The St. Louis Symphony Orchestra makes a cautious return to Powell Hall

Powell Symphony Hall went dark in mid-March due to the rapidly spreading SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, but the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra (SLSO) quickly found multiple ways to stay in touch with its audience during the hiatus via its web site, its YouTube channel, rebroadcasts of previous SLSO concerts on St. Louis Public Radio, the monthly “Night at the Symphony”  series of concert highlights on Nine Network television, and the “SLSO Soundbites” podcast at Classic 107.3.

Stéphane Denève

Now, however, the orchestra is preparing to open Powell Hall for live concerts once again for a special two-concert series under the baton of SLSO Music Director Stéphane Denève. The experience, however, will be very different from what it was in the days before COVID-19, the disease caused by SARS-CoV-2, had (as this is being written) killed over 214,000 Americans and infected at least 7.7 million, per the Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center.

Working with a team of infectious disease specialists from Washington University, the SLSO developed a plan to insure the safety of both audiences and SLSO staff. You can find a complete rundown on the many upgrades and changes the SLSO has made to Powell at the SLSO Stories site, but perhaps the most obvious ones from your standpoint as an audience member will be the size of the house and the changes in the concert format.

For the two concerts in the fall series, which take place October 15-18 and October 22-24, the maximum audience size is limited to 100—less than 3% of Powell’s 2600-seat capacity. That means you and your concert companions will have nearly an entire row or dress circle box to yourselves and you won’t need to step over anyone to get to your seats. City health officials have actually approved a maximum of 300 seats, but the SLSO has elected to start with a more conservative approach.

The orchestra will be smaller as well. For the October 15-18 program, for example, there will be total of 40 players for Beethoven’s “Eroica” Symphony (around the size of a typical orchestra back in Ludwig’s day) and only 26 for the opening work (and the only other piece on the program), Jessie Mongomery’s “Starburst.” They’ll still take up the entire stage, though, because of physical distancing protocols. I’m not sure how that will affect the overall sound, but as I’ll be there opening night, I’ll give you a full report in my review.

Violinist and composer
Jessie Montgomery

The programs will be shorter as well. The “Eroica” runs around 45 minutes and “Starburst” clocks in at less than 5, resulting in a concert that will run only around an hour with no intermission.  There will be no concessions and no mingling in the lobby before the concert. Audience members will enter through separate doors, depending on where they’re sitting, and parties will be kept at least six feet apart both entering and leaving.

Needless to say, masks are mandatory, as are temperature checks. There will also be plenty of hand sanitizer stations, should you forget to bring your own.

In an effort to accommodate as many music lovers as possible, the symphony is presenting four performances of each program instead of the usual two or three: Thursdays and Saturdays at 7:30 pm, Fridays at 11 am, and Sundays at 3 pm. For these two special concerts, tickets are available only by calling the SLSO box office at 314-534-1700. The SLSO hopes to resume its regular season in January, but no formal announcement has been made and tickets are not yet available.

Romantic classics get supercharged with Leonard Slatkin and the St. Louis Symphony

Who: The St. Louis Symphony Orchestra conducted by Leonard Slatkin with violinist David Halen
What: Music of Bruch, Berlioz, and Cindy McTee
When: October 17 and 19, 2014
Where: Powell Symphony Hall, St. Louis

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This weekend brought electrifying performances of a pair of 19th century classics: Max Bruch's "Violin Concerto No. 1" and Hector Berlioz's "Symphonie Fantastique." Rounding out the concerts was a bit of old Bach wine in new bottles by Cindy McTee, whose "Double Play" was such a delightful discovery last January.

Composed about three decades apart (the Berlioz premiered in 1830, the Bruch in 1868), the two big Romantic works have little in common aside from the fact that their respective composers were around the same age (30) at their premiers.

The Bruch concerto is a warm, heartfelt, and utterly irresistible work that marries virtuoso flash with genuine emotion. The Adagio second movement, in particular, is a piece of almost heartbreaking beauty. The Berlioz, on the other hand, is a hair-raising study in dramatic excess. I dearly love both works, but the Bruch is far and away the more moving. It's rather like the difference between an action movie and a romantic drama.

