Symphony Review: The art of dance with Denève and the SLSO

During the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra’s (SLSO) “Operatic Favorites” concert a few weeks ago, Music Director Stéphane Denève reminded us that for much of its history opera has been accompanied by ballet. It seemed only appropriate, then, that when regular subscription concerts resumed this past weekend (March 16 and 17), ballet was front and center—both figuratively and literally.

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

The ”literally” part refers to the fact that for the first half of the concert, the area of the Stifel Theatre stage in front of the podium was turned into a dance floor for the Big Muddy Dance Company. They were there to perform the world premiere of a ballet commissioned by the SLSO to accompany “Picture Studies,” a 2011 suite by Kansas City–based composer Adam Schoenberg (b. 1980). That work was also the result of a commission, this time from the Nelson-Atkins Museum, who were looking for a 21st-century version of “Pictures at an Exhibition” by Modest Mussorgsky (1839–1881).

Die Drei Pierrots Nr. 2
Photo coutesy of
Nelson-Atkins Museum

Mussorgsky’s suite was based on a collection of works by a single artist, the composer’s friend Viktor Hartmann. Schoenberg’s work is a collection of musical invocations of works by eight different artists (four paintings, three photographs, and one sculpture). So the challenge for Big Muddy Artistic Director Kirven Douthit-Boyd was to create a ballet that reflected both Schoenberg’s music and the works of art that inspired it.

He succeeded admirably. The combination of Douthit-Boyd’s choreography, Schoenberg’s music, and the polished performances of both the Big Muddy dancers and the SLSO added new layers of meaning to the original works of art. Here are a few examples.

Die Drei Pierrots Nr. 2 (The Three Pierrots Nr. 2) is a 1911 painting by Albert Bloch 1882–1961. The three figures in the painting may look dark and a bit creepy, but Schoenberg has given them light and mischievous music more in keeping with their commedia dell’arte origins. The dancing linked those two different sides of Pierrot, with a trio of women in polka dot dresses moving in tight formations that mirrored the grouping in the picture.

Repetition Photo courtesy of 
Nelson-Atkins Museum

Repetition, a 1913 photograph by Kurt Baasch (1891–1964), is the spatial opposite of Der Drei Pierrots. Here, four widely separated pedestrians are captured in their own individual worlds on a strangely empty midday street. The music reflects a less empty and more energetic scene while the dance presents us with the four isolated figures, each with their own style of movement.

Rose with Gray, a 1924 painting by Wassily Kandinsky (1866–1944), is all jagged edges, blocks of color, and a general feeling of edgy energy. Schoenberg’s music matches the mood of the image, as do the choreography and lighting. The latter projects angular abstract shapes on the stage that are a match for the aggressive movements of the dancing.

Rose with Gray Photo courtesy of
Nelson-Atkins Museum

It was, in sum, a memorable mix of sight and sound. I think projecting images of the original art in synch with the music and dance might have given the audience a better idea of how it all fit together, but that could also have acted as a distraction. It was a hit in any case, with both composer Schoenberg and choreographer Douthit-Boyd on hand to share the curtain call.

The second half of the concert brought us back to the ballet with Denève’s compilation of music from the three concert suites from the “Romeo and Juliet” ballet by Sergei Prokofiev (1891–1953). The suites have been popular with audiences. With conductors, not so much.

In his comments before the performance, Denève noted that both he and his fellow conductors often struggle with the odd sequencing of the suites, and said he wished he could call up Prokofiev up and ask him what he had in mind. As a result, performances of the ballet suites often consist of individual numbers reassembled to match the musical vision of the conductor. Gilbert Varga did that, in fact, when the SLSO last played this music in 2016.

Denève said that his R&J suite was “a Romantic suite” intended to follow the arc of the play. Which, to my ears, it certainly did. The “Balcony Scene” was as lush and achingly lovely as I have ever heard it, with a positively ethereal end. “Friar Lawrence” emphasized the sympathetic warmth of the character.

“Montagues and Capulets” (the first movement from the Suite No. 2) was turned into two separate movements, with the break coming right after the dissonant opening fortissimo brass chords and the pianissimo string chorale that follows. Denève then jumped directly to the “Minuet” (the fourth movement from Suite No. 1), not returning to “Montagues and Capulets” until after the puckish “Masks”  (Suite 1, number V). At that point he picked up at rehearsal number 1, which is a repeat of the same ominous opening followed by the lead-footed Allegro pesante “Dance of the Knights.”

Stéphane Denève conducts the SLSO in
Romeo and Juliet
Photo courtesy of the SLSO

The dramatic impact of that contrast was palpable, as was the radical shift to the “Balcony Scene” immediately afterwards. “Death of Tybalt” was an electrifying exercise in virtuosity by the orchestra and the final death of Juliet had a tragic delicacy that echoed the Prince’s final lines from Shakespeare’s play: “For never was a story of more woe / Than this of Juliet and her Romeo.”

It was all beautifully played and conducted with Denève’s customary attention to detail. At around 40 minutes, it felt more like a symphonic poem based on Prokofiev’s score than a mere collection of excerpts. Nicely done, everyone.

Next from the SLSO: Stéphane Denève conducts the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra and soloist Tom Borrow in the Piano Concerto No. 5 (“Emperor”) by Beethoven, along with the overture to "Béatrice et Bénedict” by Berlioz and the local premiere of “Pretty” by Julia Wolfe. The final performance is Saturday, March 23, at 7:30 pm at the Touhill Performing Arts Center on the UMSL campus. The Saturday concert will be broadcast live on St. Louis Public Radio and Classic 107.3 and will be available for streaming for a limited time afterward at the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra site.

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

Symphony Review: The St. Louis Symphony says 'bon voyage' with a big night of orchestral showpieces

It was a veritable love fest at Powell Hall last Thursday, March 16th. Stéphane Denève professed his love for pianist Víkingur Ólafsson. Ólafsson declared his love for the musicians of the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra and the audience. And the audience demonstrated their love for all of them with multiple standing ovations. To top it off, the opening work on the program was Prokofiev’s “Love for Three Oranges” suite.

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

Denève conducts the SLSO
Photo courtesy of the SLSO

The occasion for this outpouring of affection was a special “bon voyage” concert in which Denève and the band presented the program that they and Ólafsson will be playing on their four-country, five-city European tour March 21 through 31. In addition to the Prokofiev, that program consists of Grieg’s Piano Concerto, Rachmaninoff’s valedictory “Symphonic Dances,” and encores by Bernstein and Bizet. If it goes as well on the tour as it did Thursday night, St. Louis will be well represented on the other side of the Atlantic.
 
Denève said that he chose the suite Prokofiev created from the score for his 1921 opera “The Love for Three Oranges” because it was a showcase for the excellence of the SLSO musicians. He then proved that point with a performance of this wildly colorful score that reflected all its many eccentric moods. The second movement, “Magician Celio and Fata Morgana Play Cards,” was a perfect combination of menace and mock pomposity, with great crashes of sound from the brass and percussion. The fourth movement “Scherzo” was light, fleet, and a striking study in contrasts. And in “The Prince and Princess” (the fifth movement) the voice of the strings was both romantic and uneasy.

