Symphony Review: Denève brings Florence Price's masterpiece to St. Louis

Last Friday night (February 2)  Stéphane Denève conducted the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra (SLSO) and violin soloist Augustin Hadelich in music by Valerie Coleman (b. 1970), Samuel Barber (1910–1981), and Florence Price (1887–1953). It was a truly memorable concert and a demonstration of the strength that comes from diversity, consisting of works by two black women and a gay man.

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

The concert opened with a glorious performance of Coleman's 2019 "Umoja: Anthem of Unity." Originally a short piece for female choir titled simply “Umoja” (the Swahili word for “unity” and the first of the Seven Principles of Kwanzaa) this little musical acorn has now grown into a brilliantly orchestrated oak of a tone poem. It begins with the modest, Celtic-sounding main theme played softly by flute and violin (nicely done by Principal Flute Matthew Roitstein and Associate Concert Master Erin Schreiber) over the otherworldly sounds of bowed percussion (marimba, xylophone, and the like adeptly played by Will James, Alan Stewart, and Kevin Ritenauer). Over the next fifteen minutes or so it goes through a series of variations until building to a triumphant call for unity in the brass and percussion before returning to the quiet serenity of the opening.

L-R: Augustin Hadelich and Stéphane Denève
Photo by Chuck Lavazzi

Under Denève’s sympathetic direction, it emerged as one of the most uplifting and inspiring pieces I have heard in some time, and one I hope we hear more often from now on.

Barber's dramatic Op. 14 Violin Concerto got a highly expressive and technically brilliant performance by Hadelich ably supported by Denève and the orchestra. Hedelich’s intense emotional commitment to the music was apparent from the beginning of the Allegro first movement in both the sweetly nostalgic statement of the first theme and his powerful handling of the subsequent drama that pervades the rest of the movement. Both he and Denève were on the same quietly elegiac page in the following Andante (including a lovely solo by Principal Oboe Jelena Dirks) and delivered the hair-raising fireworks of the Presto in moto perpetuo finale with stunning precision.

That last movement isn’t just an Olympian exercise for the soloist. The members of the orchestra are called upon to inject a plethora of short, tricky motifs all the way through, so the entire ensemble has to work closely as a team. They did so perfectly under Denève’s leadership, providing yet another manifestation of the theme of unity.

The standing ovation that followed was, of course, inevitable but it was also completely justifiable. Hadelich responded with an unexpected and delightful encore: his own virtuoso arrangement of the Robert Shafer/Randy Howard version of the traditional “Wild Fiddler’s Rag.”

The evening concluded with a powerful performance of Florence Price’s remarkable Symphony No. 3. Premiered in 1933 by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, it made Price the first African American woman to see her work performed by a major symphony orchestra.

When I first heard this work last July at Bravo Vail, I recall finding Price’s approach to traditional structures like sonata form to be somewhat episodic, but after Friday night's wonderfully coherent reading by Denève I am obliged to take that all back. The mix of traditional African American elements with modernist dissonances, whole-tone passages, and Wagnerian brass chorales no longer sounded disconcerting. The echoes of Dvořák and traditional spirituals in the second movement kept harmonious company and the bits of sly humor in the third movement Juba dance were just right. The wild, turbulent, and dissonant Scherzo last movement brought it all to a rousing close.

Denève and the SLSO have, in short, demonstrated that the Symphony No. 3 is a genuine masterpiece. He said it needs to be heard more often and I couldn't agree more. Judging from the enthusiastic audience response, that shouldn’t be a hard sell.

If you missed this concert, never fear. It was recorded and will shortly be available for streaming for a limited time at the SLSO website.

Next from the SLSO: On Wednesday, February 7, at 7:30 pm Concertmaster David Halen leads members of the orchestra in a chamber music evening at the Sheldon Concert Hall. On the program: Florence Price’s Andante cantabile from the String Quartet No. 2, the world premiere of “The Art of Dreaming” by Robyne Sieh, Ravel’s String Quartet in F major, and Dvořák’s Piano Quintet in A major.

