Symphony Preview: Les feuilles mortes

We’re only a week past the autumnal equinox and over a month away from the dreaded end of daylight saving time but, at least here in St. Louis, it’s finally beginning to feel like fall. Temperatures are mercifully cooler, days are shorter, and I find myself thinking of that Kurt Weill lyric about how the “the days dwindle down to a precious few.” Winter is coming, and so is the night.

The St. Louis Symphony Orchestra concerts Stéphane Denève will conduct this weekend (September 30 and October 1) have a decidedly nocturnal and autumnal feel to them, starting with a pair of local premieres by Japanese composer Tōru Takemitsu (1930-1996) and Chinese-born Qigang Chen (b. 1951).

Tōru Takemitsu
Photo: Guy Vivien

The concerts open with Takemitsu’s “Night Signal,” the second of two “antiphonal fanfares” for brass ensemble (the first, not surprisingly, is “Day Signal”) published collectively as “Signals from Heaven” in 1987. Unlike the prototypical fanfare, “Night Signal” is a quiet, almost mysterious piece in which the physical distance between the two instrumental groups becomes an integral part of the work. In that way, it's a bit reminiscent of the antiphonal brass music Giovanni Gabrielli (c. 1554/1557–1612) wrote for St. Mark’s Cathedral in Venice, in which groups of players engaged in “call and response” music across the vast space of the church. Perhaps that’s why “Night Signal” somehow sounds ancient and modern at the same time.

Distance is also a factor in the next piece, Qigang Chen’s “Éloignement” for string orchestra. It’s there in the title (which translates as “distance” or “separation”), as well as in the music itself, in which a traditional Chinese tune “Zou Xi Kou” (“Going Beyond the Western Gorges”) repeatedly struggles to be heard against more agitated motifs. Describing the song as “a love-song upon the departure of a beloved one, plaintive and nostalgic,” the composer says that “its melody is used in L’Éloignement because it retains a basic simplicity and because it gives the composer the possibility to express therein his own estrangement.”

This is, in short, music that speaks of the disconnection of the émigré from their homeland. The sense of conflict in “L’Éloignement” represents the composer’s own conflicting feelings. “L Éloignement,” writes Chen in program notes for the Minnesota Orchestra,  “depicts separation, disorder, imagination, and yearning. The music is both happy and sad, nostalgic and exciting, all of which account for the conflicting moods of the departing one.”

Qigang Chen
Photo: Boosey.com

Formally speaking “Éloignement” is a traditional rondo, but one that sometimes feels like a pitched battle. It ends serenely, but only after a considerable struggle.

Perhaps the greatest distance, though, is the one between life and the eternal darkness of death. The latter is the subject of this weekend’s major work, "Das Lied on der Erde" ("The Song of the Earth") by Gustav Mahler (1860–1911).  When Mahler began work on the piece in the summer of 1907 (as I originally wrote in notes for the SLSO’s last performance of “Das Lied” in 2014), his eldest daughter had just died of scarlet fever at the age of four and the composer himself had just been diagnosed with the heart condition that would lead to his demise four years later. Suddenly death—which had always been a theme in Mahler's music—became very personal.

Scored for large orchestra and two singers (typically tenor and mezzo-soprano, although Mahler allows for the substitution of a baritone in the second, fourth, and sixth songs), "Das Lied" is essentially a vocal symphony. Mahler didn’t call it that, though, because it then would have been his Symphony No. 9. And he had come to believe that because Beethoven and Schubert died after writing nine symphonies, the ninth symphony would always be a composer’s last.

Mahler in 1907
Photo: Moritz Nähr
en.wikipedia.org

Absurd? No doubt. And yet Mahler would go on to seemingly prove the superstition he essentially invented by writing a Symphony No. 9 and then promptly dying before he could complete his Symphony No. 10.