Prokofiev composed both the opera and the suite with an American audience in mind, which may be one reason why the music sounds like a cross between a circus and a lunatic asylum. It is, in any case, flashy and entertaining and gave every member of the band a chance to show why the SLSO can be fairly described as an orchestra of virtuosos.

Vikingur Ólafsson plays the Grieg Concerto
Photo courtesy of the SLSO

Up next was Grieg’s enormously popular Piano Concerto. This dependable old warhorse is so well known that you’d think it would be difficult to find anything new in it. But Icelandic pianist Víkingur Ólafsson demonstrated that it can still be done.

When Ólafsson last played the concerto with Denève and the SLSO in 2021 I was struck by the originality and energy of his approach. This was especially true in the first movement cadenza, which was something of a microcosm of the performance as a whole. Both then and this past Thursday, it was a study in extremes, nearly coming to a complete halt before building steadily to the boiling power of the big restatement of the main theme.

Ólafsson was less physically demonstrative than he was when he made his debut here in 2021, but no less artistically and technically solid. The near-capacity house rewarded him with warm applause, and he reciprocated with a subtly beautiful encore: Ólafsson’s own arrangement of the “Ave Maria” by his fellow countryman Sigvaldi Kaldalóns (1881–1946). Those of you keen on hearing it again can find it on Ólafsson’s 2022 album “From Afar” on Spotify.
 
The concert concluded with Rachmaninoff’s “Symphonic Dances,” another large-scale work that also showed off the band to good advantage. Unlike Prokofiev’s frenetic suite, though, this was not a soundscape drenched in bright primary colors. The sonic world of the “Symphonic Dances” is one of encroaching shadows and nocturnal imagery. Not surprisingly, it was the last thing Rachmaninoff wrote.

Denève conducts the SLSO
Photo courtesy of the SLSO

Denève last conducted this in 2019. At the time I felt that he had brought a wide variety of expression to the work, with tempos on the slow side, a feeling of intense emotional commitment, and recognition of the way the composer used silence as a musical element. That was still true this time around, although there were some tweaks here and there. The Non allegro first movement, for example, got off to a brisker start than I recall, but that could just be my memory playing me false.

No matter: it was still a grand performance with important solo moments finely rendered. That includes, among many others, Michael Weiss-Holmes’s melancholy alto sax solo in the first movement and Concertmaster David Halen and English horn Cally Banham in the second. There was some darned fine playing throughout by Peter Henderson on piano, Principal Harp Allegra Lilly, and the flutes under Matthew Roitstein. Congratulations to all.

But, wait: there was more!  The orchestra is bringing along a pair of high-energy encores: the overture to Leonard Bernstein’s 1956 opera/operetta/musical (it has been through multiple revisions over the years) “Candide” and the “Farandole” from Bizet’s incidental music for the play “L'Arlésienne.” The latter, with its insistent percussion and quotes from the Provençal Christmas carol “La Marche des rois,” is always a guaranteed rouser. They both got an enthusiastic reception Thursday night, despite coming as surprises at the end of a long concert.

More information about the SLSO’s upcoming tour is available at the orchestra’s web site, including pictures from Thursday’s concert.

Next at Powell Hall: Powell will be dark while the band is away, except for a concert by bluegrass banjo virtuoso Béla Fleck on Friday March 31 at 7:30 pm. St. Louis Speakers Series presents Anthony Ray Hinton on Tuesday, April 11 at 8 pm. One of the longest-serving death row prisoners in Alabama history, Hinton was released after 30 years of time for a crime he did not commit.

Regular concerts resume in mid-April. Note, however, that the Powell Hall lot will be closed as of March 20th as the renovation and expansion of Powell Hall begins. More information about parking is available at the SLSO web site.

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

Symphony Preview: The Grand Tour

Music Director Stéphane Denève and the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra are off on their annual European concert tour on March 21st. But before they leave, they’re offering a one night only “bon voyage” concert of the music they’ll be playing on the tour on Thursday, March 16, at 7:30 pm.

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

It all starts with the lively and acerbic suite Sergei Prokofiev (1891 – 1953) created in 1924 from the score for his 1921 opera “L'amour des trois oranges” (“The Love for Three Oranges”).  Prokofiev wrote both the music and the libretto for the opera, which was commissioned by the Chicago Opera Association during the composer’s 1918 visit to the USA. He based it on the 1761 commedia dell’arte farce “L'amore delle tre melarance” by Carlo Gozzi (1720 – 1806) which was itself based on the fairy tale of the same name by 16th century Italian poet Giambattista Basile (1583 – 1632).

Prokofiev in New York, 1918
Photo by Bain News Service

“The story,” writes Benjamin Pesetsky in this week’s program notes, “is too silly to dwell on.” He’s right, so we won’t (although Wikipedia has a detailed synopsis for the curious). Let’s just say Prokofiev combined his ancient Italian sources with a jigger or two of sarcasm, a pinch of surrealism, shook the whole thing vigorously and served it over ice to an audience which found it somewhat baffling.

The suite is great fun, though, combining the composer’s quirky sense of humor, inventive orchestration, and rhythmic drive to create a colorful musical circus complete with acrobats, clowns, and strutting sorcerers. The third movement “March” was once quite well-known, having been appropriated as the theme for the CBS radio crime drama “The FBI in Peace and War,” which ran from 1944 through 1958. If you’re curious as to what that sounded like, the GSMC Classics podcast network offers all 88 episodes via Apple Podcasts. And probably via every other podcast platform as well.

Denève last conducted the suite with the band in 2007. Sadly, I missed that concert, so I’m looking forward to this one.

Up next is the popular Piano Concerto in A minor, op. 16, written in 1868 by Edvard Grieg (1843 – 1907). It was his first and only piano concerto. Indeed, it was his only completed concerto of any kind.

The interior of Grieg's hut at Troldhaugen

That’s because Grieg was fundamentally a miniaturist. He was at his best in short forms like his “Lyric Pieces” and other works for the piano. Longer works like his “Symphonic Dances,” the “Lyric Suite,” and his incidental music for Ibsen’s gargantuan drama “Peer Gynt” are, ultimately, little more than a collection of short pieces. It’s what he did, and he did it darned well.

It’s not surprising, then, that his piano concerto tends to sound a bit episodic. The episodes are all entrancing, though, and the concerto was an instant hit at its 1869 Copenhagen premiere by the Royal Danish Orchestra with Edmund Neupert as soloist. Neupert, to whom the concerto was dedicated, wrote to Grieg (who was unable to attend because of a scheduling conflict) describing the happy event:

The triumph I achieved was tremendous. Even as early as the cadenza in the first movement, the public broke into real storm. The three dangerous critics, [composer Niels] Gade, [pianist/composer Anton] Rubenstein, and [composer Emil] Hartmann, sat in the stalls and applauded with all their might. I am to send you greetings from Rubenstein and say that he is astounded to have heard a composition of such genius. (Cited in program notes by Robert C. Bagar and Louis Biancolli for the Philharmonic-Symphony Society of New York).

