Symphony Preview: A fall of spring

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

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

Stéphane Denève conducts the SLSO
Photo courtesy of the SLSO

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

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

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

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

Violinist and composer
Jessie Montgomery

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

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

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

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

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

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

Anna Clyne
Photo: Christina Kernohan

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Symphony Notes: As Cole Porter wrote, 'why don't we try staying home?'

The St. Louis Symphony Orchestra's (SLSO) season may have been cut short by the COVID-19 crisis, but that doesn't mean you can't enjoy some of the music scheduled for the next several weeks at home.

The concerts originally scheduled for this weekend (April 24-26) would have featured works that were inspired by folk and popular music from their respective composers' home countries. The program would have consisted of the "Romanian Rhapsody No. 2 by George Enescu, the Violin Concerto in D by contemporary American composer William Bolcom, and Dvořák's popular Symphony No. 9 in E minor, Op. 94, subtitled "From the New World." That gives us music from Romania, The USA, and the USA as experienced by one of the Czech Republic's most famous composers.

George Enescu in 1930
By E. Joaillier, Paris (photographer)
Bibliothèque nationale de France,
Public Domain, Link

If you don't have recordings of all of those pieces readily at hand, fear not; the SLSO has put together a free Spotify playlist of the complete concert that will enable you to recreate the experience right at home, albeit with different performers. It's the ideal listening companion to this article.

Your home concert opens with the "Romanian Rhapsody No. 2." Composed in 1901 and first performed as a set in 1903, Enescu's two Romanian Rhapsodies are probably his best-known works outside of his native land. He was a prolific composer, though, who produced five symphonies, a number of orchestral works, one opera, and a large volume of chamber music. In Romania, in fact, he's so highly regarded that the airport of the city of Bacău was recently renamed the George Enescu International Airport. In Bucharest, there's an Enescu Museum in the Cantacuzino Palace and an annual George Enescu Music Festival presented by the Symphony Orchestra of Bucharest.

The first and second rhapsodies both draw heavily on Romanian folk tunes despite their sharply contrasting moods. The First Rhapsody is the more popular of the two with its faster tempo and lively dances and slam-bang finish. The Second Rhapsody is lyrical, emphasizing song rather than dance.

Based largely on the 19th-century ballad "Pe o stîncă neagră, într-un vechi castel" ("On a dark rock, in an old castle"), the work begins with a soft, warm declaration of the tune in the strings that gradually builds to a full-throated declaration by the orchestra. A minor-key solo on the English horn leads to a more reflective moment or two before building to another grand orchestral declaration. The dance tune, "Sîrba lui Pompieru" ("Sîrba of the Fireman") makes a brief appearance, but it's played by only a handful of strings, as though the party were taking place in another room, or just in one's memory. A brief recollection of the big dance theme from the first rhapsody follows before everything fades out with a last little flute solo marked "très long, extrêment lent" ("very long, extremely slow").

Why are the dynamic marking in French? Probably because both the First and Second Rhapsodies, drenched though they are in Romanian song and dance, were actually composed in Paris, where Enescu would eventually move after World War II and the Soviet occupation of Romania. The first performance of both works, though, took place in Bucharest with the composer at the podium.

William Bolcom
Photo: Katryn Conlin

Up next on your playlist is the Bolcom Violin Concerto. It counts, I suppose, as "new music," although considering that it was written back in 1983,"new" is only relative. It is, in any case, great fun--a thoroughly enjoyable tribute to American popular music in the first few decades of the 20th century.

The concerto was written expressly for noted virtuoso Sergiu Luca, (born in Bucharest, which gives us a tenuous link back to Enescu) who was at the time "reveling in his newly-acquired jazz technique," according to Derek Bremel the Music Director of the American Composers Orchestra:

Inspired by the playing of the great jazz violinist Joe Venuti (a contemporary of Gershwin with whom Bolcom once jammed), the work is a true hybrid, combining bluesy lyricism with pulsating rhythms and more than a hint of crunchy chromaticism and polytonal clusters. Bolcom is a master orchestrator; just listen to the way he contrasts the colors of winds and strings in the gorgeously lush and moody second movement.

William Bolcom, for those of you who unfamiliar with the name, is an impressively eclectic composer and performer whose work often bridges (and even completely obliterates) the line between "popular" and "classical" music. His operas and concert works have been performed all over the world, but he has also written cabaret songs and piano rags. With his wife, mezzo-soprano Joan Morris, he has recorded many wonderful discs of American popular songs, ranging from Vaudeville-era tunes to the songs of rock and roll pioneers Leiber and Stoller.

It's no surprise, then, that Bolcom's violin concerto is strongly colored by the sounds of ragtime and the kind of "hot jazz" that was pioneered by Venuti, whose career flourished in the 1920s and '30. You can hear that almost immediately in the syncopated, ragtime-style melody on the solo violin that opens the first movement. That shortly gives way to a shorter and more agitated theme that eventually explodes into an angry orchestral outburst. A short virtuoso cadenza for the soloist leads to a kind of drunken waltz melody that returns us, in the final measures, to that original ragtime dance.

The second movement has its anguished moments as well, beginning with a dissonant lament in the winds, but for the most part it's dominated by a tender theme that feels like it wants to turn into a romantic 1940s ballad but never quite makes the transition. Another brief cadenza leads without pause to the lively finale where, as Mr. Bremel notes, the solo line "includes many of Venuti's signature inflections--including sliding sixths and alternating left- and right-hand pizzicato (string plucking)." There are definitely toe-tapping moments here and times when you'll be tempted to hum along with the soloist--which is not something I often find myself saying about newer music.

