity that allowed him to sail through the concerto's many difficult passages with an Astaire-like grace. He had a sensitive, singing tone in the lyrical second movement and approached the Rondo finale with a playful joy. He got great support from Mr. Halls and the orchestra, including some lovely playing from Roger Kaza and his fellow horns.

The concert ended with big, passionate interpretation of the Symphony No. 1 in C minor by Felix Mendelssohn from 1824. The composer was only 15 when he wrote it, but as he already had a dozen string symphonies to his credit at that point you could hardly call it the work of a beginner. It has, in fact, a maturity that belies Mendelssohn's youth, and Mr. Halls gave it a sense of weight and majesty that I have not always heard in other interpretations.

Conducting without a score, he drew a muscular, bold sound from the orchestra from the dramatic opening right through to the dynamic final movement with its powerful sense of momentum and sophisticated double fugue. There were many wonderful moments here, such as the almost inaudibly soft string pizzicati in the final movement and the elegant woodwind chorale in the Andante second movement. The sharp contrast between the vigorous outer sections and the gentle center of the third movement Menuetto was especially striking, generating a kind of tension that called to mind the transition into the finale of the fifth symphony of Beethoven, whose final symphony appeared the same year as Mendelssohn's first.

One could take issue with some of Mr. Halls' choices, but the sheer power of the overall result spoke for itself. As SLSO conducting debuts go, this one was pretty auspicious, and I look forward to seeing more of Mr. Halls in the future.

Next at Powell Hall: Kevin McBeth conducts the St. Louis Symphony IN UNISON Chorus and soloist Oleta Adams in Lift Every Voice, a concert commemorating the 50th anniversary of the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., on Friday, February 23, at 7:30 pm; note that as this is being written, the concert is standing room only. On Saturday at 7 pm and Sunday at 3 pm, February 24 and 25, the SLSO presents a showing of the Alfred Hitchcock classic North by Northwest with the score performed live by the orchestra. All concerts take place at Powell Symphony Hall, 718 North Grand in Grand Center.

Review: The St. Louis Symphony's all-American program is even better the second time around

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

Violinist Gil Shaham

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If this past weekend's St. Louis Symphony Orchestra program (January 14 and 15, 2017) provoked a strong sense of déjà vu in the audience, it's because the orchestra presented a nearly identical program three years ago.  The two major works—Erich Wolfgang Korngold's Violin Concerto and Dvořák's New World symphony—were the same, as were the conductor (David Robertson) and the soloist (Gil Shaham).

The only difference, in fact, was in the short opening work.  Three years ago it was Ingram Marshall's Bright Kingdom.  This time around it was The Chairman Dances, Foxtrot for Orchestra by John Adams.  But that was familiar as well, having last been performed by the orchestra under Mr. Robertson in the fall of 2013.  Even Gil Shaham's unlisted encore was the same: Schön Rosmarin, Fritz Kreisler's pastiche of the waltzes of Joseph Lanner.

For some background on the music itself, check out my symphony preview article.  For my thoughts on the performances, read on.

So how much has changed over the years?  Looking back at my original review of the Korngold and the Dvořák, I'd say the short answer is "not much." 

Mr. Shaham is as thoroughly in command of this music as he was the last time he played it here, with a singing tone and a real and obvious joy in his performance.  He flew through the virtuoso fireworks of the first and third movements easily and brought out all the yearning of the second movement Romance.  Back in 2014, I commented that Mr. Shaham was sometimes swamped by the orchestra, but I didn’t hear such balance problems this time around—probably because I was seated on the orchestra floor as opposed to the dress circle.  In Powell Hall, location can be everything when it comes to vocal and instrumental soloists.

In an interview during the intermission of Saturday night's broadcast of the concert, Mr. Robertson noted that, although the concerto is scored for a large, late-romantic orchestra, performing it requires the kind of intimate give and take between the soloist and the ensemble that is more characteristic of chamber music—and which makes each performance a unique event.  You could see that in the close communication between Mr. Shaham and Mr. Robertson when we attended the concert on Sunday afternoon.  They were physically close as well, with Mr. Shaham sometimes playing very close to the podium.

They were, in short, a joy to see and hear.