Our soloist this Thursday (and at every performance on the tour) will be Icelandic pianist Víkingur Ólafsson, who has earned praise for his recordings of everything from Bach to Philip Glass. He was the soloist the last time Denève and the SLSO presented the Grieg concerto in 2021. At the time I wrote that he made “a stunning impression…with a performance that blended nuance and poetry with virtuoso flair.”

Rachmaninoff in 1921
Public Domain, Wikimeida Commons

During the intermission that follows, you’ll have the opportunity to see why taking an orchestra on tour is just a major logistical effort the SLSO production team assembles large cargo trunks in the foyer. Immediately after this concert, large instruments will be packed into trunks and begin their journey to Europe on Friday.

This evening concludes with the "Symphonic Dances" by Sergei Rachmaninoff (1873 – 1943). It’s a work I have found oddly compelling since I first heard it on a 1961 LP recording by the Philadelphia Orchestra under Eugene Ormandy, who conducted the work's first performance in 1941. I was immediately struck by the "late night" feel of the piece--and not just because of the chimes in the last movement. It was only later that I learned that Rachmaninoff had, in fact, originally titled the three sections "Noon," "Twilight," and "Midnight." The composer dropped the titles, preferring the let the music speak for itself, and it does so eloquently.

The work is filled with evidence of Rachmaninoff's genius as an orchestrator, with elaborate and complex string writing, inventive use of brasses and winds (including a short but poignant solo for alto sax), and an effective but never overwhelming use of the large percussion battery. This is dramatic music that is nevertheless steeped in autumnal melancholy. The final movement is a struggle between the “Dies Irae” and the “Resurrection” theme from Rachmaninoff’s 1915 “All-night Vigil” which, while emphatically resolved in favor of the latter, still seems to carry the sense of a life approaching its conclusion.

In the program notes for the SLSOs last performance of the work in 2019, Denève described it as “redeeming--it's a piece of hope. The ending is an Alleluia, a triumph over death. It was his last work, and maybe, because he composed this piece, he felt he could die."

The Essentials: Stéphane Denève conducts the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra and pianist Vikingur Ólafsson in a one-night-only preview of the program they will take on the orchestra's March European tour. The concert consists of Prokofiev's "The Love for Three Oranges" Suite, Grieg's Piano Concerto, and Rachmaninoff's "Symphonic Dances." The concert takes place on  Thursday, March 16, at 7:30 pm. Stephanie Childress will conduct the SLSO Youth Orchestra and Concerto Competition winner Ayan Amerin in the Allegro non troppo from the Violin Concerto in D major by Brahms and the Symphony No. 5 by Shostakovich on Sunday, March 19 at 3 pm. The regular concert season resumes in mid-April.

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

Digital Symphony Review: The SLSO summer digital series concludes with two very varied quintets

Available for on-demand streaming through August 31st, the fifth of five videos in the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra’s digital series presents two quintets by Prokofiev and Mozart. The pair are a study in contrasts, and not just because they were written nearly 250 years apart. They’re also scored for two very different groups of instruments and represent very different moods.

Prokofiev's Quintet

The video opens with Prokofiev’s Quintet in G minor, op. 39. Scored for oboe, clarinet, violin, viola, and double bass, the quintet was written in Paris in 1924. The work was originally intended as the score for “Trapeze,” a circus-themed ballet that was to be performed by a five-member dance troupe of fellow Russian émigrés. The oddball instrumentation was dictated by the instruments the troupe had on hand.

The ballet never happened, but you can hear more than a hint of the Big Top in what Second Associate Concertmaster Celeste Golden, in her spoken introduction to the original live video performance on March 14th 2021, called the “technical acrobatics” of the score.

There are times, especially in the second and fourth movements of this six-movement work, when the music turns wistful, grim, and even a bit creepy, but on the whole the Quintet is all bright lights, greasepaint, and reckless abandon. It’s fun to hear, and fascinating to watch as the performers do, indeed, execute some musical high-wire acts. At one point the camera zooms in on Celeste Golden Boyer’s fingers rapidly dashing up and down the strings; at another you can see Principal Bass Erik Harris working at the extremes of his instrument’s range. Principal Clarinet Scott Andrews, Cally Banham (on oboe rather than her usual English horn), and violist Shannon Farrell Williams provide copious amounts of dazzling moments as well.

The instrumentation of Mozart’s String Quintet No. 4 in g minor, K. 516, was also unusual for its time: two violins, two violas, and one cello. The dominance of the lower and darker voices is a perfect match for the predominantly tragic and even angry mood of the work. It’s fraught with drama and overhung with musical storm clouds that don’t clear until the lengthy adagio introduction of the fourth movement gives way to a sunny, danceable allegro in rondo form.

L-R: Alvin McCall, Jonathan Chu,
Beth Guterman Chu

In her spoken introduction, Assistant Principal Second Violin Eva Kozma describes this as one of her favorite chamber works, and you can both see and hear that in the passion she and Principal Second Violin Alison Harney bring to their performances. Mozart gives the violas prominent roles as well, and the wife and husband team of Principal Viola Beth Guterman Chu and Associate Principal Viola Jonathan Chu fill them admirably. To my eyes and ears, at least, their playing seems to have that extra level of intimacy that can come with living together as well as playing together. Cellist Alvin McCall provides a deep, resonant backbone for the ensemble.

The Prokofiev was broadcast live only once and although it was recorded last February the Mozart Quintet is, as far as I know, being presented here for the first time. So for many of you this will be your only chance to enjoy these excellent performances. Both were recorded in an audience-free Powell Hall, and the long-distance shots of five performers alone in that big auditorium add an extra layer of melancholy to the Mozart.

The St. Louis Symphony’s concert of quintets by Prokofiev and Mozart is available via on-demand video through August 31st. For more information visit the SLSO digital concerts page.

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

Symphony Preview: Three faces of Sergei

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

This weekend (February 15-17) St. Louis Symphony Orchestra Music Director Designate Stéphane Denève concludes his first 2019 appearance with the orchestra with an all-Prokofiev concert series that highlights the many moods of the 20th century Russian master. There will be regular season concerts on Friday and Saturday and a special abbreviated Family Series Concert Sunday afternoon.

Prokofiev in New York, 1918
Photo by Bain News Service

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The regular series concerts will open with a suite assembled by Mr. Denève from the score for Prokofiev's 1945 ballet "Cinderella." It's music that finds the composer in a playful and romantic mood--remarkable, given that it was begun in the depths of World War II and that the composer's wife had just left him.

SLSO program annotator Tim Munro says that Prokofiev "escaped into a fairy tale" by writing the score for this faithful adaptation of Perrault's classic. But Mr. Denève, in his own remarks in the program, points out that Prokofiev was "like Mozart, a man who reveals the child he continued to be. He has a sense of enchantment, a way of building music as if it were made of simple cubes." So perhaps it didn't necessarily take external stress to move him in that direction.

The score for "Cinderella" is, in any case, about as much fun as you can legally have in public. The thirteen numbers Mr. Denève has selected don't include many of the more whimsical and comic moments--although he has included "The Shawl Dance" in which Cinderella's two awful stepsisters fight absurdly over a scarf. His suite also contains some of my favorite bits, such as the romantic "Grand Waltz" in which Cinderella and the Prince fall in love, and "Midnight," in which the clock ticks away in the percussion section and each toll of the fateful midnight bell is met with increasingly ominous growls in the low brass and piano.