David Halen would have been the soloist this weekend and it's a pity we won't get to hear him play the piece, but you can at least take solace in the fact that the soloist in the SLSO's Spotify playlist is none other that Sergiu Luca himself, backed up by Mr. Bremel's American Composers Orchestra under the baton of Dennis Russell Davies. And if you don't do Spotify, you can watch a video of a performance by Benjamin Schmid with the Spanish Radio and Television Orchestra, conducted by Carlos Kalmar, courtesy of classical radio station WQXR.

William Bolcom has local connection, by the way. His "Session I" and Symphony No. 4 were recorded by Leonard Slatkin and the SLSO back in 1988. The symphony was commissioned by Slatkin and the SLSO, whose performance of it on March 13th, 1987, was the world premiere.

Dvořák with his friends and family in New York
By Photographer's original name unknown -
www.musicwithease.com,
Public Domain, Link

The Dvořák Ninth closes our virtual visit to Powell Hall. The Czech master wrote it during a visit to America in the early 1890s, and while he never explicitly quotes any American folk material, there's still something about this music that strongly suggests America. From the flute theme in the first movement that seems to echo "Swing Low, Sweet Chariot," to the second movement Largo that has (at least for me) always evoked the majestic solitude of the plains (Dvořák said he wrote it after reading Longfellow's "Hiawatha"), to the "bluesy" flatted seventh chords of the finale, Dvořák's "New World" symphony just shouts "USA"--even if it does so with a strong Czech accent.

Some critics have complained of the symphony's structural weaknesses and its episodic nature, but even they have had to confess that it's never anything less than tremendously appealing. It's one of the first "classical" works I ever encountered (in a memorable recording by Leonard Bernstein and the New York Philharmonic), and I've never lost my affection for it.

The SLSO last performed it in 2014 in what I called a "world class" interpretation by David Robertson. The performance the SLSO has curated for you on Spotify--by the Berlin Philharmonic under Rafael Kubelik--is also a fine piece of work. Those of you with Amazon Prime can hear it for free there as well as part of a complete set of Dvořák symphonies.

The regular SLSO season is scheduled to resume in September. Until then, you can still stay in touch with them at the SLSO Stories web site where, among other things, you can see and hear SLSO musicians performing for you from their homes.

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

Symphony Preview: Triple play

This weekend (Saturday and Sunday, January 18 and 19), Stéphane Denève conducts the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra (SLSO) in an evening of music by Wagner, Liszt, Richard Strauss, and contemporary (b. 1980) British composer Anna Clyne. At first glance, these four composers might not appear to have a great deal in common, but as SLSO program annotator Tim Munro points out, the first three are links in a late 19th/early 20th century chain.

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

Photo of Cosima and Richard Wagner, 1872
By Fritz Luckhardt
Self-scanned, Public Domain

"Without Franz Liszt," he writes, "there would have been no Richard Wagner: Wagner absorbed Liszt's musical voice, and Liszt was a passionate early Wagnerian... Without Wagner and Liszt, there would have been no Richard Strauss: He learned his trade from Liszt's orchestral poetry, from Wagner's all-embracing operas."

There might also be a tangential link from Ms. Clyne's work, "This Midnight Hour" back to Liszt, but I'll return to that anon.

Liszt may be the start of the chain, but Wagner is the start of the program this weekend. Specifically, it begins with his charming "Siegfried Idyll" from 1870. It was written as a birthday/Christmas present to his wife Cosima (born on December 24th), who was Liszt's daughter (yes, another link). And it was inspired by 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," notes Wikipedia,, ""was the family's nickname for their son Siegfried."" Mr. Munro adds that the orange sunrise refers to "the orange sun that warmed a wall of his bedroom."

A very cozy domestic image, in short.

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. Cosima 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."

"Liszt at a Piano"
Drawing by Sir Hubert von Herkomer, 1904

As I wrote in my preview article for the SLSO's last performance of the "Siegfried Idyll" in 2014, Wagner never intended the piece for public performance, but financial considerations obliged him to allow it. It is, in any case, as 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.

Up next is music by the first link in the chain, the Piano Concerto No. 2 by Franz Liszt. The concerto's composition process, as James M. Keller writes program notes for the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra, was a lengthy one:

Liszt first drafted it in 1839, returned to it a decade later, and brought it to a provisional completion in 1856, in which form it was premiered in 1857. Even after that, Liszt continued revising it until 1861. Throughout that process, the work's manuscripts carried the title Concerto symphonique; not until it appeared in published form, on the Schott imprint in 1863, was that heading transformed into "Second Concerto for Piano and Orchestra."

But that wasn't unusual for Liszt. His Piano Concerto No. 1 took 25 years to come to fruition, while his "Symphony to the Divine Comedy" (a.k.a. the "Dante" Symphony) took 17 years. His flashy "Totentanz" ("Dance of the Dead") for piano and orchestra was initiated in 1838 but didn't reach its final form until 1859. That's largely because, as Mr. Keller points out, "Liszt could turn out facile piano solos at the drop of a hat [but] he tended to agonize over works that he envisioned more for posterity, like works in the 'big' forms of the symphony or the concerto."

And then there's the fact that the Second Concerto was, like many of Liszt's later works, a daring and forward-looking break from the traditional mid-19th century model. Instead of being cast in three or four separate movements, it unfolds in one movement with six separate sections.

More significantly, though, it breaks with existing models of musical structure in that it is organized, not along the lines of the classical sonata form (exposition, development, recapitulation, and all that other Music 101 stuff) but through the use of thematic transformation. An elaboration of the old "theme and variations" concept, thematic transformation involves organizing a work around variations, transformations, expansions, and other forms of metamorphosis on a single theme.