David Halen
stlsymphony.org

The solo role in Bruch's romance requires a performer who has both solid technique and emotional depth—which is exactly what it got in this weekend's soloist, SLSO Concertmaster David Halen. He has, as I noted when he did the Mendelssohn concerto back in February of 2012, a mix of technical facility and intense concentration that pulled me in immediately and kept me there throughout the work. He attacked the dramatic entrances in the first movement with tremendous vigor, sang the lyrical second, and simply danced through the joyous Allegro energico finale. He got great support from Mr. Slatkin and the orchestra as well. The standing ovation at the end was immediate and completely justified.

"If Hector Berlioz had been born in 20th-century America instead of 19th-century France," writes Reneé Spencer Saller in her program notes, "he would have wound up in prison or a mental institution." He might also have ended up as the object of a sexual harassment suit, given his dogged pursuit of Shakespearean actress Harriet Smithson. It was his obsession with her that inspired the creation of the "Symphonie" and eventually led to their disastrous marriage—but that's another story.

The music, unlike the romantic obsession that inspired it, was a great success, although it was fiercely controversial. Parisians had just gotten used to the idea of Beethoven when along came this wildly dramatic bit of excess scored for a massive orchestra and accompanied by a lurid narrative about a young musician who dreams about his ideal woman (first movement), pursues her at a ball (second), and then flees to the country to escape his longing (third). Overdosing on opium, he dreams he is being beheaded for her murder (fourth movement) and then literally goes to Hell, where he encounters his love for the last time, now transformed into a demon and presiding over a witches' Sabbath.

To tell this wild tale, Berlioz used an orchestra that was not only large but also included instruments rarely heard in concerts, from the little E-flat clarinet to the coarse-sounding ophicleide (now usually replaced by the tuba) and tuned iron bells. He also asks the players to employ uncommon techniques, such as having the strings play col legno (with the wood of their bows instead of the strings) in the finale.

All that means that the "Symphonie Fantastique" is a real test of an orchestra's mettle, and the SLSO musicians were more than up to the challenge. There are many great solo passages throughout the work. Cally Banham, for example, was wonderfully plaintive in the famous English horn solo in the bucolic "Scène aux Champs" third movement, as was oboist Barbara Orland with the offstage echo part (played from the house right balcony). The bassoon section was wonderfully menacing in the fourth movement "Marche au suplice" and Diana Haskell's E-flat clarinet was delightfully grotesque in the fifth movement transformation of the "idée fixe" theme which represents the narrator's beloved. Flautists Mark Sparks and Ann Choomack (doubling on piccolo) also did fine work in the second movement waltz, along with harpists Allegra Lilly and Megan Stout.

Celeste Golden Boyer
stlsymphony.org

Well, I could go on, but you get the idea. Up on the podium, Mr. Slatkin, conducting without a score (and, during the third movement, without a baton), brought it all together with a wonderfully sympathetic and dynamic reading that did full justice to Berlioz's high drama without ever descending into exaggeration. His decision to place key "effects" instruments (such as the fifth movement bells) offstage worked very well, I thought, and added a very appropriate theatricality to the proceedings. The final pages were both alarming and thrilling—just as Berlioz would have wished.

The concerts opened with "Einstein's Dream," a 2004 work by Cindy McTee (Mr. Slatkin's wife), apparently a late substitution for the originally scheduled opener, Slatkin's own "Endgames" (which will have its world premiere with the Detroit Symphony in November). "Albert Einstein," writes the composer on her web site, "gave much thought to issues of space and time, and he dreamt of finding a theory of everything, or a broad, mathematical structure that would fully explain and link together all known phenomena. My piece celebrates this dream."

That celebration takes the form of a set of variations for strings, percussion, and recorded sound on the Bach chorale prelude "Wir glauben all’ an einen Gott" ("We all believe in one God"), "transposed," as Ms. McTee notes, "to the key of 'e' for Einstein." The theme is initially stated by the strings in the first section ("Warps and Curves in the Fabric of Space and Time") and then subjected to increasingly complex transformations in each of the following six sections.