The "Cinderella" suite is the only thing on the Family Series concert, but the Friday and Saturday night concerts follow it up with the Piano Concerto No. 2. Unlike the "Cinderella" suite, the concerto is dark, sardonic, and aggressive. Which seems only fair, as its genesis involved both death--literal as well as musical--and resurrection.

The literal death was that of the composer's close friend, the pianist Maximilian Schmidt, just a few months before the concerto's first performance. As Alexander Carpenter writes at allmusic.com, "Schmidt committed suicide in 1913, and left a note to Prokofiev that read, in part, 'I am reporting the latest news to you. I have shot myself. Don't grieve overmuch. The reasons were not important.'" The musical death was that of the original score for the concerto, which was lost in a fire in Prokofiev's St. Petersburg apartment shortly after the work's premiere.

The resurrection took place in 1923, when Prokofiev completely re-wrote the concerto from memory. By then, however, his approach to composition and orchestration had changed significantly and he had written another concerto (his Third, in C major). "I have so completely rewritten the Second Concerto," he wrote to a friend "that it might be considered the Fourth."

The concerto is, in any case, a testament to Prokofiev's skill at the keyboard. It's a wildly difficult piece, with four movements in which the tempo never falls below Allegro and a stunningly challenging first movement cadenza that, at around five minutes, takes up almost as much time as the rest of the movement. "A decade ago," wrote David Nice in a review of a new recording of the concerto for BBC Music Magazine, "I'd have bet you there were only a dozen pianists in the world who could play Prokofiev's Second Piano Concerto properly. [Martha] Argerich wouldn't touch it, [Evgeny] Kissin delayed learning it, and even Prokofiev as virtuoso had got into a terrible mess trying to perform it with [Ernest] Ansermet and the BBC Symphony Orchestra in the 1930s, when it had gone out of his fingers."

I'm reminded by Balakirev's infamous "Islamey," a work so formidable that, in the end, even the composer couldn't play it. We should expect no such problems this weekend, though, as the soloist will be the justifiably celebrated Russian-born Yefim Bronfman, whose prodigious technique should be more than up to the task. He gave us a first-rate Beethoven Concerto No. 3 in 2016, for example, and a Tchaikovsky Concerto No. 1 in 2011 that practically danced across the stage.

He also recorded a pretty impressive "Islamey" back in 1998.

Teutonic knights take over Pskov in
Alexander Nevsky

Closing the concerts will be the 1939 cantata "Alexander Nevsky." Based on the score Prokofiev wrote for Sergei Eisenstein's 1938 film of the same name, the work placed the composer, who had just returned to Russia to live, at the top of the People's Composer list and therefore at the bottom of the Bourgeois Formalists Headed for a Gulag list. "When you arrive in the U.S.S.R. from abroad," Prokofiev wrote at the time, "you feel something completely different. Here, dramatic works are needed, and there is no doubt what subject they should address: the subject must be heroic and constructive (it must be creative, not destructive). This is what our era demands." (Cited in "Red Zone: Sergey Prokofiev and the Soviet Union," a Playbill article by Eddie Silva).

If you have ever seen the film, you will undoubtedly remember its vivid images of the ominous, armored Teutonic Knights, which have always struck me as evocative of Nazi Germany's massive Panzer tank divisions. Relations between Russia and Germany were, to put it mildly, strained at the time, so both the film's anti-German message and anti-clerical sentiment played well with Communist officialdom. The great thing about both the film and Prokofiev's music, though, is the way they reached beyond simple agitprop to create real art. It's a thrilling and captivating score.

The St. Louis Symphony Orchestra and Chorus have performed "Alexander Nevsky" numerous times, both alone and as part of a showing of the film. They even recorded it in 1979 under Leonard Slatkin (when the chorus was directed by Thomas Peck), with Claudine Carlson as the mezzo-soprano soloist. The recording is still available in SACD format and worth having in your collection.

The Essentials: Stéphane Denève conducts the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra and Chorus, along with pianist Yefim Bronfman and mezzo-soprano Dolora Zajick (a change from the originally scheduled Clémentine Margaine), Friday and Saturday at 8 pm, February 15 and 16. The all-Prokofiev program consists of a suite from the ballet "Cinderella," the Piano Concerto No. 2, and the cantata "Alexander Nevsky." Mr. Denève also conducts the orchestra in the "Cinderella" suite in a Family Concert on Sunday at 3 pm, February 17. The concerts take place at Powell Symphony Hall, 718 North Grand in Grand Center.

Concert Review: A dramatic Russian program with Gilbert Varga and the St. Louis Symphony, March 5 and 6, 2016

Gilbert Varga
Photo: Felix Broede

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Those of you Of a Certain Age may recall an ad campaign by Esso Oil (now Exxon Mobil) that promised to "put a tiger in your tank." St. Louis Symphony guest conductor Gilbert Varga had a tiger in his baton Saturday night, and the roaring was most impressive.

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

The concert got off to an electrifying start with a thrilling performance of Tchaikovsky's "Hamlet, Fantasy Overture after Shakespeare," Op. 67. Written only a few years before the composer's death, the work shows the obsession with fate that permeates both his "Symphony No. 4" from 1878 and his "Symphony No. 5," which first saw the light of day in the same year as "Hamlet". It's powerful music with a strong sense of impending doom.

Working without a score, Mr. Varga used slashing, dramatic gestures in the service of a compelling interpretation that brought out every bit of the composer's high drama without sacrificing clarity or descending into exaggeration. The opening "fate" motif was arresting, the appearance of the ghost alarming, and the sad little oboe melody that represents Ophelia (beautifully played by Phil Ross) was truly poignant. It was a vivid and breathtaking performance, skillfully played.

The same can be said of the Shostakovich "Piano Concerto No. 2 in F major," Op. 102, that followed. Written for the composer's son Maxim and first performed by Maxim on his 19th birthday, the concerto is an unambiguously (and uncharacteristically) happy work. Soloist Denis Kozhukhin handled the exuberant and fiercely difficult passages in the outer movements with ease and style while playing the charming and unabashedly sentimental second movement with sensitivity.

Denis Kozhukhin

Mr. Kozhukhin is one of those "heads down" pianists who maintain a laser-like focus on the keyboard while playing, but that clearly did not prevent him from being attentive to what was happening in the orchestra. Critics have praised this young (born in 1986) Russian pianist for his balance of technique and interpretive depth, and based on what I saw and heard Saturday night I'd have to agree.

The concert concluded with selections from Prokofiev's 1936 "Romeo and Juliet" ballet. Culled from the two orchestral suites the composer put together around the same time as the ballet's premiere, the seven selections capture the dramatic arc of Shakespeare's play in a little over a half hour of colorful and varied music that demonstrates Prokofiev's skill as an orchestrator.

As he did with the Tchaikovsky, Mr. Varga delivered, from memory, a high-octane interpretation filled with grand gestures, strong contrasts, and a fine feel for the many wonderful orchestral details, which were performed flawlessly by members of the orchestra. Scott Andrews's clarinet, Danny Lee's cello, and Nathan Nabb's tenor sax, for example, all contributed to the delicate beauty of "Juliet—The Young Girl."