On Thursday, February 8, at 7:00 pm, the Washington University Department of Music and musicians of the SLSO team up for “Untold Stories: LGBTQ+ Composers through Time,” a unique narrated performance that introduces stories of composers from the LGBTQ+ community over the last 1,000 years. The concert takes place at the 560 Music Center in University City.

On Saturday, February 10, at 7:30 pm Norman Huynh conducts a special Lunar New Year program with the SLSO and soloists Rulin Olivia Zhang (erhu), the CECC dragon dance team, and the Thunder Drum team. The program includes music by Li Huanzhi, Tan Dun, Ravel, and Stranisnky and takes place at Lindenwood University's J. Scheidegger Center for the Arts.

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

Symphony Preview: Traditional values

Back home from its first European tour since 2017, the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra continues the current season this weekend (April 14–16) with a mix of works from early 19th century Poland, late 19th century England, and WW II USA—all of which use composition techniques that go back to at least the 18th century.

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

Samuel Barber, photographed by
Carl Van Vechten, 1944
Public Domain

With Assistant Conductor Stephanie Childress at the podium, the orchestra opens the concerts with the Second Essay for Orchestra, written in 1942 by Samuel Barber (1910–1981) and last heard at Powell Hall back in 2009 with former Assistant Conductor Ward Stare at the helm. Like its literary namesake, Barber’s Essay presents a thesis (i.e., a musical theme) and then elaborates on it by altering the theme’s mood and orchestral dress and generally expanding on it in a freer version of the traditional theme and variations form.

In Grove Music Online, Barbara B. Heyman writes that this and Barber’s other two Essays “employ a rich orchestral palette and are characterized by well-crafted formal design, fluent counterpoint, and haunting themes–often assigned to solo woodwind instruments–that reflect a strong vocal orientation.” In the Second Essay, the theme is first stated by the solo flute, which is soon joined by the bass clarinet, English horn, and oboe. It has an uncertain feel, as if the composer were beginning his essay with a musical question.  Soon the rest of the orchestra joins in, and the theme begins to undergo a series of transformations. The work builds to the first of several climaxes as rapidly changing time signatures (6/8, 9/8,3/4, etc.) create a sense of restlessness—a feeling emphasized in a contrapuntal central section that prominently features the woodwinds, brass, and percussion.

This is music that clearly reflects the anxiety of a world at war. It ends with a sense of serenity and hope for the future—something that probably felt as uncertain then as it does now.

When Fryderyk Chopin (1810–1849) composed his 1829 F minor piano concerto (officially the Concerto No. 2 because, even though it was written before the Concerto No. 1 in E minor, it was published six years later) he was also experiencing a profound mix of anxiety and hope. In his case, though, it was heavily seasoned with what Alan Walker, in a 2018 biography of the composer, describes as “his first sexual awakening.”

The cause of all that hormonal uproar was one Konstancja Gladowsky, the manager of an apartment building in Warsaw and possessor of an impressive mezzo-soprano voice. Chopin saw her perform in a concert on April 12, 1829, and was immediately smitten. Alas, Konstancja did not lack for male admirers and Chopin was so painfully shy that instead of pouring his heart out to her, he unburdened himself in a series of increasingly steamy letters to his friend Tytus Woyciechowski. We’ll never know what Tytus made of it all since no letters from him to the composer have survived, and Konstancja went on to marry the wealthy diplomat Józef Grabowski. So the only real product of Chopin’s repressed passion was the Larghetto of the F minor concerto.

Chopin age 25 By Maria Wodzińska
,Public Domain.

Ah, but what a heartbreakingly beautiful thing that Larghetto is. “It reaches such expressive heights,” writes Walker, “that the roulades and grace notes with which it is adorned become virtually indistinguishable from the melody those ornaments were meant to decorate.” Indeed, the entire concerto is steeped in the composer’s characteristically decorative Romanticism while staying true to Classical-era structures like sonata form (in the first movement) and the rondo (in the finale). The latter is also heavily informed by the Polish mazurka, a folk dance that so entranced the composer that he wrote close to 60 of them. There’s no cadenza as such in the first movement (although the piano plays such a prominent role that one could regard the whole movement as a cadenza), but Chopin makes up for it with plenty of virtuoso flash in the concluding minutes of that last movement.