“Das Lied” takes its texts from Hans Bethge's "The Chinese Flute," a German-language rewrite of English, French, and German translations of some ancient Chinese poems. Further edited and rewritten by Mahler, the lyrics contemplate a variety of aspects of life and death. "Every mood," writes Tony Duggan at musicweb-international.com "from cynical and drunken hedonism to serene and Zen-like stasis gets covered in the course of the hour this work takes. At the end, the message is that, since the beauties and mysteries of the earth renew themselves year after year, our own passing should not be feared but accepted calmly and without rancour. The earth, the world and nature goes [sic] on without us."

Too true. In particular, the last movement—"Das Abschied" ("The Farewell")—is possibly one of the most emotionally powerful things you will ever encounter in a concert hall. In it, the narrator's farewell to a friend becomes a farewell to life itself: "Die liebe Erde allüberall Blüht auf im Lenz und grünt aufs neu! Allüberall und ewig blauen licht die Fernen! Ewig... ewig..." ("Everywhere the good earth blossoms in spring and turns green once again! Everywhere and forever, distant spaces shine their blue light! Forever...forever...").

"Mahler’s own philosophy saw death as a part of life,” writes Tim Munro in his program notes, “and in Der Abschied we meet death as friend, not foe.” It's a notion of death which, while uncommon, is hardly unknown. The character Death of the Endless from Neil Gaiman's "Sandman" graphic novels comes immediately to mind.

[Note: "Les feuilles mortes" (literally "The Dead Leaves") refers to the 1947 Joseph Kosma/Jacques Prévert song beter known to us Anglophones as "Autumn Leaves." Either way, the message is the same.'

The Essentials: Stéphane Denève conducts the SLSO in Tōru Takemitsu’s “Night Signal,” Qigang Chen’s L'Éloignement," and Mahler’s “Das Lied von der Erde,” with mezzo Kelley O’Connor and tenor Clay Hilley. Performances are Friday at 7:30 pm Saturday at 8 pm, September 30 and October 1.  The Saturday concert will be broadcast live, as usual, on St. Louis Public Radio and Classic 107.3.

Under the baton of Ben Whiteley, the SLSO returns on Sunday, October 2 at 3 pm for a "A Little Sondheim Music." A joint presentation with The Muny, this program of the music of the late Broadway legend features six prominent singers, including St. Louis's own Ken Page. All performances take place at Powell Symphony Hall in Grand Center.

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

Symphony Preview: Three faces of Eve

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

Mezzo Rinat Shaham

The St. Louis Symphony Orchestra concludes its regular concert season this weekend (May 10-12, 2019) as Music Director Designate Stéphane Denève conducts three works inspired by exotic women. Only one of them was real, though, and even she wasn't exactly what the composer hoped for.

But I'm getting ahead of myself.

The concerts open with the local premiere of the tone poem "Nyx," written in 2011 by composer/conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen, who will take over the post of Music Director at the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra next year. The title refers to the Greek goddess of the night, a powerful figure in mythology and the mother of all the other gods. "She is an extremely nebulous figure altogether; we have no sense of her character or personality," writes Mr. Salonen in his program notes:

It is this very quality that has long fascinated me and made me decide to name my new orchestral piece after her. I'm not trying to describe this mythical goddess in any precise way musically. However, the almost constant flickering and rapid changing of textures and moods as well as a certain elusive character of many musical gestures may well be related to the subject.

He goes on to note that his real challenge in composing the piece was "to write complex counterpoint for almost one hundred musicians playing tutti at full throttle without losing clarity of the different layers and lines." The score calls for a big ensemble with a lot of percussion instruments, including glockenspiel, tam-tam, tom-tom, vibraphone and bongos. It certainly makes a glorious noise, as you can hear in the composer's own recording.

As to whether it achieves that clarity, the composer says "I leave it to the listener to judge how well I succeeded." I think he did, and conjured up something dark, elemental, and potent in the process. Come see for yourself this weekend and decide.