The emotionally potent "Romeo and Juliet before Parting" gave us more striking individual performances from Mark Sparks and Jennifer Nichtman on flutes, Jonathan Chu on viola, and, towards the end, Michael Sanders on tuba and Erik Harris's bass section with their premonition of the tragedy to come. Roger Kaza's horn section sounded terrific in the big, sweeping passages in the middle of that same movement.

If you think that sounds like a true virtuoso performance, you're right. There were many other arresting moments, including Concertmaster David Halen's delicate solo in the "Dance of the Maids from the Antilles," but the bottom line is that this was another demonstration of the depth the orchestra's talent pool.

Mr. Varga has made several appearances with the orchestra since I've started covering it regularly, and he seems to have real rapport with the musicians. It's not unusual for a conductor to wade into the orchestra and ask individual players to stand during curtain calls, but Mr. Varga did so with real enthusiasm, even stopping to kiss the occasional cheek and otherwise display affection for the players. Witnessing that, it's impossible not to smile.

Next at Powell Hall, Leonard Slatkin conducts the orchestra and chorus in Berlioz's "dramatic symphony" "Roméo et Juliette" Friday and Saturday at 8 p.m., March 11 and 12. The program concludes the Symphony's four-week Shakespeare Festival. Performances take place at Powell Symphony Hall, 718 North Grand. For more information, visit the symphony web site.

Symphony Preview, March 5 and 6, 2016: More clouds of gray than any Russian play could guarantee

This weekend Gilbert Varga conducts the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra in the third of their four Shakespeare Festival programs with a concert that's around 70% Shakespeare and 100% Russian. Which isn't as unusual as you might think.

Portrait of Tchaikovsky by Nikolai Kuznetsov
en.wikipedia.org

As I noted a couple weeks ago, the Bard of Avon has inspired quite a lot of music over the centuries, much of it by composers who knew his works only in translation and in some cases (Ambroise Thomas's operatic treatment of "Hamlet" comes immediately to mind) only in fairly free adaptations by other writers. But no matter how far removed they were from the original plays, many of history's greatest composers have found themselves fascinated by Shakespeare's characters and themes.

The great Russian composers were no exception. Tchaikovsky found inspiration in the Bard for one of his Greatest Hits, the "Romeo and Juliet Fantas-Overture," as well as for his less well known overtures "The Tempest" and this weekend's opener, "Hamlet."

For Tchaikovsky, the dominant theme of "Hamlet" was the implacable hand of fate. "There's a divinity that shapes our ends," observes Hamlet in Act V, "Rough-hew them how we will." First performed in 1888, Tchaikovsy's "Hamlet" overture is a late work (the composer died in 1893) and shows the obsession with fate that permeates both his "Symphony No. 4" from 1878 and his "Symphony No. 5," which first saw the light of day in the same year as "Hamlet".

The "fate" theme shows up in the opening lento lugubre in the violas and cellos, announced by a portentous roll of the tympani. Hamlet broods in the strings until muted horns strike midnight and the ghost appears amid brass and percussion. Ophelia shows up briefly as a sad little melody for the oboe about of third of the way in, but overall the mood is one of high drama and tragedy until (to quote critic Herbert Glass), "the piece ends in the F-minor gloom of its misty beginnings."

"Hamlet" was originally intended to be part of a complete set of incidental music for a French-language production of the play that the actor/impresario Lucien Guitry was preparing for a tour. That project fell through, and by the time Guitry asked Tchaikovsky to revive it in 1891 (this time for a farewell performance at the Mikhaylovsky Theatre in Saint Petersburg) the composer was suffering from exhaustion and other health problems. He recycled a shortened version of the concert overture as the curtain raiser for the play and cobbled together a mix of old and new material for the other 16 numbers. However, he reportedly didn't think much of the results, and the complete score is rarely heard, although you can find it on CD.

Maxim Shostakovich
By Koch, Eric / Anefo - Dutch National Archives,
The Hague, Fotocollectie Algemeen Nederlands
Persbureau, 1945-1989
en.wikipedia.org

This weekend's non-Shakespeare piece, Shostakovich's "Piano Concerto No. 2" is considerably brighter in its outlook. The product of a short-lived thaw in artistic repression the USSR in 1957, the concerto is an unambiguously (and uncharacteristically) happy work. Written for the composer's son Maxim and first performed by Maxim on his 19th birthday, the piece zips through three short movements in around 20 minutes, concluding with a slightly satirical nod to the Hanon finger exercises that Maxim undoubtedly knew well from his years at the Moscow Conservatory. It is, in short, an irresistible work.

The soloist for the concerto will be the young (born in 1986) Russian pianist Denis Kozhukhin, whose star began rising when he claimed First Prize in the 2010 Queen Elisabeth Competition in Brussels at the age of 23. A month later, the New York Times critic Anthony Tommasini praised his "accomplished performance" of Schumann's challenging "Symphonic Études" in a solo recital, and other critics have been similarly impressed. "Kozhukhin possesses an impeccable technique," wrote Lawrence Bumden for the Miami Herald in 2010. "He can play with total accuracy at extreme speeds and tricky passages seem to bring out extra dynamism in his performances. Kozhukhin matches his remarkable technical arsenal with acute musicianship and interpretive depth." This will be his debut appearance with the SLSO, so I look forward to seeing what he and Mr. Varga do with the piece.

The main event this weekend is a suite from Prokofiev's score for the ballet "Romeo and Juliet," first performed in 1938. It's among his most popular compositions, but Prokofiev paid a price for it that's almost as tragic as the story it tells.

Lured back from Paris to Leningrad in 1934 with promises of lucrative commissions and a relatively free hand in composing the ballet for the Bolshoi Theatre, he soon discovered that the hand of ideologically motivated censorship was as heavy as that of fate in "Hamlet." As Princeton University scholar Simon Morrison (author of The People's Artist: Prokofiev's Soviet Years) noted in a paper at a Columbia University symposium:

Prokofiev suffered more than his share of disappointments in his career, and upon relocating from Paris to Moscow in 1936, had more than his share of unpleasant encounters with cultural officials. He adapted to the constraints imposed on him by the Stalinist regime as best he could. His talent overcame—even benefited from—outside control, a phenomenon that undermines the Western musicological assumption that Soviet artists were passive victims of brutal, crude, and rigid politics. Yet from the start, Romeo and Juliet had a particularly hard time of it, enduring second-guessing, reworking, and censorship. In his final years, Prokofiev was able to take pride in its success, but he spent many years resenting the changes that had been imposed on it to the ending, the dramatic structure of the first and second acts, the relationship between solo and ensemble numbers, and the orchestration.

Prokofiev in 1918
en.wikipedia.org

And it wasn't just the music that suffered. As Linda B. Glaser writes in the March 21, 2011, Cornell Chronicle, "the bureaucrat who commissioned 'Romeo and Juliet' was executed, as was the Central Committee flunky who approved the ballet's original happy ending. Even the scenarist who inspired Prokofiev to write the ballet ended up dead. Authorities exiled Prokofiev's first wife to the Gulag, and in 1938 confiscated Prokofiev's passport, determining that he needed 'ideological correctin' for too much Western influence."