Three years ago, I dubbed Mr. Robertson's Dvořák 9^th a "world class" interpretation, and I'm just as enthusiastic this time around.  His approach has, if anything, gotten even more nuanced and refined over the last few years, with wonderful little details that I don't recall hearing in 2014.  The profound hush of the transition to the second subject in the Largo second movement is a good example, as are the many subtle shadings he brought to the exuberant Scherzo third movement.

The orchestra played very well, some issues in the horns not withstanding, and all the important solo passages were sheer perfection.  That includes the flute passages in the first movement by Mark Sparks and Jennifer Nichtman, Scott Andrews’s fine clarinet work in the fourth movement, and Cally Banham's plaintive rendition of The Most Famous English Horn Solo in the World in the Largo.

As for The Chairman Dances, Mr. Robertson and his forces brought out the whimsy in this odd little number, which was cut from the 1987 opera Nixon in China.  It was originally intended to accompany a surrealistic scene in which a painting of Chairman Mao comes to life and dances with his widow during a state dinner. 

There's a kind of quirky nostalgia to the music, which rises to a big orchestral climax before slowly fading out to the sounds of woodblock and sandpaper, as though Mao were doing a soft shoe number as he fades away.  It's rhythmically tricky stuff, and the percussion section—including Peter Henderson on piano—did a fine job with it.

The concerts concluded with another unlisted encore, the original version of the lively and tune-filled overture to Leonard Bernstein's often-revised 1956 operetta Candide.  The piece seems to be a favorite of Mr. Robertson's, and he and the band gave it a cheerfully unbuttoned (but still precise) reading.

The orchestra is taking this weekend's program on its road trip to Spain next month, with performances in Valencia, Madrid, and Oviedo.  If what we heard Sunday is any indication, they'll represent both our town and our nation well. 

I also have to say that, given the poisonous nature of our current political climate, it's good to see that while all the works on this program were written on these shores, three of the five composers represented were born elsewhere.  And two of them were immigrants fleeing fascism.  It's a reminder that America has always been a far more heterogeneous nation than some people want to admit.

The regular symphony season continues next weekend as Andrey Boreyko conducts the orchestra and pianist Till Fellner in Shostakovich's eccentric Symphony No. 15 and Beethoven's Piano Concerto No. 2.  Performances are Friday at 10:30 a.m. and Saturday at 8 p.m., January 20 and 21; visit the SLSO web site for details and information on the Spain tour.

Symphony Preview: It's beginning to look a lot like a Powell Hall Christmas

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As it does every December, the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra will be delivering Christmas presents for St. Louis audiences throughout the month of December. Let's sneak downstairs and take a peek under the wrapping, shall we?

Kevin McBeth
stlsymphony.org

December 8: Kevin McBeth leads the IN UNISON® Chorus in "A Gospel Christmas" - Grammy Award-winning vocalist Richard Smallwood and his group Vision are the guest soloists in a program that features many of Mr. Smallwood's original compositions along with Gospel favorites and popular Christmas tunes. There's even a soulful version of the "Hallelujah Chorus" from "Handel's Messiah: a Soulful Celebration" by Paul David Wilson. Tenor Curtis McGregor will be the featured soloist for that one.

Celebrating its 20th season with the SLSO, the IN UNISON® Chorus is "an all-volunteer, 120-voice auditioned ensemble that performs a variety of musical styles, with a focus on the interpretation, performance, and preservation of the music of African-American and African cultures." Kevin McBeth, who became director of the chorus in 2011, is Director of Music at Manchester United Methodist Church and serves as full-time administrator for the Music Ministry, which includes 18 choral and handbell ensembles, involving nearly 500 youngsters and adults. NOTE: as of Tuesday, December 6, this concert is sold out, but standing room tickets are still available.

December 9-11: A Mannheim Steamroller Christmas - Arnie Roth conducts the orchestra in this program of traditional carols from around the world as arranged by the group Mannheim Steamroller (of which Mr. Roth is a member), the classical/new age crossover group founded by composer and record producer Chip Davis back in 1975. Their sound is a blend of classical, jazz, rock that you will either find delightful or acutely annoying, depending on your musical taste. I find it pleasant, in a background music kind of way.

Arnie Roth
Photo by ainudil
www.flickr.com/photos/ainudil/526586152/

In any case, their 1984 album A Mannheim Steamroller Christmas was a massive hit. It and their subsequent holiday-themed albums have been massive sellers and the group still tours extensively around this time of the year. They won't be here in St. Louis, though; this concert is SLSO all the way. And that's a good thing.