Maurice Ravel in 1925
en.wikipedia.org

The legendary woman behind the next work, Ravel's song cycle "Shéhérazade," surely needs no introduction. The musical immortality of the fictional author of the "1001 and One Nights" was guaranteed by Rimsky-Korsakov's colorful 1888 symphony/tone poem, but Ravel's much shorter and more transparently scored set of three songs deserves to be heard far more often than it is.

Ravel was fascinated by Scheherazade and her stories. His first published work, in 1898, was an orchestral overture named for her. It was not well received, convincing the composer that a planned opera based on the "1001 Nights" would be a non-starter.

It all might have ended there if it hadn't been for La Société des Apaches, a group of artists, writers, and musicians in Paris circa 1900 who would hang out every Saturday at the home of the artist Paul Sordes. In addition to Ravel, the group's membership included the Symbolist poet Tristan Klingsor (real name: Arthur Justin Léon Leclère) who, in 1903, published a collection of 100 free-verse poems titled "Shéhérazade." Ravel read them, liked them, and decided to set three of them to music.

Ravel's compositional approach, as Thomas May writes in this weekend's program notes, was unusual. Impressed by the conversational rhythms of the music his colleague Debussy had written for "Pelléas et Mélisande," "Ravel had Klingsor recite his texts out loud to accentuate their beautiful rhythms and the sensuality of the sounds of the words. He was intent on translating these aspects into his musical setting." The resulting music unspools in a languorous, exotic line that mimics and enhances the feel of spoken French. As Caroline Rae writes in notes for the Phliharmonia Orchestra:

Ravel's magically evocative setting of Klingsor's texts brims with mystery and desire. All three songs are tranquil and reflective, opening and closing in a veiled piano, while the sensuous orchestral sound combines with a rich harmonic palette, in which added seconds, sevenths and ninths abound, to create a sense of yearning and nostalgia...moving from rich voluptuousness and gentle lyricism to languid sensuousness.

It's good thing that Ravel's music is so seductive because, as Mr. May notes, "Klingsor's poems are problematic for contemporary audiences sensitive to stereotypes of other cultures." Indeed. "Asie," ("Asia") the first (and longest) of the three songs, reads like something out of Sax Rohmer, with images of "beautiful silk turbans / Above dark faces with gleaming white teeth" ("de beaux turbans de soie / Sur des visages noirs aux dents claires"), "Plump mandarins sitting under parasols" ("Les mandarins ventrus sous les ombrelles") and a "cruel assassins smile / As an executioner lops off a guiltless head ("des assassins souriants / Du bourreau qui coupe un cou d'innocent"). It's a reminder that the Orientalism of authors and poets of a century ago had very little to do with the actual Orient.

Parenthetical note: "Shéhérazade" is nearly always sung by a soprano or mezzo-soprano. This weekend's soloist, for example, is mezzo Rinat Shaham, whose stage credits range from Mozart's "Don Giovanni" to Bartok's "Bluebeard's Castle." But, as James M. Keller writes in notes for the San Francisco Symphony, Ravel might actually have had a male voice in mind:

From the outset, Ravel's Shéhérazade has been in the domain of sopranos (or mezzo-sopranos with a comfortable upper range), but in 1965 the late baritone Martial Singher wrote to the Ravel scholar Arbie Orenstein that the composer had something quite different in mind: "I had remarked to Ravel that the texts of those songs were certainly meant for a man. He confirmed (this must have happened about 1935) that he had had in mind a male voice when writing them, but that only women singers with strong musical backgrounds had been interested in them. "

Charles Kemble and Harriet Smithson
as Romeo and Juliet
By Francis (François-Antoine Conscience)

The concerts will conclude with a work inspired by a woman who wasn't at all mythological: the Irish Shakespearean actress Harriet Smithson. To composer Hector Berlioz, though, she was something of a goddess. His pursuit of her, ill conceived and ultimately disastrous as it was, moved him to compose one of his greatest works, the "Symphonie Fantastique."