In "Music of the Spheres," for example, the theme is played by the high strings over a pedal point in the cellos and basses while in the "Celestial Bells" live tubular bells are accompanied by recorded bell-like sounds and Ligeti-ish clusters in the strings. The leaping violin solo in "Pondering the Behavior of Light" (expertly played by Celeste Golden Boyer) is a homage to Einstein's own violin playing. In the final section, "Wondering at the Secrets," notes of the theme are slowed down and overlapped in a technique the composer calls "time-stretching." "What most intrigued me about musical time-stretching," she writes, "was its ability to shift the listener’s attention toward the inner components of the sound – the harmonics and the overlapping resonant regions – as if inviting a kind of meditation to wonder at the secrets."

If all of this sounds, to quote Mr. Slatkin's introductory remarks, like "one of those kind of pieces," rest assured that it wasn't. It was fascinating, ingenious, and even a bit mischievous at times. Like McTee's "Double Play," "Einstein's Dream" clearly shows a lively and playful intellect at work. I'm not sure it leaves much room for interpretation by the conductor, though, as the live musicians are required to stay in synch with the recorded tracks.

Next at Powell Hall: John Storgårds conducts the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra and violin soloist Heidi Harris in Mendelssohn's "Violin Concerto" Sibelius's "Symphony No. 1," and Paufnik's "Landscapes" Friday and Saturday, October 24 and 25, at 8 p.m. The Saturday concert will be broadcast on St. Louis Public Radio. Steven Jarvi conducts the orchestra in "Never Play Music Right Next to the Zoo," a special Family Concert featuring Saint-Saëns's "Carnival of the Animals" on Sunday, October 26, at 3 p.m. The concerts take place at Powell Symphony Hall, 718 North Grand in Grand Center. For more information, visit the web site.

Expectancy and ecstasy

Karita Mattila
Photo: Marcia Rosengard

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Who: The St. Louis Symphony conducted by David Robertson with soprano soloist Karita Mattila
What: Music of Brahms, Wagner, and Schoenberg
When: Friday and Saturday, March 28 and 29, 2014
Where: Powell Symphony Hall, St. Louis

The OnMusic Dictionary (at dictionary.onmusic.org) defines attacca as "a musical directive for the performer to begin the next movement (or section) of a composition immediately and without pause." Lately the symphony has been experimenting with playing compositions by different composers attacca as a way of highlighting similarities between the pieces. This weekend's bit of attacca might be the boldest yet, following the prelude to Wagner's "Tristan und Isolde" (first performed in 1859) with Arnold Schoenberg's neurasthenic 1909 "monodrama" "Erwartung" ("Expectation").

[Find out more about the music with the symphony program notes and my Symphony Preview article.]

Although separated by six decades, the two works have more in common than you might think. Musically, the expanded harmonic language of "Tristan" marked the start of a sea change in composition style that eventually led to the serialism of Schoenberg, with its complete demolition of conventional notions of consonance and dissonance. Dramatically, both "Tristan" and "Erwartung" mix images of love and death. Or, as Freud would have put it, Eros and Thanatos.

Wagner in Paris, 1861

In Wagner's opera, the musical and psychological tension set up by the unsettling "Tristan chord" in the first measures of the "Prelude" aren't resolved until nearly four hours later when Isolde, in the rapturous "liebestod," wills herself to join her lover Tristan in death. In "Erwartung" the mixture of the erotic and the violent that forms the subtext of "Tristan" comes to the forefront in "a stream of consciousness libretto (it starts on page 59 of that link) written by poet and medical student Marie Pappenheim and inspired by Freud's "The Interpretation of Dreams."