In the case of the Liszt Second Concerto, the theme is presented in simple and sweetly lyrical form by a small choir of woodwinds at the very beginning, in a section marked adagio sostenuto assai (roughly, "very slowly and sustained"). It's both memorable and open to a lot of variation--a good thing, since over the next 20 minutes or so you'll hear it in multiple guises, including a noble march (marziale un poco meno allegro) in the penultimate section.

That's followed by a flurry of keyboard pyrotechnics that brings the piece to a rousing finish. Because, while Liszt often treats the piano as a partner rather than star player in this piece, it's still technically challenging, and Liszt the virtuoso showoff couldn't be expected to keep his light under a bushel the entire time.

Anna Clyne
Photo by Jennifer Taylor, annaclyne.com

At the concert grand this weekend will be the Jean-Paul and Isabelle Montupet Artist-in-Residence, pianist Jean-Yves Thibaudet. As such, he'll be returning for more concerts later in the season and will also present an evening of chamber music with SLSO members on Friday, the 17th, at Washington University's 560 Music Center.

Anna Clyne's "This Midnight Hour" is next. First performed in 2015, the work opens with agitated passages in the low strings that suggest a chase scene from a suspense film before morphing into a tipsy dance that fights it out with the "chase" music before finally lapsing into a sweetly nostalgic melody that prevails almost until the end, when a final bang from the percussion section brings everything to an abrupt finish.

If you're the sort of music lover who has tired of new works that sound more like mathematical exercises than music, I think you'll find Ms. Clyne's "This Midnight Hour" to be a welcome change of pace. In his program notes, Mr. Munro writes "Clyne's work evokes a mysterious journey of a woman in the hour after midnight" which draws inspiration from two poems: Baudelaire's 1857 "Harmonie du soir" and "a very short poem from Juan Ramón Jiménez: 'Music, a naked woman, running mad through the pure night.'" The somewhat tangential link back to Liszt goes through that first poem, since the title of his "Transcendental Étude No. 11 is "Harmonies du soir" (although we can't ignore the possibility that Liszt, roué that he was, had his share of experience with les femmes nues).

Granted, Liszt wrote "Harmonies du soir" six years before Baudelaire's poem but, as Sara Zamir and Juliette Hassine point out in a 2008 paper for the Journal of Music and Meaning, "the absence of a proven interaction between Liszt and Baudelaire is irrelevant" because both were likely inspired by "the Soleil Couchant [sunset] literary theme and its aesthetic implications in French Romantic poetry":

It is well-known that the Romantic Movement recruited natural phenomena to the aesthetics of the self-focused yearning to the unattainable and converted them into a vehicle for sentimental inconsistency and to the transformation of the sensation into a vision. A cause-and-effect relation between nature and overflowing powerful feelings was gradually established as an immanent part of the Romantic tradition, where nature turned into an expressive, mediating artistic language.

In short, they both drank from the same nocturnal spring. It's a bit sketchy and I wouldn't swear to it on a stack of Grove Dictionaries, but it's a provocative notion in any case.

L-R: Amanda Majeski and Sophie Koch
as The Marschallin and Octavian
Photo: Cory Weaver, Lyric Opera of Chicago

This weekend's concerts conclude with a suite of music from the wonderfully lush and engaging score of Richard Strauss's bittersweet romantic comedy "Der Rosenkavalier" ("The Knight of the Rose"). First performed in Dresden in 1911, "Rosenkavalier" was an immediate success with both audiences and critics alike. Today it's easily Strauss's most popular opera and a part of the core repertoire.

Much of the opera's success stems from the depth and intelligence of Hugo von Hofmannsthal's libretto. Working closely with the composer, von Hofmannsthal took what started out as a typical romantic farce about young lovers Sophie and Octavian (the titular cavalier) outwitting the boorish Baron Ochs, who is being forced on Sophie as a husband, and added a worldly-wise depth to it with the character of Octavian's older lover, the noblewoman Marschallin.

In her mid-thirties, the Marschallin is nearly twice Octavian's age and sees all too clearly that their affair must eventually end. Her Act I ruminations on the transitory nature of happiness and her final renunciation of Octavian in the exquisitely beautiful trio at the end of the third act lend her character a richness that makes her immediately appealing. That final trio, along with the duet for Sophie and Octavian that follows, also gives the comedy a rueful edge that contrasts wonderfully with the door-slamming farce that has gone before.

The 1945 orchestral suite of selections from the score (assembled with Strauss's approval but apparently without his participation) opens with the opera's overture, an unabashedly erotic depiction of Octavian and the Marschallin's night of passion (Con molto agitato, complete with orgasmic whoops from the horns) that is a neat bit of tongue-in-cheek comedy. It ends with the "fast waltz" (Schneller Walzer, molto con moto), in which Baron Ochs gets his comeuppance.

For this weekend's concerts, though, Maestro Denève has rearranged the order of the selections to more closely track the arc of the libretto. That means that the suite ends, not with that lavish waltz, but rather with that final, beautiful trio. So even if you heard this music when the SLSO last played it in 2013 under the baton of then-Resident Conductor Ward Stare, this rearranged version might shed new light on it all.

The Essentials: Stéphane Denève conducts The St. Louis Symphony Orchestra and pianist Jean-Yves Thibaudet on Saturday at 8 pm and Sunday at 3 pm, January 18 and 19. Performances take place at Powell Symphony Hall in Grand Center. The Department of Music at Washington University presents Jean-Yves Thibaudet and members of the SLSO in a program of chamber music by Poulenc and Shostakovich on Friday, January 17, at 7:30 pm. That concert takes place in the E. Desmond Lee Concert Hall at the 560 Music Center in University City.

Preview: "I'm not afraid of going for emotion," a conversation with composer Jeff Beal

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

Composer Jeff Beal

St. Louis Symphony Orchestra Conductor Laureate Leonard Slatkin leads the orchestra in the second of a pair of concerts this weekend, May 3 and 4, 2019. During his tenure with the orchestra, Mr. Slatkin championed new works and infrequently heard pieces by American composers, so it's not surprising that this weekend's concerts features one of each.