This weekend’s soloist will be the young French pianist Lise de Salle (b. 1988), who began performing in public at the age of 9 and won First Prize at the Seventh International Contest in Ettlingen, Germany, at the age of 12. A native of Cherbourg, de la Salle comes (not surprisingly) from a musical family. Her mother sang with the chorus of L’Orchestre de Paris, her grandmother taught piano, and her great-grandmother was a concert pianist in Russia where she “rubbed shoulders” (“oú elle côtoya”) with Tchaikovsky.

Finally, it’s back to the theme and variations format with the “Enigma Variations (Variations on an Original Theme),” op. 36, composed between 1898 and 1899 by Edward Elgar (1857–1934). Effectively a musical family album, the fourteen variations are vivid little sound portraits of Elgar, his wife, and his friends. Even a pet bulldog puts in an appearance in a comical variation (number 11) that portrays the dog tumbling down a grassy bank into the river Wye and then, according to the composer, "paddling up stream to find a landing place (bars 2 and 3) and his rejoicing bark on landing (second half of bar 5)."

Edward Elgar, circa 1900
en.wikipedia.org

My personal favorite, in terms of pure orchestral inventiveness, is variation 13, dedicated to an unnamed friend on a sea voyage. The solo clarinet (presumably Principal Scott Andrews this time around) plays a phrase from Mendelssohn's "Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage" over an eerie pianissimo roll played on the tympani (Shannon Wood) with the wooden drumsticks instead of the usual mallets.  Elgar meant the sound to suggest "the distant throb of engines of a liner." It’s an effect that can be hard to appreciate on recordings but has a truly eerie quality in a live performance.

The “Enigma” of the title, according to Elgar, refers to “another and larger theme” which is “not played”. The composer never revealed what that theme might be, and speculation has been lively ("most convincingly Auld Lang Syne," according to the late British musicologist Robin Golding). I'm inclined to go along with the school of thought that the “theme” to which Elgar referred wasn't musical at all but rather the common thread of friendship and good humor that pervades the music.

The Essentials: Stephanie Childress conducts the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra and piano soloist Lise de la Salle in Chopin’s Piano Concerto No. 2, along with Barber’s “Second Essay for Orchestra” and Elgar’s “Enigma Variations.” The full program will be performed Saturday at 8 pm and Sunday at 3 pm, April 15 and 16. The Saturday concert will be broadcast live on St. Louis Public Radio and Classical 107.3.

There will also be a special Crafted Series performance of the “Enigma Variations” only on Friday, April 14, at 6:30 pm. Doors open at 5:30 pm for “happy hour” with local drink samples and complimentary snacks from Soul Burgers, Perennial Artisan Ales, Switchgrass Spirits, The Popcorn Bar, and All Rolled Up. Seating is on a general admission basis.

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

Symphony Preview: Extra seasons with the St. Louis Symphony, December 5-7, 2014

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As I said in my first symphony preview post this week, the main event at the St. Louis Symphony this weekend is Vivaldi’s “The Four Seasons.” Steven Jarvi is at the podium and the violin soloists—all drawn from the symphony string section—are Jessica Cheng (“Spring”), Angie Smart (“Summer”), Jooyeon Kong (“Autumn”), and Alison Harney (“Winter”). What I left out was any mention of the other two works on the program.

Usually a performance of “The Four Season” presents all four of the concertos as a unit. But not always. Before the four concertos became part of the standard repertoire, it wasn’t unusual for them to be played individually. Indeed, as I noted in my earlier post, that’s exactly what St. Louis Symphony back in January of 1928 when guest conductor Bernadino Molinari spread them out over three separate concerts.

This time around Mr. Jarvi has kept them all on the same bill but has shuffled in two other pieces: Samuel Barber’s hauntingly nostalgic “Knoxville: Summer of 1915,” Op. 24 (1947), with Kiera Duffy as the soprano soloist; and Richard Wagner’s utterly ingratiating “Siegfried Idyll” from 1870. The Wagner was written as a Christmas present for his wife Cosima, so it’s played just before the “Winter” concerto, while the Barber acts as a bridge between spring and summer.