Scored for soprano and post-Wagnerian orchestra, "Erwartung" unfolds as a somewhat hallucinatory monolog in which the narrator (The Woman) wanders into a nocturnal forest expecting to meet her lover and instead finds his corpse. "The line between truth and fantasy grows increasingly blurred," writes Paul Schiavo in his program notes. "Who killed her lover? Did she do it herself? The only reference point is the dramatic impulse, but the protagonist is unreliable, in thrall to her own circuitous dream logic." Schoenberg himself, in his essay "New Music: My Music," said the aim of the piece "is to represent in slow motion everything that occurs during a single second of maximum spiritual excitement, stretching it out to half an hour."

This is demanding music, both for the audience and the soloist. Schoenberg's didactic, theme-free score is no easier on the ears now than it was over a century ago and the challenges it presents to the singer are substantial. She has to hold her own against a huge orchestra and convincingly portray a wide range of disordered emotions without tipping over into absurdity. It requires a performer with a powerful voice and exceptional acting skills.

Karita Mattila clearly has both. She gave us a jaw droppingly intense performance Friday night. A striking, statuesque figure in a slinky black gown and gray shawl, Ms. Mattila commanded attention from the moment she walked on stage during the final pages of the "Tristan" prelude and held it all the way through the deranged twists and turns of "Erwartung."

Schoenberg's Der Rote Blick (Red Gaze)
1910
en.wikipedia.org

The focus on the drama was enhanced by the canny use of lighting, as the house was dimmed more than usual and the orchestra illuminated by lights that changed color to match the mood of the text. The opening section describing the forest was all in green, for example, with a change to the silvery when the narrator's attention shifted to the moon. The lights went red when the narrator raged against a rival and then gold when the sun rose; very effective.

The orchestra's performance was no less impressive. The occasional massive musical explosion not withstanding, "Erwartung" has long solo and small ensemble passages that leave individual musicians very exposed. Peter Henderson on celesta and Allegra Lilly on harp acquitted themselves particularly well, I thought.

The concerts opened with a lush and passionate Brahms "Symphony No. 3" in which the rubato dial was cranked up to 11. I'm usually very impressed with Mr. Robertson's ability to highlight the musical architecture of a symphony while still retaining the dramatic tension of the music from beginning to end. This time things got rather sluggish as Mr. Roberson tended to linger lovingly over too many phrases and there were occasional intonation problems, especially in the third movement. It sounded somewhat under rehearsed in spots, which made me wonder whether or not it got short changed by the Schoenberg.

Next at Powell: Christian Tetzlaff is the soloist and Mr. Robertson is on the podium for Shostakovich's "Violin Concerto No. 1" and Sibelius's "Symphony No. 2." Performances are Saturday at 8 PM and Sunday at 3 PM, April 5 and 6. For more information: stlsymphony.org.

A league of their own

The view from the stage

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If the rest of the League of American Orchestras conference here goes as well as the special St. Louis Symphony Orchestra concert they saw last night did, it will certainly be a week to remember. Maestro David Robertson conducted a very full program (two and one-half hours with intermission) that showed off the orchestra's versatility: arias and overtures by Mozart and Wagner (with powerful performances by bass-baritone Eric Owens) along with Sibelius's 7th symphony (which still sounds strikingly original nearly 90 years later) and John Adams's flashy but (to my ears) rather empty "Doctor Atomic" symphony.

There was heroic work by the brass and percussion in the Adams and fine playing all around.  The string sound in the Sibelius was particularly striking.

After a week in Fort Worth for the Cliburn Competition and another week in Boston for the Boston Early Music Festival, it was nice to settle back with the home town band at Powell Hall—even if I am more aware of its acoustic shortcomings as a result of my travels over the last twelve months.  It's still a lovely space and, to quote a Tom Lehrer lyric, "what the hell, it's home."

Ring Resounding

Who: The St. Louis Symphony Orchestra, Chorus and Children’s Choirs
What: The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring
Where: Powell Symphony Hall, St. Louis
When: April 1 through 3, 2011

Were it not for the huge movie screen suspended above the Powell Hall stage this weekend, you might be forgiven for thinking that the large orchestra, augmented percussion battery, and chorus were going perform the first work in the Ring cycle – and in a way, you’d be right.