The concerts will open with the Symphony No. 1 by Samuel Barber. Composed in 1935 and 1936 in Rome, the work netted him the American Prix de Rome at the ripe old age of 25. It's expansive, dramatic music with a wide emotional range--the sort of thing that made some critics dismiss him as "conservative" at a time when serialism was all the rage and actual melodies were seen as somehow déclassé. It's great stuff.

Up next is the new work: "The Paper Lined Shack," a song cycle by contemporary American composer Jeff Beal that's getting its world premiere this weekend. Mr. Beal is probably best known for his music for the TV series "House of Cards," but he also has extensive film and, more recently, concert credits. I talked with him late last week.

---

Chuck Lavazzi (CL): I'd like to start off with a little bit about your background. I know you were a jazz trumpeter before you started composing, and that you picked up the trumpet at a very early age.

Jeff Beal (JB): Yes, I was in grade school--probably third or fourth grade--and I went to a school assembly with my dad where musicians were demonstrating different instruments. This guy picked up the trumpet and I pointed and said, "that's the one!" It's funny how your fate might get sealed at an early age, but I love the trumpet. It's a vocal instrument in many ways and it has always been a big part of my voice. When I started composing, I think improvising and being a jazz trumpet player opened the doors for me to be a composer.

CL: So you came to composing from the world of jazz. What was that transition like, moving from the freer atmosphere of jazz to composing for film and the concert hall?

JB: I think when you improvise in jazz, it really is a form of spontaneous composition. Also the other childhood connection that really influenced me was playing trumpet in the Oakland Youth Symphony Orchestra, which is a really fine youth orchestra. I'll never forget, we were playing Stravinsky's "The Rite of Spring," and I was listening to that incredible music, that mind of Stravinsky's, the colorful nature of it, and the fact that it was from a ballet so it had a narrative to it--and I knew that I wanted to write all kinds of music. Not just jazz but for the orchestra, to express my musical urges through composition.

CL: I was reading that you are something of a one-man band. You compose, orchestrate, and even engineer and record your own works. How does it feel to turn your artistic children out into the wild to be performed by others?

JB: That's a great question. Having done film for so long, I really missed that chance to connect back to the world of live performance. And I think I have relaxed a little bit. I'm 55 now and I'm more forgiving of the unpredictable nature of live performance. In fact, I really quite enjoy it.

One of the things I've discovered during these years of recording and producing my own scores is that often I prefer to use the first or second take, which is more like a live performance. So the energy of a live performance is one of the ultimate ways to not only have your work done but to listen to music.

I find myself going to a lot more concerts than when I was in the darkroom writing film scores. I think when you listen to music played live in a room by people something magical happens. For me it's like flying first class, especially with Hila Plitmann singing and Leonard Slatkin conducting. I couldn't be happier.

CL: The piece they're going to do is "The Paper Lined Shack," a song cycle. It's the world premiere. What has the experience been like working on that with the orchestra?

Soprano Hila Piltmann
Photo courtesy St. Louis Symphony Orchestra

JB: I had a session with Hila several weeks ago, and that was really useful. You always have a sense in your mind of what the piece is going to feel like and I do a little mock-up with the computers when I'm writing, but there's always something I learn when it really gets played by the orchestra and the way it lives and breathes in the room. I know I'm going to understand the piece in a different way, which is an enjoyable part of the experience for me. Whenever you're doing something for the first time, it has a life of its own and you're sort of discovering it, even if you wrote it. That's the amazing thing about music for me--it's a performance medium so I'm really looking forward to that.

One of things I like about Hila is that she always memorizes her music and she really takes on the story that she's singing. What she brings to it as a performer will be a powerful part of the piece.

CL: The text for "The Paper Lined Shack" is based on a diary by your great-grandmother Della that you found while unpacking some boxes.

JB: Yes, this was 20 years ago. My wife and I discovered it and she started reading it. I knew the general outline of what her story was, but reading it we thought "this is really special." There's some really beautiful writing, especially in the way she describes that crucial moment in her life when she was in Idaho pregnant with her sixth child and her husband got sick and died suddenly. She ended up raising these six kids on a farm by herself.

It was always in the back of my mind that it would be great to do something with this. I knew I wanted to have a strong female character for Hila because of her acting ability, something that really had dramatic weight, and that's when this came back to me. I read it with my wife Joan who helped me craft parts of this diary into a libretto. We both had similar ideas about the important images and parts of her life that we wanted in the song cycle.

CL: What made you think of this as a good choice for Leonard Slatkin and the SLSO?

JB: To me the St. Louis Symphony and Leonard Slatkin represent a very American take on culture and the part of the country that's dependent on the pioneer spirit, because anybody that didn't start on the East coast was a pioneer of some sort. Even though I grew up in San Francisco, I always felt that the West was part of the mythology of how I identified.

CL: I like the way your great-grandmother Della talks about her garden as part of the cycle of life.

JB: Yes, we bring that back in the last movement. I realized that's a really important part of my story as well. There's a documentary film I scored called "The Biggest Little Farm" opening May 10th. It's about a husband and wife that took over this farm in southern California, and I realized there's something powerful about that connection to the earth. There's something spiritual and mythical about it in a way, tapping into that universal part of the story.

This is a very personal text for me, but my hope is that, as a concert piece, it won't just be about my story. I hope that everybody will find something in Della that they can relate to. She was the only girl in a family of four brothers, so she was a kind of tomboy. This is the story of how she found her identity and a woman and became who she was. It's wonderful the humility she had and the lack of self-pity. It's a sort of Midwestern, Protestant work ethic that I find quite beautiful, hopeful, and not cynical.