Mr. Jarvi elaborates on the logic behind this in the program notes. “James Agee’s incredible text,” he observes, “brings this work to life, similar to the poems that inspired The Four Seasons, which may or may not have been written by Vivaldi...With Wagner we move from autumn to winter. At first we were looking at something symbolic of winter—something representative of ‘lateness,’ the end of life. Then we thought of how Siegfried Idyll was one of the most wonderful musical Christmas gifts ever given.”

Makes sense. And I’m especially happy to see the Barber on the program. Mr. Jarvi says it’s one of his “favorite pieces of all time” and I’m inclined to agree with him. I first encountered this wonderfully evocative setting of James Agee’s little prose-poem (which later became the prologue for his autobiographical novel “A Death in the Family”) in a 1968 recording by the great Leontyne Price with an orchestra conducted by Thomas Schippers, and have been something of a sucker for it ever since.

The text is a poetic recollection of a peaceful scene from the author’s childhood in which the narrator is sometimes an adult and sometimes the child who later becomes the adult. Prosaic descriptions of a quiet summer evening on the lawn are mixed with flights of poetic fancy, leading finally to philosophical contemplation of the narrator’s family and their place in the cosmos: "By chance, here they are, all on this earth; and who shall ever tell the sorrow of being on this earth, lying, on quilts, on the grass, in a summer evening, among the sounds of the night." Barber’s music mirrors and highlights all of this with deceptive simplicity.

The inspiration for the novel of which Agee’s text became a part was a death; specifically, the death of Agee’s father. In the case of Wagner’s “Siegfried Idyll,” the inspiration was exactly the opposite: the birth, in 1869, of the composer’s son Siegfried.

The piece was originally titled “Triebschen Idyll with Fidi's birdsong and the orange sunrise, as symphonic birthday greeting. Presented to his Cosima by her Richard. "Fidi," says Wikipedia, “was the family's nickname for their son Siegfried. It is thought that the birdsong and the sunrise refer to incidents of personal significance to the couple.” The first performance took place not in a concert hall, but on the stairs of the Wagner family home in Tribschen on Christmas morning, 1870. The musicians were members of the Tonhalle Orchester Zürich. Wagner’s wife Cosima (whose own birthday was December 24th) was awakened by the first gentle strains of the music and was, as you might expect, completely enchanted.

“As I awoke,” she would later recall, “my ear caught a sound, which swelled fuller and fuller; no longer could I imagine myself to be dreaming: music was sounding, and such music! When it died away, Richard came into my room with the children and offered me the score of the symphonic birthday poem. I was in tears, but so were all the rest of the household. Richard had arranged his orchestra on the staircase, and thus was our Tribschen consecrated forever.”

Although Wagner never intended the piece for public performance,, financial considerations obliged him to expand the orchestration from the original 13 players to 35 and publish the work as the “Siegfried Idyll” in 1878. It might also have been a canny marketing decision. He used themes from the “Idyll” in his 1876 opera “Siegfried,” so publication gave him another way to get his “Ring” cycle music before the public.

It is, in any case, a disarming a piece as you are likely to hear, and utterly unlike the more grandiose gestures most people associate with Wagner. It’s a reminder that even that great egotist had his moments of intimate reflection. And it also reminds us that winter is about the warmth of family as well as the cold weather.

The essentials: Steven Jarvi conducts the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra along with violin soloists Jessica Cheng, Angie Smart, Jooyeon Kong, and Alison Harney Friday at 10:30 a.m. and 8 p.m., Saturday at 8 p.m., and Sunday at 3 p.m., December 5-7. The concerts take place at Powell Symphony Hall, 718 North Grand in Grand Center. For more information: stlsymphony.org.