FYI the group's name is a joking reference to the "Mannheim roller," one of several innovations developed by composers writing for the court orchestra at Mannheim in the late 18th century. Most of those composers are little more than historical footnotes now (although Carl Stamitz still shows up on concert programs now and then), but they were very influential in the musical development of Mozart and Haydn, among others.

December 16-18: The Mercy Holiday Celebration - Steven Jarvi conducts the orchestra and Holiday Festival Chorus (consisting of students from local schools and colleges conducted by Kevin McBeth) in a program of traditional carols and seasonal pop songs. The featured soloist is singer/actress Nicole Parker, best known for her work on MADtv. She also has extensive musical theatre credits, including the plum role of Elphaba in the first North American tour of Wicked.

As I'm writing this, the program for this year's concerts hasn't been published yet, but based on previous years you can expect a mix of traditional and contemporary holiday songs, a few classical favorites, a "Holiday Sing-Along," and possibly some seasonal film music. There will also be the annual "surprise" visit from Santa (usually played by the ever-charming Whit Richert). "Pops" events like this are usually big moneymakers for the orchestra and great fun as well. Only a dedicated Scrooge could complain.

The concerts are sponsored by Mercy Healthcare and Macy's.

Soprano Emily Birsan

December 22: The Bach Society Christmas Candlelight Concert - Soprano Emily Birsan joins the Bach Society Chorus and Orchestra in a performance of the Magnificat by British composer John Rutter, who is perhaps best known for his original Christmas carols, in the first half of the program. What makes this annual program truly special, though, is the candlelight procession that starts the second half.

The lights dim, and the members of the Bach Society walk down the aisles singing, each with an electric candle. If you're lucky enough to be sitting downstairs in the orchestra section, you find yourself surrounded by singers - some carrying the melody, some harmony, enveloping you in a constantly changing kaleidoscope of sound. Charles Ives would have loved it. It's a St. Louis tradition and every music lover should get to experience it at least once.

This isn't an SLSO event, but the SLSO is handling the ticketing and it does take place in Powell Hall, so I figured it's fair game for this article.

There are other special concerts at Powell after Christmas. I'll give you a look at the in my next preview article.

Review: A celebration of musical diversity at the St. Louis Symphony

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

Leonard Slatkin

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Last Saturday, November 12, former music director Leonard Slatkin conducted the St. Louis Symphony in a highly entertaining program of works by American composers. Ironically, given the outcome of our recent election, the evening was a celebration of our nation's diversity, with music informed by African-American and Jewish-American culture, as well as two major works by gay composers: Samuel Barber's Piano Concerto and Aaron Copland's Billy the Kid ballet suite.

Commissioned in 1959 by the piano manufacturer G. Schirmer as a vehicle for John Browning, the Barber concerto is heavily influenced by the big, muscular sound for which the late American pianist was famous. Resplendent in a shimmering turquoise gown, soloist Elizabeth Joy Roe -- a late substitute for the scheduled Olga Kern -- proved to be more than equal to the work's technical challenges, tearing the place up with a display of steely power that belied her diminutive appearance. You could hear that most obviously in her pristine rendering of the fire hose of notes that Barber pours out in the first movement cadenzas, as well as in the rapid-fire virtuoso flourishes of the last movement.

In a review for Classical Source, Colin Anderson called Ms. Roe's recording of the Barber concerto last year with the London Symphony "full of power and crusade and with no shortage of subtlety." I couldn't agree more. Her encore, a Rachmaninoff-esque arrangement of Gershwin's "The Man I Love," was an ideal choice, melding virtuosity to lyricism. This was a very promising local debut for the young Chicago-born pianist. I hope to see more of her here in the future.

Mr. Slatkin and the orchestra haven't played the concerto since 1992, when Mr. Browning was the soloist, but they sounded entirely comfortable with it Saturday night.

The second half of the concert opened with the suite from the 1938 ballet Billy the Kid by our second gay composer, Aaron Copland. Composed to a scenario by Lincoln Kirsten for Ballet Caravan, Billy the Kid was the first of Copland's two "cowboy" ballets (the other one is the popular Rodeo) and the first major work to display the popular "open" sound that would come to characterize his most often-played pieces.