I think we're living in such a horribly cynical time, politically and otherwise, so to me this isn't nostalgia. It's about values and celebrating the best we can be. The best of us.

CL: I think it also touches on something we seem very blind to in this country, which is our debt to the past. Americans seem to have this belief that the past doesn't matter and that we can reinvent ourselves every day, and that's just not real.

Della's paper lined shack

JB: I think that's a great point. I think inventiveness is great, but there's a danger in that. In fact, I rediscovered myself writing this.

I came up with the title based on a description of the house. It's really startling when you live in the modern era in a relatively wealthy country, it's a reality check to be reminded how so many people had so little and got by with so little and made it work.

CL: There's a picture of it in the program, so people will see it when the come.

JB: It has a kind of Ken Burns iconic look.

CL: Let's talk about the music. What are people going to hear when they experience "The Paper Lined Shack"?

JB: The music follows the beats of Della's life. It's somewhat chronological. So you first meet her as a young girl and the music has a childlike, playful character. There's energy and a definitely American sound. I'm really honored to be on the same program as Samuel Barber because his musical language is part of what I love.

The garden movement is much more lyrical and bittersweet. When Hila and I were rehearsing it we both started crying at a certain point because those are powerful words. I love music like that, that's cathartic. That probably goes back to my roots as a film composer. I'm not afraid of going for emotion in what I do. That part of what I love about being a composer, trying to communicate the feelings of an experience with somebody.

CL: I love these final words in the text: "It was love that we planted in the garden / There our hearts bloomed, / Our hearts opened. / Carry my heart." That feels like a wonderful way to close it.

JB: Thank you. I certainly hope people are moved by it.

CL: Is there anything more you want to communicate to the listeners?

JB: Well, Leonard Slatkin has been an important mentor in my life and I'm grateful to have him as a partner. His parents were very involved with film music, so he's not afraid to reach out to a film composer to write a piece of concert music. That's very special to me.

And I really feel--and I know Leonard feels this way too--that the more we can break down the barriers between "high" art and "low" art and the more we can have the story telling drive what gets played, I think that's the way music is going. I'm not the only one doing this and it's nice that this is starting to happen.

---

The Essentials: Leonard Slatkin returns to conduct the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra and soprano soloist Hila Plitmann Friday at 10:30 am and Saturday at 8 pm, May 3 and 4 at Powell Hall in Grand Center. In addition to the Barber and Beal works, the concert features Tchaikovsky's Symphony No. 6 ("Pathetique"). In an interview with me last week, Mr. Slatkin said his interpretation "will perhaps remind audiences, sonically, of what that collaboration [with the SLSO] was like in the earlier days when I was music director. It has changed over the years, but for the next couple of weeks we old timers will show the kids how we used to play."

Review: Slatkin takes flight with a diverse program at the symphony

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

Leonard Slatkin
Photo by Lewel Li

No doubt about, St. Louis Symphony Orchestra Conductor Laureate Leonard Slatkin got his two-week concert series off to a strong start Saturday night (April 27, 2019) with three very different and very fascinating pieces.

The concert started with Loren Loiacono's 2017 "Smothered by Sky." The composer describes this six-minute work as a "mini-concerto for orchestra" and, in fact, it bristles with flashy writing for most of the sections in the orchestra. She keeps the percussion section especially busy, banging away on a wide variety of devices, including rarely heard instruments like the flexatone (a popular item in cartoon soundtracks) and non-instruments like brake drums.

Quoted in the SLSO program, Ms. Loiacono says the work deals with the concept of "escape velocity" in physics but goes on to note that the piece "does not attempt to literally depict a rocket taking off or a satellite going into orbit. Instead, it embraces the metaphor behind that narrative, of barreling through atmospheric chaos in order to transcend gravity itself."

To my ears, though, there was a distinct sense, as the work began, of taking flight in the energetic percussion sounds, followed by a feeling of weightlessness in music for the high strings and woodwinds. Frantic brass outbursts increase in frequency until everything suddenly evaporates with a quick passage on the sizzle cymbal. Is that the sound of breaking earthly bonds or a flameout? It's up to the listener to decide.

It was, in any case, given a thrilling performance by the band, with especially impressive work by percussionists Will James, Alan Stewart, and Stephen Kehner with the reliable Tom Stubbs on tympani.

Olga Kern
Photo courtesy of St. Louis Symphony Orchestra

Next was an equally thrilling Rachmaninoff Piano Concerto No. 1. Originally written while Rachmaninoff was a student at the Moscow Conservatory, the concerto was later revised substantially on the eve of the Russian Revolution in 1917, and it's not hard to hear the faint echoes of that turbulence in the sweep and drama of this remarkably concise and vigorous work.

Soloist Olga Kern displayed the same virtuosity and keen musical insight that I heard when she played Rachmaninoff's "Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini" here with Mr. Slatkin in 2010. She pounded out those power chords in the first movement cadenza impressively and perfectly captured the wistful yearning of the second movement. In an interview with me n earlier in the week, Mr. Slatkin praised Ms. Kern's "wide variety and range of skills and styles," and you could certainly hear that in her performance.

Between the two of them, they generated positively volcanic energy in the opening pages and reveled in Rachmaninoff's unabashed Romanticism all the way to the end. Mr. Slatkin appears to have a solid sense of how to indulge Rachmaninoff without ever sounding indulgent. An enthusiastic standing ovation resulted in an electrifying encore from Ms. Kern: Prokofiev's motoric Etude Op. 2 No. 4, written when the composer was a brash young lad of 18.