None of this takes away from the greatness of the music you'll hear this weekend, but it does illustrate how difficult it can be to hold on to artistic integrity (or even basic human dignity) in the face of implacable autocracy. It's something we should perhaps bear in mind during the current round of national elections.

Gilbert Varga conducts the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra and piano soloist Denis Kozhukhin in music by Tchaikovsky, Prokofiev, and Shostakovich Saturday at 8 p.m. and Sunday at 3 p.m. March 5 and 6. The program also includes Tchaikovsky's tone poem Hamlet. Performances take place at Powell Symphony Hall, 718 North Grand. For more information: stlsymphony.org.

Symphony Review: Variety is the spice of the St. Louis Symphony's Thanksgiving weekend

Variety was the order of the day Friday night as the St. Louis Symphony livened up the Thanksgiving weekend with classical favorites by Prokofiev and the local premiere of a new contrabass concerto by Chinese composer Tan Dun in a stunning performance by SLSO Principal Double Bass Erik Harris.

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

Erik Harris

Tan Dun is probably best known here in the USA for his film and multimedia work—most notably his score for "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon" in 2000—but his musical interests are wide-ranging and heavily weighted toward the theatrical. Some of his earliest works were written for the stage and even his concert pieces often have extra-musical reference points.

In the case of his "Contrabass Concerto: The Wolf" the inspiration was the Chinese novel "Wolf Totem" by Jiang Rong. According to the composer's web site the novel "resonated deeply with Tan Dun’s personal connection and fascination with the spirits of the natural world and the sounds and customs of the ancient cultures along the Silk Road. The symbol of the Mongolian wolf and its life in the grasslands for Tan Dun is a mirror of the human spirit and our relationship to the natural world."

The concerto starts mysteriously with high harmonics in the basses and soft tones from Tibetan singing bowls suggesting a vast, empty landscape. That Largo melancholia introduction soon gives way to an Allegro depicting (to quote the web site again) "the running of the wolves and wild horses across the Mongolian grasslands." An elegiac Andante molto second movement suggests "the loneliness of a young wolf missing its mother; missing the sky and grasslands of its home" while the final Allegro vivace "returns us to the scene of the running horses, heard in the galloping rhythms of the orchestra while the soloist alternates between the lyrical and percussive capabilities of the instrument."

It's all very dramatic—I might even say cinematic—as well as tremendously appealing. As Mr. Harris points out in an interesting video interview with Mr. Robertson that's shown during the stage change preceding the concerto, it also poses some stiff challenges for the soloist, with lots of rapid passages and extended sections calling for bowing and fingering techniques more typical of the Chinese erhu. Mr. Harris, I'm happy to report, appeared to have completely embraced those challenges, delivering a performance that combined impressive technique with artistic sensitivity. Spontaneous applause broke out after the exhilarating first movement and the entire piece got a standing ovation.

Preceding the concerto is Prokofiev's "Symphony No. 1 in D major," op. 25, ("Classical"). One of the composer's most popular works, it takes classical style and gives it a distinctly 20th-century twist, with harmonies and key changes that would probably have astonished Haydn or Mozart. It relies heavily on the strings (especially the violins) to produce an exceptionally light and transparent sound, and the SLSO players did quite well by it. The violins sounded a bit more astringent than they usually do, which worked quite well for this music.

Mr. Robertson, for his part, brought out a wealth of orchestral detail in a superbly balanced and subtly shaded performance. As often as I've heard this music, there were still facets of the score that came through here in ways that I hadn't noticed in the past.

Lara Teeter

The second half of this weekend's concerts opens with a short suite from Rimsky-Korsakov's 1882 opera "The Snow Maiden". The piece is a real rarity—the SLSO hasn't performed it since 1926. Which is rather a shame as it's filled with some vivid music, colorfully evoking the fairy tale world of the opera. The "Dance of the Birds," with its inventive writing for the woodwinds, was especially delightful, especially when played with the kind of precision I heard Friday. Mr. Robertson and his forces brought out all the loopy comedy of the "Coretge," and the concluding "Dance of the Tumblers"—undoubtedly the best-known piece from the opera—was fittingly energetic.

The concerts conclude with another of Prokofiev's greatest hits, the 1936 children's story for narrator and orchestra, "Peter and the Wolf," about a brave lad who outsmarts a nasty predator. The SLSO has taken a variety of approaches to this piece in the past, but this one was perhaps the most remarkable in that it used fanciful watercolor-inspired animation and not one but two narrators: Webster Conservatory acting student Annie Barbour and Webster faculty member Lara Teeter.

A familiar figure from both the local and Broadway stages, Mr. Teeter handled the bulk of the narration in a slightly arch and humorous style, while Ms. Barbour was a bit more straightforward. I thought it worked quite well, especially in combination with Natalie Arco's charming animation, but I'm not sure splitting up the narration added anything much. The orchestral playing was excellent, in any case, with fine work by Principal Clarinet Scott Andrews as the cat, Associate Principal Flute Andrea Kaplan as the bird, and Principal Oboe Jelena Dirks as the unfortunate duck who gets swallowed whole by the wolf.

Next at Powell Hall, Bernard Labadie conducts the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra and Chorus, with soloists Lydia Teuscher, soprano; Allyson McHardy, mezzo-soprano; Jeremy Ovenden, tenor; and Philippe Sly, bass-baritone, in Handel's "Messiah." Performances are Thursday through Saturday at 8 p.m. and Sunday at 3 p.m., December 3-6. For more information: stlsymphony.org

Symphony Preview: The St. Louis Symphony cries "wolf" twice the weekend of November 27, 2015

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David Robertson and the St. Louis Symphony have a heavily lupine program for you this weekend, with Prokofiev's musical fairy tale "Peter and the Wolf" (in a collaboration with Webster University) as well as Tan Dun's new contrabass concerto, subtitled "The Wolf." There's also music from "The Snow Maiden," a fairy tale opera by Rimsky-Korsakov, along with one of Prokofiev's most popular pieces, "Symphony No. 1," Op. 25 ("Classical").

Prokofiev in New York, 1918
en.wikipedia.org

The "Classical" symphony, which opens the program, came about in part as a reaction by the composer to his growing reputation as an aggressive modernist—said reputation springing from his spiky "Piano Concerto No. 2" and his electrifying "Scythian Suite". He also felt that he was becoming too dependent on the piano as a compositional medium. So in 1917, with the socialist revolution exploding around him, he retreated, sans piano, to a village outside of St. Petersburg and completed the symphony he had begun the previous year.

"I had been playing with the idea of writing a whole symphony without the piano," wrote Prokofiev in his autobiography, "thinking that such a piece would have more natural and transparent colours. So that is how the project for a symphony in the style of Haydn came about. I had come to understand a great deal about Haydn's technique from Tcherepnin [his teacher at the St Petersburg Conservatory] and thought it would be less scary to embark on this piano-less journey if I were on familiar stylistic ground."

The result is a work that takes classical style and gives it a distinctly 20th-century sound. It will also give our orchestra's string section something of a workout as it demands a lot from them, with rapid passages in the first movement and a high soft entry in the second, and generally requires players that can handle the lightness and transparency of the orchestration.