Berlioz's first exposure to Smithson came when he saw her play Ophelia in 1827 in a highly edited production of "Hamlet" by the actor Charles Kemble (who also played Hamlet) at the Odéon in Paris. Although considered a somewhat mediocre performer in Britain, she bowled the French over with her sensitive "mad" scene and completely transfixed poor Berlioz, even though he didn't understand a word of English.

He became infatuated with her immediately. He sent her letters. He sent hand-delivered notes. He did everything but mail himself to her in a box like poor Waldo in the Velvet Underground's "The Gift". The depth of his obsession can be seen in a letter he sent to his friend Ferdinand Hiller (quoted on Melissa Ide and Leslie Merriman's Interdisciplinary Shakespeare site):

... today it is a year since I saw HER for the last time_________oh! unhappy woman! how I loved you...trembling I write, HOW I LOVE YOU! If there is another world shall we find each other again?...Shall I ever see Shakespeare? Will she know me?...Will she understand the poetry of my love?...oh! Juliet, Ophelia, Belvidera, Jane Shore, names that hell repeats unceasingly...Oh! sublime ones! sublime ones! annihilate me! summon me to your golden clouds! deliver me!...Go, go Henriette Smithson and Hector Berlioz will be reunited in the oblivion of the tomb, which will not prevent other unhappy ones from SUFFERING AND DYING."

And so on.

Today he would have been hit (justifiably) with a restraining order. Instead, he wrote his "Symphonie Fantastique," a work Leonard Bernstein once famously described as "the first psychedelic symphony in history, the first musical description ever made of a trip, written one hundred thirty odd years before the Beatles."

Subtitled "An Episode in the Life of an Artist," the "Symphonie Fantastique" tells, in dramatic and musically explicit terms, the story of a "young vibrant musician" who becomes sexually obsessed with an "ideal" woman. He dreams of her in the first movement; unsuccessfully pursues her at a ball in the second; and flees to the country to escape his longing in the third. In the fourth movement "March of the Scaffold" (often performed by itself) he overdoses on opium (the LSD of the early 19th century) and dreams he is being beheaded for her murder. The work ends with the hallucinatory "Dreams of a Witches' Sabbath," in which the protagonist envisions himself at an infernal dance, presided over by the object of his affection, now transformed into a demon.

Even after the premiere of the "Symphonie Fantastique" Berlioz continued to pursue Smithson, going to far as to threaten to kill himself with an opium overdose if she didn't marry him. In 1833, after seeing a performance of "Lélio" (Berlioz's rarely-performed sequel to the "Symphonie Fantastique"), she finally agreed, but they did not live happily ever after. The marriage fell apart after a decade and both Smithson's health and fortunes went into decline. Some great music emerged from the wreckage, but I doubt that was any comfort to Ms. Smithson.

The Essentials: Music Director Designate Stéphane Denève conducts the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra and mezzo-soprano Rinat Shaham Friday and Saturday at 8 pm and Sunday at 3 pm, May 10-12. Performances take place at Powell Hall in Grand Center.

Review: Quintessential Slatkin at the St. Louis Symphony

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

Soprano Hila Plitmann

It's an index of the continuing popularity of St. Louis Symphony Orchestra Conductor Laureate Leonard Slatkin that he got a standing ovation from the crowd as soon as he stepped on to the stage Saturday night (May 4, 2019) for the final performance in a two-week concert series.

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

Granted, SLSO CEO Marie-Hélène Bernard warmed up the crowd with a laudatory introduction, but the audience didn't need much prompting. Fifty years after his first appearance with the orchestra, Mr. Slatkin--who ended his 17-year tenure as SLSO Music Director back in 1996--is as popular as ever.

Saturday night's concert demonstrated why that's the case. It was a quintessentially Slatkin evening, with an infrequently heard American classic, a world premiere by an American composer, and a highly personal take on a concert hall favorite--exactly the sort of thing that has endeared him to local classical music lovers. It was good to have him back.