Elizabeth Joy Roe

Mr. Slatkin and the SLSO recorded the entire ballet for EMI back in 1985, and it was interesting to compare the two performances. His tempi are more brisk than they were back then, but otherwise the grandeur, drama, and the flashes of droll humor in the score came through with the same clarity. The orchestra sounded great in the many solo and small ensemble moments Copland sprinkles throughout the work, and the percussion section deserves a shout-out for the "Gun Battle" sequence.

The concerts closed with Porgy and Bess: A Symphonic Picture for Orchestra by the noted composer and arranger Robert Russell Bennett. It's a work featuring African-American musical ideas translated for the stage by a Jewish-American composer and then arranged by a native Missourian who would go on to work with some of the biggest names in Broadway and Hollywood -- a quintessential example our nation's rich, multicultural heritage.

Bennett includes pretty much all of the "greatest hits" from Gershwin's original score, although the fact that they're out of sequence can feel a bit disconcerting if you know the opera well. Still, he intelligently expands on Gershwin's orchestrations while still respecting the composer's intent, and Mr. Slatkin conducted the musicians in a smartly turned out performance that did full justice to all of Gershwin's and Bennett's colors.

There was excellent work here by Cally Banham on English horn and Karin Bliznik on offstage trumpet in the opening sequence, and by the four additional sax players in the grand seduction of "There's A Boat that's Leavin' Soon for New York." "It Ain't Necessarily So" had real sinuous ease, "Bess, You Is My Woman Now" had true heart and soul, and the finale ("Lord, I'm on My Way") had the same mix of triumph and tragedy as the operatic original. I still love Gershwin's own Catfish Row suite, but Mr. Slatkin and the SLSO musicians made a fine case for the Bennett suite as well.

Mr. Slatkin followed the Gershwin up with an unexpected encore: an American folk music pastiche by his father, Felix Slatkin, titled "Devil's Dream." The original is from the 1962 LP Hoedown! The Fantastic Fiddles of Felix Slatkin that I still remember with fondness (it includes a truly memorable "Orange Blossom Special"). All of the original arrangements have been lost, but Leonard Slatkin's wife, composer Cindy McTee, has been painstakingly reconstructing them from the master recordings. If "Devil's Dream" was any indication, she's doing one hell of a job.

Speaking of Felix Slatkin, the concerts open with Kinah (Hebrew for "elegy") written by Leonard Slatkin and first performed by him last December with the Detroit Symphony, where he is currently Music Director. It's a memorial to his late father, who died at the tragically young age of 47 the day before he and his wife, the cellist Eleanor Aller, were scheduled to perform the Brahms Double Concerto in public for the first time.

Written in a style that is both obviously contemporary and deeply romantic, Kinah struck me, from the very first notes, with a sense of delicate beauty, longing, and loss. The work is based on a four-note motif drawn from the second movement of the Brahms concerto, but that actual passage isn't heard in its original form until the very end, after a vast wall of sound that could have come straight from the pen of Alan Hovhaness. In the ensuing hush, an offstage violin and cello try, but always fail, to complete the phrase, just as the elder Slatkin and Ms. Aller never completed their performance. It was profound and heartbreaking and beautifully done.

In an added personal touch, the offstage cellist was the man who played the part at the work's Detroit premiere, Mr. Slatkin's brother Frederick Zlotkin. The violinist was SLSO Associate Concertmaster Heidi Harris.

Next at Powell Hall: David Robertson conducts the orchestra and chorus with soloists Caitlin Lynch, soprano; Michelle DeYoung, mezzo-soprano; Nicholas Phan, tenor; and Kevin Thompson, bass in Mozart's Requiem and John Adam's On the Transmigration of Souls, along with The Unanswered Question by Charles Ives. Performances are Friday and Saturday at 8 p.m., and Sunday at 3 p.m., November 18-20, at Powell Hall in Grand Center.

Symphony Preview: The Meaning of Life

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Grief, loss, and the meaning of life amidst the seeming indifference of the cosmos-these are the big ideas behind the music David Robertson will conduct with the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra and Chorus this weekend (November 18 - 20).