The evening concluded with a stunning performance of Bernstein's highly theatrical Symphony No. 3 ("Kaddish"). Originally completed in 1963 just after the death of JFK and then revised in 1977, it's a work of wide-ranging theatricality and philosophical depth scored for massive forces (large orchestra, chorus, children's chorus, mezzo-soprano soloist, and speaker) that pushes everyone to their limits.

The work has not met with universal approval over the years. "Some of the responses to the new work were venomous," writes Tim Munro in his program notes. "The American press reactions to the original version," writes Jack Gottlieb in liner notes for Bernstein's 1978 recording of the revised edition, "read like notices of a controversial Broadway play: 'mustn't be missed!' and 'a melodramatic tearjerker!'"

Narrator Charlotte Blake Alston
Photo by Deborah Boardman

Some of the venom, no doubt, came from the narrator's confrontations with God, which condemn The Supreme Being for indifference to suffering and evil: "Tin God! Your bargain is tin! It crumples in my hand!" But as David Denby writes in a 2017 New Yorker article, this quasi-adversarial relationship with God is an essential facet of Bernstein's faith. "For Jews," he notes, "questioning not just God but the Old Testament itself--arguing with its contradictory assertions and laws--is an essential activity, central to the two-thousand-year-long project of interpretation."

Love it or hate it (I come down mostly on the "love it" side) the "Kaddish" Symphony can't fail to make a strong impression, especially in a performance as compelling as this one. A long-time champion of Bernstein's work, Mr. Slatkin pulled together the many disparate and complex elements of Bernstein's score into a powerful and consistently gripping whole.

That's not an easy task, given the sheer magnitude of the piece. The 90-piece orchestra and full chorus completely filled the stage, forcing the children's chorus and director Barbara Berner to perform on the orchestra floor in front of the stage. This could easily have been a recipe for chaos, but it all came together beautifully.

Narrator Charlotte Blake Alston delivered her lines with a gravitas that somewhat gave even the more melodramatic excesses of Bernstein's prose a sober dignity. Mezzo Sasha Cooke both sang and acted her part to perfection, most notably in the touching "Kaddish 2" portion of the second movement, which is a sort of lullaby for God.

Mezzo Sasha Cooke

I have praised Amy Kaiser and the St. Louis Symphony Chorus for their fine work in the past and they rose to the occasion once again in this challenging and complex score. The singers are required to hum, clap, and sing tricky counterpoint. At one point Bernstein breaks the chorus up into (at least) a half dozen small groups, each led by a different member of the chorus and each singing wildly divergent versions of '"amen." Only a chorus as polished as this one could make it all sound so coherent.

The first and only previous performance of this work by the SLSO was back in 1965, with Eleazar de Carvalho on the podium and Bernstein's wife, the actress Felicia Montealegre, as the narrator. That made it effectively a new piece for all concerned, which makes the high quality of the performance that much more impressive.

Leonard Slatkin concludes his two-week stint with the SLSO Friday at 10:30 am and Saturday at 3 pm, May 3 and 4, with a program of music by Tchaikovsky and Samuel Barber, along with the world premiere of "The Paper-Lined Shack" by Jeff Beal. Performances take place at Powell Hall in Grand Center.

Symphony Preview: "I try only to do the good stuff," a conversation with St. Louis Symphony Orchestra Conductor Laureate Leonard Slatkin

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

Leonard Slatkin

St. Louis Symphony Orchestra Conductor Laureate Leonard Slatkin has been a favorite of local audiences since his tenure as music director from 1979 to 1996. His time with the SLSO marked the ensemble's peak of international visibility and he left behind a significant recorded legacy.

Maestro Slatkin has made many appearances with the orchestra over the decades. Having left his post at the Detroit Symphony Orchestra, he has now returned to live in St. Louis and will conduct two sets of concerts with the orchestra this weekend and next (April 27-28 and May 3-4). I had an opportunity to chat with him between rehearsals. Here's our conversation, with some minor edits for clarity.

Chuck Lavazzi (CL): Many local music lovers may not be aware that in the late 1960s you had a relationship with community radio station KDNA, the predecessor of KDHX.

Leonard Slatkin (LS): That's exactly right. When I was the assistant conductor in 1968 the orchestra was on strike--hopefully not because I was the assistant conductor! I can't remember exactly how it happened but somebody contacted me and asked me if I'd come down to the station and do an interview. I didn't know anything about it and I was a bit surprised when I pulled up to what was basically the only building left standing in Gaslight Square.

We talked for about an hour and then I asked them if I could look at their classical music library. I looked through it and it was horribly out of order with no organization whatsoever. I offered to put it in some sort of order and they asked me if I'd be interested in doing a show. It had never occurred to me at all because I was quite shy back then but I thought "this could be interesting and could fill up some time," so I embarked on what became, for the next three years, a show called "The Slatkin Project" on Thursdays from 2 to 6 pm.

Back then you were the programmer, the producer, and the engineer for your show--one person doing everything in the little tiny room. We could do interviews, we could hook up four or five phone lines together and people could call in and talk on the air. There was a guy called "The Weatherbird" would call in every day at 5:30 pm to give a rather elaborate weather forecast. We used to tease him mercilessly.

I loved my time there because there was a lot of camaraderie at the station, not to mention a lot of drug busts, and it gave me an understanding of what the power of radio was, how--perhaps more than any other medium at the time--it had the power to spur on people's imaginations, to make their own images instead of having them put up on a screen for you.

So even though I could only do it for three years simply because I got too busy to devote any time to it, I always kept that radio stuff in the back of my head. Now I'm sort of resurrecting it in a way with another station in town. It will be sort of similar to the old show in that it's a mix of all kinds of stuff but the difference now is that I have adapted it to the 21st century. So I have ten thousand tracks on my iPad and I'm just going to hit the shuffle button and that's what I'll talk about and play.