The concert began with that infrequently heard American work, the Symphony No. 1 by Samuel Barber. Composed in 1935 and 1936 in Rome, the symphony netted him the American Prix de Rome at the ripe old age of 25. Running around 20 minutes, it's expansive, dramatic music with a wide emotional range.

Composer Jeff Beal

Conducting without a baton, Mr. Slatkin delivered a performance that was a perfect combination of big, dramatic gestures and precise details. The brass section was wonderfully clear and powerful in the first movement, the woodwinds danced through the rapid triplet passages in the second movement with ease, and the increasingly elaborate passacaglia of the finale was a model of clarity. There were fine individual performances here as usual, including the rapid bassoon and tympani duet at the end of the second movement (Andy Gott and Shannon Wood, respectively) and Jelena Dirks's plaintive oboe solo at the top of the final movement.

Next was that world premiere, the song cycle "The Paper Lined Shack" by contemporary American composer Jeff Beal. Best known for his film and television work (mostly notably the series "House of Cards"), Mr. Beal has recently branched out into the concert world. If this piece is any indication, he has a promising future there.

Based on diaries kept by Mr. Beal's great-grandmother Della, the piece reminded me a great deal of "Knoxville: Summer of 1915," written by Samuel Barber in 1947 to a text by novelist James Agee. Both are based on memoirs of family life in the early 20th century--urban middle class in Agee's case and dirt poor rural in the case of Della Beal--and both speak a musical vocabulary that would not have been shocking to audiences a century ago. Mr. Beal's music has a gentle, transparent quality that mirrors the sometimes surprisingly poetic text.

I'm not sure, though, that Mr. Beal writes that well for the human voice. I know he had input from the soloist, soprano Hila Plitmann, in developing the work, but even so the vocal line seems to lie too high a bit too often, and while Ms. Plitmann was in good voice generally, she did not always sound comfortable singing softly at the top of her range.

Still, it was a compelling performance, and a convincingly acted one. Ms. Plitmann made good theatrical use of the stage, entering far right on her first song, "Carefree Girl," and gradually working her way center to finish the cycle sitting at Mr. Slatkin's feet on the podium, as Della speaks directly to her children. I thought she perfectly captured Della's progression from carefree childhood to devastating personal losses in adulthood and, finally, poetic acceptance of her lot in life. The final two songs, "Our Garden" and "My Heart," were especially touching in their evocation of the contrast between the deaths of Della's mother and husband and the life of her garden. "The garden looked the same," Della wrote, "but everything had changed."

Leonard Slatkin
Photo by Nico Rodamel

The concert concluded with Tchaikovsky's popular Symphony No. 6, whose title, "Pathétique," is an example of what the French call a faux ami--a "false friend" that appears to be an English cognate but isn't. So while it looks like it should mean "pathetic", it is more property translated as "moving, touching, or poignant." The dark and dramatic first movement and, in particular, the despairing finale will move the most stony heart, and the absurdly rousing Allegro molto vivace third movement inevitably provokes applause.

Conducting without a score, Mr. Slatkin delivered a riveting, highly personal performance filled with subtle little touches that made it unlike any other performance of the work I have heard. The opening phrases in the bassoons, for example, were hushed and anguished. The first movement coda moved at a deliberate pace that made it feel like a candlelight procession. The tympani ostinato in the central section of the second movement had palpable tension. Small alterations in tempo added nuance to the boisterous third movement. And the yearning second theme of the final movement felt especially powerful.

The orchestra played beautifully, as always. Notable performances were turned in by bassoonists Andrew Cuneo and Felicia Foland, Scott Andrews on clarinet, and Tzuying Huang on bass clarinet. Thomas Jöstlein's horns acquitted themselves very well, and their muted notes in the finale had a truly threatening rasp. The strings had great depth and power, as they so often do.