Charles Ives
Photo by Clara E. Sipprell

The concerts open with Charles Ives's enigmatic The Unanswered Question from 1908, a six-minute contemplation of the difficulty in finding The Meaning of Life in a vast and possibly empty universe. Musically, the universe is played by the strings, calmly playing cosmic chords that Ives described as "the silences of the Druids." Against this harmonic vastness, the solo trumpet intones four notes constituting (in Ives's words) the "perennial question of existence." A quartet of flutes tries (and fails) to provide an answer, finally deteriorating into chaos and silence. The trumpet asks its question one final time, but (true to the title) there's no answer.

Interestingly, Ives originally intended The Unanswered Question to be the first half of a two-part work. In that context, its full title was "A Contemplation of a Serious Matter, or The Unanswered Question” and it was followed by “A Contemplation of Nothing Serious, or Central Park in the Dark in the Good Old Summertime.” The latter piece, now known only as Central Park in the Dark, was described by Ives as “a picture in sounds of nature and of happenings that men would hear some thirty years or so ago (before the combustion engine and radio monopolized the earth and air) when sitting on a bench in Central Park on a hot summer night.”

Like The Unanswered Question, Central Park in the Dark features slow-moving and harmonically unfettered string harmonies interrupted by increasingly aggressive and chaotic music from the rest of the orchestra that concludes with a realistic portrayal of a runaway horse and carriage careening into a fence-after which the strings continue on serenely on.

Humanity and humanity's questions come and go, but the cosmos is there for the long term.

John Adams
Photo: Vern Evans

Contemplations of eternity are also to be found in the work that concludes the first half of this weekend's concerts, On the Transmigration of Souls by John Adams. Commissioned by the New York Philharmonic for a memorial concert for the victims of the 9/11 attack and first performed on September 19, 2002, this single-movement work is scored for both adult and children's choruses, a large orchestra, and a pre-recorded track of New York City street sounds mixed with friends and family members of the composer reading lists of the names of those killed in the attack.

"My desire in writing this piece," says Mr. Adams in a 2002 interview reproduced on his web site, "is to achieve in musical terms the same sort of feeling one gets upon entering one of those old, majestic cathedrals in France or Italy. When you walk into the Chartres Cathedral, for example, you experience an immediate sense of something otherworldly. You feel you are in the presence of many souls, generations upon generations of them, and you sense their collected energy as if they were all congregated or clustered in that one spot. And even though you might be with a group of people, or the cathedral itself filled with other churchgoers or tourists, you feel very much alone with your thoughts and you find them focused in a most extraordinary and spiritual way."

The music, like the string choir of The Unanswered Question, evokes a sense of timelessness and calm. "The slowly changing aural tapestry conveys a dream-like atmosphere conducive to contemplation or, perhaps, subliminal receptivity to the emotional content of the text," writes Paul Schiavo in his program notes. "Only late into the approximately 25-minute composition does the orchestra unleash a sustained burst of pent-up energy, propelling the music forward on the kind of rapid motor rhythms that Adams has made a musical signature. The chorus joins in, intoning frantically, or ecstatically, the words 'light' and 'sky.'

"This musical eruption is, however, short-lived. Calm comes once more upon the proceedings, and the chorus turns to words of family, connection, and love. Both the music and text are, in the end, consoling and life-affirming."

The combination of the recorded soundtrack and the sung text, which is drawn from the missing persons signs posted around the area that came to be known as "Ground Zero," is both hypnotic and, to my ears, unbearably sad. As Mr. Adams notes in the interview, the language of these signs is "invariably of the most simple and direct kind. No one stunned by the shock of a sudden loss like this has time nor inclination to speak or write with eloquent or flowery language."

Adams himself declined to describe his music as "healing", though: "The event will always be there in memory," he observes, "and the lives of those who suffered will forever remain burdened by the violence and the pain. Time might make the emotions and the grief gradually less acute, but nothing, least of all a work of art, is going to heal a wound of this sort. Instead, the best I can hope for is to create something that has both serenity and the kind of 'gravitas' that those old cathedrals possess."

After intermission comes what is probably the big draw for many concert-goers, the Mozart Requiem. Begun during the final months of the composer's life, it's a mostly stirring and affecting setting of the standard Latin mass for the dead that's understandably popular with performers and audiences alike. I say “mostly” because Mozart died before he could complete it and the parts commonly attributed to his student Franz Xaver Süssmayr (who may or may not have had help from others) are clearly the work of a second-rater. The “Benedictus”, in particular, could do with some editing.