Composer Loren Loiacono
Photo by Kenneth Kato

CL: That should be fun; I look forward to hearing that. Well, welcome back to St. Louis. You're conducting two concerts here over the next two weeks. I'd like to start out talking about what you're doing the first weekend, particularly two pieces that are very intriguing, beginning with the one you're going to open with, which is the local premiere of Loren Loiacono's "Smothered by Sky."

LS: Right. In my final season in Detroit, which was last season and which concluded a little too abruptly due to heart bypass surgery, I decided to do something a little different and I asked many composers, most of whom had associations with me here in St. Louis, to recommend either current or former students to write opening pieces for concerts. I picked seven of them and Loren was one. I found her work to be very attractive and very colorful for the orchestra.

The title, like most titles, was just something to create a starting point so she could create something that illustrated what the words mean to her. We have a feeling of air moving and currents, maybe in some cases a bit wildly and in others a bit calmly. I look at her as one of the bright lights in the composing firmament in the coming years.

There's so much emphasis now on inclusion of female composers and conductors so I thought that would be appropriate. We did many during my years in St. Louis, like Joan Tower and the person who is my wife, Cindy McTee. I've never chose to work with anybody on the basis of how they look or who they are, none of that, so I've never had to think about bias on my own part, but I certainly understand how it occurs in the industry, and I'm very happy that first piece I will do is by a female composer.

CL: I had a chance to watch the video of "Smothered by Sky" that you did with the Detroit Symphony and it stuck me as an extraordinarily fun piece. It also struck me as a bit like movie music in that it's so descriptive and so visual.

LS: I would say it's like music that creates imagery in your head, so you get to choose what movie it's going to be.

CL: Yes, it's very visual, and the visions you get are going to depend very much on who you are and what you bring to it.

LS: Exactly.

CL: It also sounded like a big playground for the orchestra. It's a huge ensemble and the percussion battery has some instruments you don't normally see there.

LS: Yeah, there are some different uses of traditional instruments. She has them quite busy. She's an expert colorist and orchestrator. That's one of the hallmarks of so many composers today, probably because they can get a better idea of the orchestra from the way they compose on computers and various devices. They create sound libraries with makes orchestration--I don't want to say "easier"--but you're able to hear on playback an approximation of what it's going to sound like in the orchestra. And that wasn't really available so much 25 years ago.

CL: I guess it makes it easier to be more adventurous because of that immediate feedback.

LS: Yes, but it also makes it a little more possible to be facile in a quicker way because of the immediate response. You don't have to think in the same way. It's like, you have the music in front of you and you play it, and you say "yes, I like that" or "no, I don't like that, gonna change it." And you can put the changes in and you can hear them right away. That's what composers couldn't do before. It was a different skill set.

Leonard Bernstein in 1955

CL: The other big work on the program is also a piece that might not be familiar to a lot of audience members: the Symphony No. 3, the "Kaddish" symphony by Leonard Bernstein. He began work on this in 1955, completed it in 1963 shortly after President Kennedy was killed, and then the St. Louis Symphony performed it in 1965. He revised it in 1977. Would I be safe in assuming it's the 1977 version that you're doing?

LS: Yes. The revisions are more about the text than about the music. This is a very personal piece, as many of Bernstein's works are. In this, he's challenging God over faith. "How can you do these kinds of things to me and to the world and still call yourself a God?" It's a dilemma that so many people go through.

This is not so much a Jewish work. It's similar to Bernstein's "Mass," which is not a Catholic work. These are works that deal with, more generally, how people perceive faith in its many directions, not necessarily religious. The religious part might be: how do you define (or not) your relationship with God if you believe in one. Or if you don't. That's what Bernstein was about, looking at angst in society in so many different ways.

It's written for a huge orchestra, chorus, soloists, and children's chorus--it's a big mélange. And also stylistically, he weaves in and out of mid-20th century atonality and serialism but then reverts to customary Bernstein melody and harmony.

We're now in the point in Bernstein's life where he's very well known both as a composer and conductor. "West Side Story" was already out of the way, but that's what people wanted, they wanted "West Side Story" again in whatever he wrote, and he couldn't do that. He desperately wanted to be accepted by music critics and the academic establishment. In works from around the period, he tried, but ultimately even he realized that this was not his forte.

About midway through the piece, when we actually get to the prayer, he reverts to a more songlike texture and then never really leaves it. So he doesn't return much the kind of aggressive music that he set up for the first 20 minutes of the piece. It's as if he has consoled himself in realizing that he knows where his own gifts lie.

CL: I was listening to Bernstein's recording of this with the Israel Philharmonic a couple of days ago. In the "Kaddish 2" section the soprano solo sings a kind of lullaby to God that's beautiful and heartbreaking.

LS: It's gorgeous, and he brings that back again at the end. He has more or less resigned himself that he has to reach the public first, that it shouldn't be about the critics and the academics, it should be about what he feels deeply inside.

CL: On the Leonardbernstain.dot com web site , Jack Gottlieb and some comments about the piece. One of the things she says is that this somewhat adversarial relationship between humanity and God is part of a uniquely Jewish view of God.

LS: It's not just a Jewish view, it's a view we see all over the place in the world today and even in Bernstein's time. He was someone who was really involved with the social aspects of society. He was involved with the Black Panthers, for example. So the conflict is not just about Man and God, it's about Man and how he functions in society itself. You can take the religious part as part of the Jewish tradition because the prayer is in Hebrew, but remember that the original narrator was a woman and in the Jewish faith a woman is not supposed to recite the Kaddish.

CL: And, in fact, it's going to be a woman this time.