The final measures faded out in despair, as they should, and would have been followed by a few seconds of silence if some members of the audience had not insisted on bursting into applause before Mr. Slatkin had lowered his arms. You really need a few seconds to exhale at the end of this piece, and Mr. Slatkin was trying to give it to us. As my wife remarked on the way out, people need to remember that the conductor leads the audience as well as the orchestra.

Next at Powell Hall: Music Director Designate Stéphane Denève conducts the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra and mezzo-soprano Rinat Shaham in the final concert of the season Friday and Saturday at 8 pm and Sunday at 3 pm, May 10-12. The program consists of "Nyx" by composer/conductor Essa-Pekka Salonen, Ravel's song cycle "Shéhérazade," and the "Symphonie Fantastique" by Berlioz. Performances take place at Powell Hall in Grand Center.

Symphony Preview: Cafe Vienna

We were in Vienna for a few days earlier this month and drenched ourselves in musical history. We visited the Mozarthaus museum. We saw a concert at the Musikverein and took a tour of the Vienna State Opera. We even stayed at the Hotel Beethoven on Papagenogasse, where the wall of our room was dominated by a picture of Placido Domingo in Fidelio.

And, of course, we had coffee and pastries.

This music scheduled for the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra concerts this weekend (October 27 - 29, 2017) brought all of that back to mind. Two of the three works on the program were first performed in Vienna and the third, while premiered in Salzburg, was performed there by the Vienna Philharmonic under Karl Böhm. So it's essentially "all Vienna all the time" this weekend.

The concerts open with that last work I mentioned. It's the Horn Concerto No. 2 in E-flat major by Richard Strauss. First performed on August 11th, 1943, the concerto's warmly nostalgic sound stands in stark contrast to the state of mind of its composer. His heath was not good, his wife was going blind, and the regime to which he had effectively sold his soul-and which he would later describe as a "twelve year reign of bestiality, ignorance and anti-culture under the greatest criminals"-was collapsing. Small wonder, then, that he took refuge in a kind of musical nostalgia.

Roger Kaza

Its lyricism not withstanding, the concerto is a difficult piece to perform, which may be one of the reasons why this is only the second time the SLSO has presented it. The local premiere was given back in 1987 with the famed Barry Tuckwell as the soloist. This time the solo spot will be taken by SLSO Principal Horn Roger Kaza. As someone who loves seeing local band members take center stage, I'm very much looking forward to his performance.

Up next will be the Seven Early Songs, composed by Alban Berg between 1905 and 1908 when he was studying with Arnold Schoenberg but not published until 1928. They hark back to the late Romantic sound world of Mahler and Strauss for the most part and are less terse and elliptical than the kind of thing Berg was writing when he published them. That means you can expect something very different from the last Berg song cycle we heard at Powell Hall.

That last song cycle was the Five Orchestral Songs to Picture-Postcard Texts by Peter Altenberg, performed by local favorite Christine Brewer last May. It's only appropriate, then, that Ms. Brewer is back as the soloist this time around. Ms. Brewer has substantial operatic credentials and Berg's songs are always very theatrical, so it should be a good fit.

Christine Brewer
Photo: Christian Steiner

At the other end of the popularity spectrum is the final work on the program, Beethoven's Symphony No. 5. The opening movement, in particular, has been heard and parodied so often that it's easy to forget that the symphony's premiere on December 22, 1808, was not a great success. The Fifth was part of a mammoth five hour program that included the Symphony No. 6 ("Pastoral"), the Piano Concerto No. 4, a couple of movements from the Mass in C, a concert aria ("Ah, perfido"), and the Op. 80 Choral Fantasy. Beethoven conducted and played the solo piano part in the concerto and the Fantasy.

There was only one rehearsal before the concert, the musicians weren't up to Beethoven's demands, the auditorium was cold, and by the time the Fifth was played after intermission the audience was exhausted. Things went so badly that at one point the Choral Fantasy had to be stopped completely after a performance error. Not auspicious.