The first page of Mozart's Requiem

But then, early everything about the Requiem has been a source of dispute since Mozart's death, including the wisdom of using Süssmayr's completion. At least two other completions were done in the early 19th century and several musicologists have produced their own over the last four or five decades. You can read all about it on Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Requiem_%28Mozart%29 or take a look at Christoph Wolff's 1994 book Mozart's Requiem.

But I digress.

The important thing is that four-fifths (or thereabouts) of a Mozart masterpiece is still very fine stuff. The anguished shrieks of the violins in the “Requiem aeternam”, the dramatic “Dies irae”, the heartfelt quartet of the “Recordare”, and the famous baritone and trombone duet of the “Tuba mirum” are only a few of the many memorable things in this lovely score. Coming after the Adams work, I expect it will carry an even more powerful emotional punch.

The Essentials: David Robertson conducts the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra and Chorus with soloists Caitlin Lynch, soprano; Michelle DeYoung, mezzo-soprano; Nicholas Phan, tenor; and Kevin Thompson, bass in Mozart's Requiem and John Adam's On the Transmigration of Souls, along with The Unanswered Question by Charles Ives. Performances are Friday and Saturday at 8 p.m., and Sunday at 3 p.m., November 18 - 20, at Powell Hall in Grand Center. The Saturday concert will be broadcast on St. Louis Public Radio. For more information: stlsymphony.org.

Review: Nan-Ha Chang lights up an all-Russian program

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

Han-Na Chang

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In a laudatory review of Han-Na Chang's Tchaikovsky Symphony No. 5 in E minor, Op. 64, with the Oslo Philharmonic earlier this year, critic Lars O. Fyldal called her "one of this generation's most exciting conductors." Having heard her interpretation of the Fifth with the St. Louis Symphony this past Friday (November 5, 2016), I'm inclined to agree.

Like the symphonies that bracket it, the Fifth deals with the composer's obsession with fate and his attempt to find happiness despite his depression and the stress of being gay in Czarist Russia. It's less structurally coherent than the sixth or (especially) the fourth symphonies, but its triumphant final pages have a power that can't be denied. Under Ms. Chang's baton, this familiar music came to vibrant and electrifying life.

Ms. Chang, who made her SLSO debut this weekend, seems to be particularly fond of the Fifth, having often performed it in the past. She conducted without a score and had clearly internalized the music so thoroughly that she was able to bring out nuances that I hadn't heard before, starting with the opening Andante statement of the "fate" motif on the clarinets, played with great sensitivity by Scott Andrews and Tina Ward. Ms. Chang had held the opening downbeat for a moment or two in order for the audience to settle in and become almost completely silent, so the melody began in a slow, reverential hush. When the allegro con anima of the movement kicked in, the marked contrast generated real excitement.

In fact, "real excitement" effectively describes the entire performance. Ms. Chang knows how to build Tchaikovsky's big climaxes effectively, making them feel more inevitable and less episodic than they sometimes do. She also allowed some of the more lyrical moments to really "breathe"—the second subject of the first movement was a good example—which heightened the sense of drama overall.

Her second movement, with the famous horn solo gracefully rendered by Thomas Jöstlein, was expertly paced. The third movement waltz was beautifully fluid. And the Allegro vivace of the finale dashed along with exhilarating speed. Tchaikovsky concludes the movement by playing "can you top this" with himself multiple times, but Ms. Chang made each big moment feel both necessary and inexorable. The standing ovation that followed the final chords was immediate and entirely justified.

If you missed her Tchaikovsky Fifth this weekend, by the way, you can catch her complete 2014 performance with the Qatar Philharmonic at the 2014 Proms on YouTube.

Jan Mrácek

The other big piece on the program this past weekend was Prokofiev's Violin Concerto No. 1 in D major, op. 19. The soloist was another newcomer to the Powell Hall stage, the young Czech violinist Jan Mrácek. Like Ms. Chang, he also made a very strong impression, with an intelligent and fiercely committed performance of this technically and artistically challenging music.

You could hear that commitment immediately in the gentle, singing tone he brought to the opening of the first movement. Marked sognando (literally "dreaming") it has the soloist playing softly over tremolo strings, and both Mr. Mrácek and Ms. Chang gave it a properly haunting feel. The Vivacissimo second movement was both fierce and controlled, and the tricky ascending trills at the very end of the piece came off flawlessly. Mr. Mrá_ek threw himself into this music with complete abandon, with very satisfying results.