The Tan Dun concerto is next. A joint commission among the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra Amsterdam, Royal Liverpool Philharmonic, Taiwan Philharmonic (NSO), the Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra, and our own SLSO, the concerto, according to the composer's web site, "richly gives voice to both the velvety expressive sound and also the virtuosic propulsive percussive abilities of the contrabass."

"At the time when Tan Dun began conceptualizing this concerto," the site continues, "he had recently finished reading the Chinese novel "Wolf Totem" by Jiang Rong...The symbol of the Mongolian wolf and its life in the grasslands for Tan Dun is a mirror of the human spirit and our relationship to the natural world."

For a more detailed description of the music along with some interesting background video, check out Tan Dun's site. His description of the unorthodox fingering techniques required for the music—based on the styles of ancient Mongolian Horse Fiddle playing—suggest that this piece will be a real challenge for the soloist, SLSO Principal Bass Erik Harris.

Rimsky-Korsakov in 1892
Painting by Ilya Repin

The second half of the concert kicks off with a suite from Rimsky-Korsakov's 1882 opera "The Snow Maiden". Based on Alexander Ostrovsky's 1873 play of the same name, the opera's basic plot is a familiar one about a supernatural creature—the Snow Maiden of the title—who falls in love with a mortal. If you know your Hans Christian Andersen, you know that can't end well—and it doesn't. The story is told with a sophisticated score that includes the Wagnerian technique of assigning different melodies (leitmotifs) to individual characters as part of the dramatic structure. You'll hear a number of them in the colorful suite's four movements.

The concerts conclude with Prokofiev's 1936 children's story for narrator and orchestra, "Peter and the Wolf," about a brave lad who outsmarts a wolf. This is a piece I first encountered as a child, in the 1946 animated version by Walt Disney with the gravel-voiced Sterling Holloway as the narrator. It changes the story a bit but generally sticks fairly close to the composer's original scenario.

"Peter and the Wolf" has been popular with the symphony lately. The most recent performance, for example, was this past February with Resident Conductor Steven Jarvi. In 2009 the SLSO performed a semi-staged production with former Resident Conductor Ward Stare at the podium and several local actors (including yours truly) playing the narrator, Peter, the wolf, and Peter's animal friends. This time around the orchestra is using a creative team from Webster University that includes acting student Annie Barbour and Webster faculty member (and well-known local singer/actor) Lara Teeter as the narrators. There will also be video projections, so expect a multi-media experience.

The essentials: David Robertson conducts the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra, with double bassist Erik Harris, on Friday and Saturday at 8 p.m. and Sunday at 3 p.m., 27-29. The concerts take place at Powell Symphony Hall, 718 North Grand in Grand Center. For more information: stlsymphony.org.

The St. Louis classical calendar for the week of November 21, 2015

Erik Harris

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David Robertson conducts the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra, with double bassist Erik Harris, on Friday and Saturday at 8 p.m. and Sunday at 3 p.m., 27-29. The program features Prokofiev's Peter and the Wolf as well as the US premiere of Tan Dun's Contrabass Concerto: The Wolf. The concerts take place at Powell Symphony Hall, 718 North Grand in Grand Center. For more information: stlsymphony.org.

The Tavern of Fine Arts presents Ryan Bolinger, piano and Megan Moran, soprano in an evening of classical piano and voice on Saturday, November 28, at 8 p.m. The Tavern of Fine Arts is at 313 Belt in the Debaliviere Place neighborhood. For more information: tavern-of-fine-arts.blogspot.com.

Symphony Preview: Old friends and new

David Robertson

It’s a mix of the first run and the familiar this weekend at Powell Hall, with music of the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries.

The most familiar thing on the program is Sibelius’s 1895 tone poem “The Swan of Tuonela.” A tone poem, for those of you who have never gone through a “music depreciation” class, is an orchestral work that describes and/or is inspired by something non-musical. In this case, the inspiration comes from the Finnish national epic “The Kalevala”—specifically, its description of the island of Tuonela, where the spirits dead reside. The island is surrounded by a black river, on which a lone swan floats and sings a mournful song. The music is vividly descriptive, which is why it’s a favorite of those same music depreciation classes.

Sibelius assigns the swan’s song to the English horn, a relative of the oboe with with a darker and richer sound (it’s pitched a fifth lower) that is a perfect match for the music’s imagery. Cally Banham, who holds the Solo English Horn chair with the orchestra, will be the soloist. She has done fine work with the orchestra over the last several years, so expect good things from her this weekend.

The English horn is, amusingly, neither English nor a horn (it’s a member of the woodwind family). When I was a kid, the story (since discredited) was that the the name came from a mistranslation of the Middle French phrase, cor anglé (“angled horn,” referring to the fact that the mouthpiece is at a slight angle to the body of the instrument). Current thinking is that it actually goes back to the old German word for the instrument’s ancestor (the oboe da caccia) which was know as an “engellisches” (“angelic”) horn because of its resemblance to horns played by angels in Medieval paintings. Its sound, in any case, is unmistakable.

The first run this week is “My Father Knew Charles Ives,” composed in 2003 by John Adams, whose work is often performed by the SLSO. The title is not literally true. While the elder Adams was a musician—he taught his son to play the clarinet and the two played together in local bands—he never actually met the famously craggy composer/businessman.

He did, however, share Ives’s eclectic musical sensibility. As Paul Schiavo relates in his program notes, Adams “credits his father with introducing him to both classical and popular music without prejudicial favoring of one over the other.” He goes on to note that, according to Adams, “the two men had experiences and interests in common, and the composer imagines that they would have liked each other.”

“My Father Knew Charles Ives” is, in short, a tribute both to the elder Adams and to Ives. Laid out in three movements and running just under a half hour, the work (as described in Mr. Schiavo’s notes) seems very much like the kind of thing Ives himself might have written. The first movement, “Concord,” is a musical picture of the New Hampshire town where Adams grew up and which inspired some of Ives’s most notable music. The second, “The Lake,” “conveys the lulling movement of water and a poetic spirit in the form of a melody for oboe. From across the lake comes the sound of dance music, the indistinct bits of melody blending with the watery sonorities” (Ives does something similar in his “Three Places in New England,” especially in the “Putnam’s Camp” and “Housatonic at Stockbridge” movements).

The last section, “The Mountain,” “was inspired by boyhood memories of Mount Kearsarge, in New Hampshire, but also by more recent experiences hiking in California’s high country.” It ends with what Adams calls “a moment of sudden, unexpected astonishment” as the climber sees the view for the top.

The concerts conclude with Prokofiev's 1944 Symphony No. 5, last seen on the Powell Hall stage in November of 2010 in what I called a “highly charged” and “triumphant” performance by conductor emeritus Leonard Slatkin (his 1985 recording with the SLSO is still available on line at archivmusic.com). Composed at the artists' colony of Ivanovo east of Moscow just as the war with Germany was turning in Russia's favor, the symphony was described by Prokofiev as "a hymn to free and happy Man, to his mighty powers, his pure and noble spirit" and while there is certainly an air of triumph, especially in the majestic opening theme, it has always seemed to me that the war was never far from the composer's mind. You can hear it in (among other places) the militant percussion of the first movement and the anguished climax of the third.