In fact, it wasn't until E.T.A. Hoffmann published an enthusiastic review of the newly published score in the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung a year and a half later that everyone began to sit up and take notice of the Fifth. "Radiant beams shoot through this region's deep night," wrote Hoffmann of the music's dramatic effect, "and we become aware of gigantic shadows which, rocking back and forth, close in on us and destroy everything within us except the pain of endless longing-a longing in which every pleasure that rose up in jubilant tones sinks and succumbs, and only through this pain, which, while consuming but not destroying love, hope, and joy, tries to burst our breasts with full-voiced harmonies of all the passions, we live on and are captivated beholders of the spirits."

More and better-rehearsed performances followed. By the time Hector Berlioz wrote his Critical Study of Beethoven's Nine Symphonies he could state that the Fifth was "without doubt the most famous of the symphonies" and "the first in which Beethoven gave wings to his vast imagination without being guided by or relying on any external source of inspiration." Today the Fifth is famous not just on earth but in outer space as well; a recording of the first movement by the Philadelphia Orchestra was part of the Voyager Golden Record, included on the first two Voyager space probes launched in 1977 and now speeding through deep space.

The essentials: David Robertson conducts The St. Louis Symphony Orchestra in music by Richard Strauss, Alban Berg, and Beethoven Friday and Saturday at 8 p.m. and Sunday at 3 p.m., October 27 - 29. Soprano Christine Brewer will perform Berg's Seven Early Songs and SLSO Principal Horn Roger Kaza will play Strauss's Horn Concerto No. 2. The concerts will conclude with Beethoven's popular Symphony No. 5. The performances take place at Powell Hall in Grand Center. For more information: stlsymphony.org.

Symphony Preview: Hit and Miss

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Unless you've sung in a choir or played in a concert band, you probably know Gustav Holst (1874-1934) only as the composer of his popular orchestral suite The Planets, Op. 32, a performance of which concludes the St. Louis Symphony's regular season this weekend, May 6-8, 2016. Singers will probably know Holst's many choral works, and recovering band geeks like yours truly are likely to be familiar with his two suites from 1909 and 1911, or his Hammersmith: Prelude and Scherzo from 1930. For everybody else, it's The Planets.

Gustav Holst in 1921
Photo: Herbert Lambert

Written between 1914 and 1916, The Planets was an immediate hit and made the previously unknown Holst something of a celebrity. This was not, as it turned out, a welcome development for the rather shy and retiring composer. Indeed, like many composers who became known for a single work, Holst eventually came to actively dislike his Greatest Hit. "Holst never wrote another piece like The Planets again," writes Kenric Taylor at gustavholst.info. "He hated its popularity. When people would ask for his autograph, he gave them a typed sheet of paper that stated that he didn't give out autographs."

If you've never heard The Planets before, you're in for a treat. I remember my delight the first time I heard this wonderfully cinematic seven-movement suite performed by the Vienna Philharmonic under Herbert von Karajan on a 1961 London Records disc. Back then my stereo wasn't much to brag about and the recording itself was a bit murky, but even so, from the first aggressive measures of "Mars, the Bringer of War"--an alarmingly mechanistic march in 5/4 time--I was hooked.

Inspired by the mythological and astrological aspects of the planets, the seven movements turn the heavenly bodies into characters and provide musical portraits of each one. "Mars" is all futile violence and dissonant brass. "Venus, the Bringer of Peace" floats in on a gentle horn solo, wafted along by flutes and strings. "Mercury, the Winged Messenger" zips along its triplets tossed around by the harp, strings, woodwinds, and celesta. And so it goes. Pluto hadn't been discovered yet and earth, of course, doesn't count in astrology, hence the seven movements instead of nine.

Ralph Vaughan Williams
in 1922

Holst actually got two hits out of The Planets, as it happens. The big, noble second theme from "Jupiter, the Bringer of Jollity" proved to be so popular that Holst later used it as a setting for Cecil Spring-Rice's poem "I Vow to Thee My Country." That version of the tune became a kind of second national anthem in England, along the lines of "America the Beautiful" over here.