The evening did, after all, present the first of a series of dramatic works revolving around a cursed magic ring that brings doom to those who try to use its power. The story unfolds in a mythical world filled with dwarves, dragons, and monsters. It’s a tale of magic, betrayal, honor, and redemption through sacrifice that begins with the rise of dark powers and ends with the passing of the world of magic and the coming of the world of men.

Superficial similarities aside, however, this wasn’t the opera Der Ring des Nibelungen: Das Rheingold but rather the film The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring. And while Howard Shore’s ambitious and striking score may not be in the same class as Wagner’s, it does use the same narrative approach, with specific musical motifs identifying key characters and dramatic concepts. In some respects, in fact, Shore may have the advantage, since his musical toolbox has a number of items – including microtones, Middle Eastern and Celtic influences, and aleatoric/improvisational techniques – that were not available to the German master. And which he probably would have rejected as Teutonically Incorrect in any case.

I won’t bore you by repeating what everyone else has already said about Peter Jackson’s beautiful and compelling adaptation of Tolkien’s novel. By now you’ve already made up your mind about it, and in any case, the real story here is not so much the movie as the added depth and power it derives when accompanied by a live performance of the score. I don’t care how good your surround sound system is, there’s simply no substitute for real musicians in a real hall.

Yes, soprano soloist Ann De Renais uses a wireless microphone, as do boy sopranos Blaine Clark and Graham Markowitz, but otherwise this was Howard Shore unplugged. Under the baton of guest conductor Erik Ochsner – who seems to have carved out a nice niche for himself in that gray area between traditional concert music and film scores – the symphony sounded like the finely tuned instrument it has become over the years. Even the more rhythmically tricky and aggressively “modern” parts of the score – the whole Durin/Moria sequence, for example – sounded flawless.

Mr. Ochsner seemed very engaged with and friendly towards the musicians under his baton – not an easy task given the need to divide his attention between the printed score and the film (complete with the visual equivalent of a click track) playing out on a monitor mounted on the podium.

Like Mr. Ochsner, Ms. De Renais has made LOTR concerts a regular part of her career, but her resume also includes substantial operatic and concert appearances. Perhaps that’s why she was clearly emotionally engaged during her solo passages rather than simply acting as just another pretty voice. Given that everyone was riveted to the screen, she could probably have gotten away with the latter, but a real professional doesn’t just coast – and she didn’t.

A round of applause is due, as well, to Chorus director Amy Kaiser and Children’s Choir artistic director Barbara Berner. Shore asks his singers to do a number of things not ordinarily required on the concert stage (such as singing in Elvish and rhythmically grunting and chanting in Dwarfish), so it’s to their credit that it all sounded so polished. A tip of the topper is due, as well, to the encyclopedic program notes from author Doug Adams, whose Music of Lord of the Rings blog appears to be the final word on the subject.

It would, I think, be easy to dismiss mass market events like the Lord of the Rings concerts as the musical equivalent of the slightly stale popcorn sold at the Powell Hall bar, but that would require one to overlook the sheer magnitude of the task involved and the amount of dedication and talent it takes to pull it off. We are, after all, talking about roughly three and one-half hours of music here – most of it unfamiliar and some of it rather challenging. Everyone concerned deserves hearty congratulations.

And besides, how often do you see Powell Hall this packed? Yes, it meant that getting to the restroom at intermission was pretty much impossible and some folks who brought their drinks into the hall apparently didn’t understand that leaving empty cups on the floor is lousy etiquette, but if it awakens a few more people to the glory of live music in a classic concert hall then it’s worthwhile in my book.

Next up on the symphony schedule: Mahler’s powerful Symphony No. 2 sharing the bill with Samuel Barber’s rarely heard Prayers of Kierkegaard. Kelley O’Connor and our own Christine Brewer are soloists with the orchestra and chorus conducted by Maestro Robertson. For more information, you may call 314-534-1700, visit stlsymphony.org, or follow @slso and/or use the #slso hashtag on Twitter.