The concerts opened with brisk and energizing romp through the overture to Mikhail Glinka'a 1842 fairy tale opera Ruslan and Lyudmila. The opera itself hasn't gotten much traction outside of Russia but the overture is one of those pieces that used to crop up often as “filler” on classical LPs-a function it still serves on classical radio stations today. Its alluring melodies and neat little solo tympani part are irresistible.

Ms. Chang's tempo was snappy and the orchestra's playing was clear and precise all the way through, with Shannon Wood doing the honors on the tympani. Here, as in the rest of the program, Ms. Chang's podium style was fascinating to watch, combining big gestures with precisely executed individual cues and a very neat and eloquent use of the baton.

It's always fascinating to see new performers on the Powell Hall stage and watch how the audience responds to them. If the warm response at Friday night's concert is any indication, we have not seen the last of Ms. Chang here. I certainly look forward to her return.

Next at Powell Hall: Leonard Slatkin conducts the orchestra with piano soloist Olga Kern in Barber's Piano Concerto, Copland's Billy the Kid Suite, Gershwin's Porgy and Bess: Symphonic Picture for Orchestra (arranged by Robert Russell Bennett), and Slatkin's own composition Kinah. Performances are Saturday at 8 p.m. and Sunday at 3 p.m., November 12 and 13. Get an in-depth look at that music in my symphony preview.

Mr. Slatkin will also conduct a performance of Wagner's Meistersinger Prelude as part of a St. Louis Symphony Youth Orchestra conert on Friday, November 11, at 8 p.m.

Symphony Preview: E Pluribus Unum

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For Election Day weekend, former music director Leonard Slatkin will conduct the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra in a program of works by American composers. Ironically, given the outcome of that election, the evening is a celebration of our nation's diversity, with music informed by African-American and Jewish-American culture, as well as two major works by gay composers.

You can't say Fate doesn't have a dark sense of humor.

Leonard Slatkin

The concerts open with Kinah (Hebrew for "elegy") written by Mr. Slatkin and first performed by him last December with the Detroit Symphony, where he is currently Music Director. It's a memorial to his late father Felix Slatkin, conductor of (among others) the Hollywood Bowl Symphony Orchestra.

Mr. Slatkin's mother, Eleanor Aller, was a distinguished cellist who often played with the Warner Brothers Orchestra. In 1963, she and her husband were scheduled to present a public performance of a work they had often practiced at home but had never performed in public, the Brahms Double Concerto. That performance never happened. Between the Wednesday night rehearsal and the planned Saturday night performance, Felix Slatkin suffered a heart attack and died at the age of 47.

In prefatory remarks for the 2015 premiere, Mr. Slatkin described Kinah as "a tribute to my parents and in particular of my dad's passing because it's based on four notes that form the opening theme of the Brahms Concerto. It's heard in chords, and it's heard in fragments of melodies that occur throughout the work. It is only heard in more or less its complete form at the very end."

The scoring includes an offstage violin and cello (representing the composer's parents) that only play at the very end. They play fragments of the Brahms melody but never complete any of the phrases-a reminder that they never played the complete work. This weekend, the cello part will be played by the performer who performed at the world premiere, Mr. Slatkin's brother Frederick Zlotkin. The instrument he will be playing belonged to Mr. Slatkin's mother.

Listening to the work on line, I was struck immediately by a sense of delicate beauty, longing, and loss. If you can sit through all twelve minutes of this with a dry eye, you're a better man than I am, Gunga Din.

Samuel Barber, photographed by
Carl Van Vechten, 1944

Up next is a work premiered the year before the elder Slatkin's death, the first and only piano concerto by Samuel Barber (gay composer no. 1). Barber began writing the work while he was a student at Curtis Institute, gave up, and didn't try again for over three decades, when the piano firm of G. Schirmer commissioned him to write a new concerto for pianist John Browning. "Inspired by the muscular virtuosity of his chosen soloist," writes René Spencer Saller in her program notes, "Barber began working on the concerto the following spring. To reacquaint himself with the form, he pored over contemporary scores by Boulez, Copland, Webern, Berg, and Schoenberg. He finished the first two movements in 1960, but the finale remained in flux until only two weeks before the premiere, in September of 1962. Barber incorporated technical advice from both Browning and Vladimir Horowitz, who persuaded him that the third movement was unplayable at the original tempo."