Opening the concert will be a pair of works that are likely to be much less familiar: Ralph Vaughan Williams's Flos campi (Flower of the Field) from 1925 and Alban Berg's Fünf Orchesterlieder nach Ansichtskarten-Texten von Peter Altenberg (Five Orchestral Songs to Picture-Postcard Texts by Peter Altenberg), Op. 4 (a.k.a the Altenberg Lieder), from 1912. Both have been performed by the SLSO only once--the former in 1975 under Leonard Slatkin and the latter in 1966 with Eleazar de Carvalho at the podium--and neither one has exactly been on the "Top 40" with orchestras elsewhere.

In the case of the Vaughan Williams, it's partly a matter of the forces involved. In addition to the orchestra, Flos campi is scored for solo viola and mixed chorus--an unusual enough pairing to make programming it problematic. And the piece itself is a bit of an oddity in the composer's output. Cast in six movements and played without pause, it's a series of reflections on texts from one of the most openly sensual bits of the Bible, the Song of Solomon. By turns lyrical, sensuous, pastoral, and even cinematic, it's quirky stuff. Composer Phillip Cooke has called it "one of the silliest, most baffling and (in some parts) most un-Vaughan Williams piece that RVW ever wrote; it is part pastoral elegy, part crazy pagan party." But he then goes on to confess, "I love it."

The score is dedicated to the noted English violist Lionel Tertis and was, in fact, first performed with Tertis as the soloist in 1925 with Sir Henry Wood at the podium. Like Tertis, Vaughan Williams dearly loved the rich, dark sound of the viola and loved writing for it. Discussing the origins of Flos campi, Vaughan Williams's wife Ursula noted that "The viola with its capability of warmth and its glowing quality was the instrument he knew best."

Alban Berg

A different kind of darkness figures prominently in the Berg song cycle, which takes as its text the elliptical and eccentric poems of Peter Altenberg (real name: Richard Engländer). Engländer/Altenberg was an odd duck. "He is reputed to have spent most of his adult waking hours in coffeehouses," writes James Guida in a profile of the poet in The New Yorker, "and the sleeping ones in a hotel that was little more than a brothel. As for writing, his chosen medium was a feuilleton-style prose poem of anywhere from a sentence to a few pages in length, and he did wonders with it." He sent some of those little poems to his friends on postcards, and it's five of those that Berg set to intense and cryptically passionate music.

Like all of Berg's music, the Altenberg Lieder cram a lot of information into a very small amount of time--ten to twelve minutes in most performances. "Each of the songs is symmetrically conceived," writes Alexander Carpenter at allmusic.com, "that is, each begins and ends with similar, if not identical, harmonic or motivic gestures. The songs make considerable use of canon, passacaglia, and variation form." It was all apparently too much for the Viennese audience at the work's 1913 premiere, who booed and hooted like the Paris audiences at the first performance of Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring that same year.

Alas, Berg lacked Stravinsky's massive ego and talent for self-promotion, so instead of turning the audience reaction to his advantage, he retreated from composing songs entirely, choosing instead to concentrate on his orchestral works and his celebrated operas Wozzeck and Lulu. He might have achieved even greater things, but when the Nazis came to power he was denounced as a composer of entartete music ("degenerate music") and then had the misfortune to die in 1935 at the age of fifty from an infected insect bite. Such is the impact of dumb luck on human affairs.

The Essentials: David Robertson conducts the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra and Chorus along with soloists Christine Brewer, soprano, and Kathleen Mattis, viola, on Friday and Saturday at 8 p.m. and Sunday at 3 p.m., May 6-8. The program consists of Vaughan William's Flos Campi, Berg's Altenberg Lieder, and Holst's The Planets. Performances take place at Powell Symphony Hall, 718 North Grand.