Move heaven and earth - but slowly

Mezzo Kelley O'Connor
Photo by Dario Acosta

Who: The St. Louis Symphony Orchestra and Chorus
What: Barber’s Prayers of Kierkegaard and Mahler’s Symphony No. 2 (“Resurrection”)
Where: Powell Symphony Hall, St. Louis
When: April 8 through 10, 2011

The ranting of wealthy and powerful fundamentalists and their political and media enablers aside, there’s no getting around the fact that the central message of Christianity is one of mercy, forgiveness, compassion, and love. This weekend’s St. Louis Symphony concerts offered a pair of powerful musical reminders of that message. The fact that one came from the pen of an Austrian Jew who converted to Catholicism out of professional expediency and the other from a gay American man is probably another illustration of how outsiders often see the truth more clearly than members of the tribe.

The big draw for these concerts, of course, was the Symphony No. 2 (“Resurrection”) by Gustav Mahler. For me, however, the most compelling moments came from Samuel Barber’s rarely heard Prayers of Kierkegaard from 1954. A setting for large orchestra, chorus, and multiple soloists (soprano, alto, and tenor) of four of the many original prayers by Christian existentialist philosopher Søren Kierkegaard (1813 – 1855), Prayers pays homage to both Gregorian monophony and Baroque polyphony while remaining true to Barber’s late-Romantic musical language. It’s a fascinating and complex piece that makes a convincing case for Kierkegaard’s emphasis on the primacy of each individual’s experience of Divine love, without the clutter of organized religion.

Under the baton of David Robertson, the orchestra and chorus delivered a rock-solid performance. The choral writing sounded complex and tricky, which made the clarity and enunciation with which it was sung that much more impressive. The soloists – soprano Christine Brewer, alto Debby Lennon, and tenor Keith Boyer – all did fine work, although Ms. Brewer seemed a bit uncomfortable in her lower register.

This is only the second time the symphony has undertaken this remarkable work and the first time under Mr. Robertson’s direction. I hope he felt as much satisfaction conducting this performance as I did hearing it.

The Mahler was, I’m sorry to say, somewhat less satisfying. The “Resurrection” Symphony has long been a favorite of mine, going back to my first encounter with the classic Otto Klemperer recording from early 1960s. A kind of Mahler multivitamin, the “Resurrection” contains all the key elements of the Viennese master’s work: moments of chamber-music delicacy alternating with massive orchestral outbursts, vulgar marches, lilting Ländler, a darkly comic scherzo, and passages of sublime beauty, and an ecstatic choral finale of overwhelming power. And yet, in the musical equivalent of alchemy, Mahler's sense of architecture somehow transmutes it all in to a single, unified work that brilliantly encompasses the themes of death, rebirth, and transcendence.

Personally, I missed the transcendence. As was his wont that last time he conducted this work (in 2007), Mr. Robertson favored a loving emphasis on orchestral details coupled with tempi that were somewhere between slow and plodding. Individual moments (especially in the second movement) took on a crystalline clarity as a result, but so did the joins in Mahler’s somewhat episodic musical architecture. The work came to a complete standstill far too often for me, I’m afraid, despite first-rate work from all the performers.

Christine Brewer, looking and sounding revived and re-energized, once again served as soprano soloist, backed up by mezzo Kelley O’Connor – utterly compelling in the “Urlicht” (“Primal Light”) setting that begins the symphony’s fourth movement. Amy Kaiser’s Symphony Chorus sounded splendid once again.

In brief remarks before the symphony began, Ms. Kaiser noted that this weekend’s performances were dedicated to the late Richard Ashburner, long a member and supporter of the chorus. Their work was a fitting tribute to their former colleague.

A great Mahler 2nd – such as the one Leonard Slatkin did with the SLSO back in 1982 (happily still available on CD) – never fails to move me to tears in those final glorious moments of spiritual rebirth. This one left me impressed with the virtuosity of the players and clarity of Mr. Robertson’s artistic vision, but it left me dry-eyed as well.

Next up on the symphony schedule: Maestro Robertson conducts Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 10 and Tchaikovsky’s ever popular Piano Concerto No. 1, with Yefim Bronfman at the keyboard April 15 through 17. For more information, you may call 314-534-1700, visit slso.org, or follow @slso on Twitter.