Even at the designated tempo of Allegro molto, that last movement is a pretty wild ride-a fiercely energetic perpetual motion machine that requires a pianist of real skill and stamina. Olga Kern, the originally scheduled soloist, would have been a natural for this. Fortunately her substitute, Elizabeth Joy Roe, apparently knows the work well, having recorded it for Decca with the London Symphony Orchestra under Emil Tabakov.

The second half of this weekend's concerts starts with a suite drawn from the 1938 ballet Billy the Kid by our second gay composer, Aaron Copland. Composed to a scenario by Lincoln Kirsten for Ballet Caravan, Billy the Kid was the first of Copland's two "cowboy" ballets (the other one is the popular Rodeo) and the first major work to display the popular, "open" sound that would come to characterize his most often-played pieces. It was also the first time he incorporated American folk songs into his music (although he had already used Mexican tunes in El Salon Mexico two years earlier).

Aaron Copland, 1962
By CBS Television - eBay
itemphoto frontphoto back,
Public Domain

Copland's Billy the Kid is not the brutal killer of reality but rather a symbolic figure who is part outlaw and part tragic hero. In addition, as Richard Freed writes in his lines notes for the 1985 recording of the complete ballet Mr. Slatkin and the SLSO, "[o]thers have recognized in the music a symbolic representation of the various elements in the American 'frontier spirit' that made possible the westward expansion."

Certainly the music vividly evokes the vast plains of the mythic west with wide, open harmonies as well as a bustling frontier town with lively polyrhythms and a climactic gun battle with percussion outbursts. This is cinematic stuff that makes it easy to conjure up the action of the ballet in the mind's eye.

The concerts close with Porgy and Bess: A Symphonic Picture for Orchestra by the noted composer and arranger Robert Russell Bennett. It's a work featuring African-American musical ideas translated for the stage by a Jewish-American composer and then arranged by a native Missourian who would go on to work with some of the biggest names in Broadway and Hollywood. In many ways it encapsulates our nation's rich, multi-cultural heritage.

Although Gershwin's Porgy and Bess is now widely regarded as one of the masterpieces of 20th century opera, it took (to quote one of the opera's lyrics) “a long pull to get there”.
With a book by DuBose Heyward (based on his own original novel and play) and music and lyrics by the Brothers Gershwin, the original 1935 Theatre Guild production was a financial failure, and critical reaction was mixed and, from a contemporary standpoint, clueless. New York Times drama critic Brooks Atkinson dismissed it out of hand, and the paper's music critic, Olin Downes, found the mix of vernacular musical elements and sophisticated symphonic form completely baffling (a position which he would later recant).

Despite revivals of interest in the 1940s and 1950s, Porgy and Bess remained an essentially marginal work until a 1976 production of the complete score by the Houston Grand Opera—one that restored nearly an hour of music that had been cut from earlier productions—demonstrated conclusively that Gershwin's crowning achievement was also a great work of musical art.

George Gerwhsin, 1937

Some expansions and alternations not withstanding, the 1942 Bennett arrangement sticks pretty closely to Gershwin's own orchestration and covers some of the same territory as the composer's 1936 Catfish Row suite (which the SLSO recorded with Mr. Slatkin in 1990) including the banjo solo for "I Got Plenty o' Nothing". If you're a fan of the opera, you'll find a lot to like here, including nearly all of the opera's "greatest hits." Although I have to say I miss the Act I fugue that accompanies the murder of Robbins from Gershwin's own suite.

The Essentials: Leonard Slatkin conducts the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra with piano soloist Olga Kern in Barber's Piano Concerto, Copland's Billy the Kid Suite, Gershwin's Porgy and Bess: Symphonic Picture for Orchestra, and Slatkin's own composition Kinah. Performances are Friday at 10:30 a.m., Saturday at 8 p.m., and Sunday at 3 p.m., November 11 - 13, at Powell Hall in Grand Center. For more information: stlsymphony.org. The Saturday concert will be broadcast on St. Louis Public Radio.

Mr. Slatkin will also conduct Wagner's Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg Overture as part of a concert by the St. Louis Symphony Youth Orchestra on Friday at 8 p.m. Gemma New conducts the rest of the program, which includes music by Copland, Grieg, and Beethoven.