The aura of triumph is also leavened by Prokofiev's characteristic irony. The composer of the Sarcasms for piano always seems to have a raised eyebrow or cynical smile behind his most demonstrative music. In the 5th symphony sarcasm takes various forms, including caustic comments from the brass and percussion and the deliberate interruption of the boisterous Allegro giocoso finale by a short, dissonant passage for string quartet and trumpet.

The essentials: David Robertson conducts the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra and oboe soloist Cally Banham in Sibelius's "Swan of Tuonela," John Adams's "My Father Knew Charles Ives," and Prokofiev's "Symphony No. 5" Saturday at 8 p.m. and Sunday at 3 p.m., September 27 and 28. The Saturday concert will be broadcast on St. Louis Public Radio, 90.7 FM, HD 1, and on the station web site. The concerts take place at Powell Symphony Hall, 718 North Grand in Grand Center. For more information: stlsymphony.org.

A snowbound symphony

As I sat here contemplating snowpocalypse 2014, I started putting together a mental list of classical works that would make for appropriate listening for the snowbound.  I don't claim that this is exhaustive—it's just what I was able to come up with off the top of my head—but it does look nicely balanced to me.  Feel free to leave a comment with your own suggestions.

[ADDED 22 December 2022] Don't have all these handy? Never fear: here's a free Spotify playlist.

The list is in alphabetical order by composer.

Leroy Anderson

Leroy Anderson: Sleigh Ride – This cheerful orchestral depiction of a sleigh ride—complete with whip cracks and a derisive whinny from the horse performed by solo trumpet at the end—is probably the best-known piece in the list.  Ironically, Anderson got the idea during a heat wave in 1946. It was published in 1948, first recorded by Arthur Fielder and the Boston Pops in 1949, and had lyrics grafted on to it in 1950 by Mitchell Parish.  Anderson's own recording (on Decca) hit the Cashbox best sellers chart in 1950.

Debussy: Des pas sur la neige (Footprints in the Snow) – There's a wintry solitude to this music, with its fragmented melody and suggestion of a slow procession through the landscape.  It's from the composer's first book of "Preludes" from 1910.

Debussy: The Snow is Dancing – At the other end of the spectrum is this fanciful miniature from the "Children's Corner Suite" from 1908.  Unlike most of Debussy's music, the titles are all in English—probably a nod to the English governess of Debussy's daughter Claude-Emma, to whom the suite is dedicated.  The music wasn't meant to be performed by children—some of it is pretty challenging—but rather to reflect the world of childhood.

Frederick Delius

Frederick Delius: Sleigh Ride – Written at the request of the great Norwegian musical miniaturist Edvard Grieg for an 1887 Christmas party, this piece was orchestrated by Delius in 1890 and prefaced with this description: "On Christmas Even I stood in the open air.  The moon shone bright over a billowing landscape.  The sound of an approaching sleigh was heard from a distance, but it soon rushed by and disappeared.  And then gradually it was once more still and bright and peaceful."  The opening with sleigh bells and a perky melody on the flute is really pretty irresistible.

Liszt: Transcendental Etude No. 12, Chasse-neige (Snow storm) – Liszt's twelve "Transcendental Etudes" (Études d'exécution transcendante) are the Mt. Everest of piano music.  Originally published in 1837, the pieces were revised to make them less absurdly difficult to play in 1852, but even so they present technical challenges that separate the virtuosi from the run of the mill players.  This musical storm begins softly and relentlessly builds to a massive blizzard of notes.

Leopold Mozart: A Musical Sleigh Ride – We don't think much about Wolfgang Mozart's dad these days, but he had a fairly substantial career as a musician and composer.  Many of his works have been lost over the centuries but a few—like this charming miniature and his "Cassation in G for Orchestra and Toys" (a.k.a. the "Toy Symphony")—are still performed now and then.  Leopold Mozart loved using non-traditional sounds in his pieces, including bagpipes, whistles, and even (in anticipation of Spike Jones) pistol shots.

Wolfgang Mozart: German Dance No. 3, K. 605 (Sleigh Ride) – The younger Mozart's sleigh ride is a lilting dance in three-quarter time complete with tuned sleigh bells and an ingratiating posthorn solo.

A scene from Lieutenant Kijé

Prokofiev: Troika – This depiction of a ride in a traditional Russian three-horse sleigh comes from music written for the satirical 1933 film "Lieutenant Kijé," about a non-existent soldier created by a clerical error and kept "alive" by bureaucrats afraid of the Czar's wrath, should the mistake be discovered.  It's easily the most popular piece from the score and has been appropriated by a number of rock/pop stars including Greg Lake ("I Believe in Father Christmas") and Helen Love ("Happiest Time of the Year").

Strauss: An Alpine Symphony – Completed in 1915, this mammoth tone poem (it runs close to an hour) depicts and Alpine ascent and descent, complete with a trek across a glacier and a thunderstorm.  Strauss loved the mountains.  He built a villa for himself in the Bavarian Alps and often vacationed in Alpine regions.  That affection clearly shows in this music.

Tchaikovsky: Symphony No. 1 ("Winter Dreams") – First performed in 1868, Tchaikovsky's first attempt at a symphony had a rough time being born.  It took nearly a year to compose and received a fair amount of unflattering criticism along the composer's former teachers.  The structure is a bit clunky in places, but the first movement (subtitled "Dreams of a Winter Journey") is so powerfully evocative of a haunted journey through a frigid landscape that I, for one, am inclined to overlook the work's flaws.

Artists of The Royal Ballet in The Nutcracker
Photograph © ROH/Johan Persson

Tchaikovsky: Waltz of the Snowflakes – This final number from the first act of the "Nutcracker" ballet also depicts a wintry sojourn, but a much cheerier one than the "Winter Dreams" symphony.  The Nutcracker Prince has just defeated the Mouse King and, as a snowstorm rises, he and Clara are transported to the Kingdom of Sweets.  The addition of a wordless children's chorus in the final bars adds a lovely touch of whimsy.

Ralph Vaughan Williams: Sinfonia Antartica (Symphony No. 7) – Adapted from the music Vaughan Williams wrote for the 1947 film “Scott of the Antarctic,” the “Sinfonia Antartica” is pure symphonic wind chill.  Its five movements leave an indelible impression of the forbidding landscape and tragic end of Scott’s ill-fated expedition.  In the score, each movement is preceded by a literary quotation.  Vaughan Williams didn’t explicitly say that they should be read as part of the performance, but when they are (as in the Andre Previn/London Symphony recording from many years ago) the theatrical effect can’t be denied.

Vivaldi: Winter (from "The Four Seasons") – This is easily one of the most vivid bits of tone painting you'll find anywhere, with snowstorms, icy winds, and quiet evenings by the first all colorfully captured.

That's my quick list.  I limited myself to orchestral pieces, so Schubert's 1828 "Winterreise"  ("Winter Journey") song cycle has been left out in the cold, so to speak, along with (probably) many others.  I also rejected Arnold Bax's "November Woods" on the premise that he was thinking more autumnal than wintry.  What would you add to the list?  Let me know.