Charlotte Blake Alston
Photo by Deborah Boardman

LS: Yes, we hunted high and low for a speaker. I did it two years ago with Jeremy Irons in New York and that was really quite spectacular, and now we have a young woman [Charlotte Blake Alston] who's actually a real storyteller. She has done it with the Philadelphia Orchestra and I am truly looking forward to this collaboration.

CL: What is it about this piece that really made you want to do it? What is it that really spoke to you?

LS: Well, here we are at the tail end of the Bernstein 100th anniversary celebration. We started recording Bernstein here in St. Louis under my tenure. Bernstein was always surprised that we were doing so much and I just kept telling him that I really loved the music, the orchestra loved to play it. But this was one of the few Bernstein pieces that we did not do when I was conductor, so I thought it would be nice this year to add one of the major pieces for the first time for me with the St. Louis Symphony.

CL: It seems to me that Bernstein's symphonies are a bit neglected compared with his other works.

LS: Well, the Second Symphony, "The Age of Anxiety," comes up a little more frequently. The First Symphony, "Jeremiah," by the way, was recorded for the first time by Leonard Bernstein and the St. Louis Symphony [in 1945]. This piece is also getting a little more attention than usual. It's still to early to know what his place will be in what we call the traditional classical canon. I don't think it will supplant the success of "West Side Story" or "Candide," but certainly works like the "Chichester Psalms," his Serenade for Violin and Orchestra, and a couple of other pieces have been played often enough to recognize him as an important force on the concert hall stage.

CL: Back in 2013, during a symposium at The Van Cliburn Competition, you were talking about your feelings conducting works that had already been recorded by their own composers. You noted at the time that not all composers were great conductors. How to you feel about doing a work where the composer was a great conductor, like Bernstein?

LS: Well, it's interesting, I didn't meet Bernstein until five years before he died. We always tried to get together but it never worked out. And finally we did because I was conducting the Boston Symphony in Tanglewood and I saw that Bernstein was conducting the next night, so I figured if I programmed a piece of his, he would show up and I would have to meet him.

And that's exactly what happened. I did a work that we had recorded here called "Facsimile"--very rarely played. And I knew it wasn't the best performance I had ever given--it just somehow didn't hang together in my head--and in walks Bernstein, cape and all, and I was prepared for the worst. And he looked at me and he said, "you know, that wasn't what I intended when I wrote it, but I understand how you came to your interpretive decisions."

And that actually changed the way I looked at conducting any composer's music, much less ones who were also good conductors. It told me that they realized, in order for their works to survive into the future, that they must undergo some sort of transformation in other interpreters' hands, in the very same way that those conductors had done Haydn, Beethoven, Schubert, Mahler, Shostakovich--whatever it was. A composer cannot be locked in to one way of having his or her piece played. It needs to be subject to different people looking at it in different ways.

CL: And the composers who were also conductors understood that most deeply, because they did that themselves.

LS: Yes. Bernstein did, Benjamin Britten did. I'm not sure if [Pierre] Boulez did. But the few who I considered to be outstanding conductors realized that they had to separate themselves from being the creators of the piece. They realized that they were now just the composers.

Olga Kern
Photo courtesy of St. Louis Symphony Orchestra

CL: There is one other piece on the program this weekend: the Piano Concerto No. 1 by Rachmaninoff with Olga Kern. You've worked with her before, yes?

LS: Yes, we work together all the time. I adore her playing. She's so wonderful and expressive, especially in this Russian Romantic music. She has a wide variety and range of skills and styles. She'll just tear the house down with this--we've done it a couple of time before. She's a delight and a commanding stage presence.

One quick word about the following week's program (May 3-5). This one has a premiere that's written in honor or my 50-year association with the St. Louis Symphony, but it's not a likely choice. The composer's name is Jeff Beal. He's known mostly for writing the music for "House of Cards." He's been active in television and film, but mostly in the concert hall. I wanted to do something a little bit different and he wanted to write a song cycle based on letters from his great-grandmother. And our soprano, also new to St. Louis but just mind-droppingly good, is Israeli-born singer Hila Plitmann. With her range, her virtuosity, and her acting ability, audiences are in for a real treat.

The piece is really beautiful. I think it's one of those pieces that will catch on very quickly. It's melodic and simple in its way. Keep looking out for Jeff Beal's name. He's going to be a force in concert hall composition and one of these composers to bridge the gap between popular culture and what we unfortunately call "sophisticated" culture. Although there shouldn't be a difference. It's like [Duke] Ellington said, there's only two kinds, good music and the other stuff. I try only to do the good stuff.

CL: That weekend you're also doing Samuel Barber's Symphony No. 1.

LS: Yes, a piece we recorded and which won a Grammy. And then the Tchaikovsky "Pathetique," the Symphony No. 6, his final work. It's another piece that we recorded. It's a performance that will perhaps remind audiences, sonically, of what that collaboration was like in the earlier days when I was music director. It has changed over the years, but for the next couple of weeks we old timers will show the kids how we used to play.

CL: And you have moved back to St. Louis now.

LS: Yes, my wife and I live in Clayton now. We're loving it. We went to a Cards game yesterday. I've got the barbecue ready to go. If I wasn't preparing to go to Europe in two weeks I'd be sitting on the porch for the entire summer.

CL: Welcome back, and I hope we see more of you in Powell Hall in the future.

LS: Oh, you will. I'll be around quite often.

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The Essentials: Leonard Slatkin returns to conduct the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra and Chorus Saturday at 8 pm and Sunday at 3 pm, April 27 and 28. The program consists of Loren Loiacono's "Smothered by the Sky," Rachmaninoff's Piano Concerto No. 1 with soloist Olga Kern, and Bernstein's Symphony No. 3 ("Kaddish") with narrator Charlotte Blake Alston. He conducts the orchestra and soprano soloist Hila Plitmann Friday and Saturday at 8 pm, May 3 and 4, in Barber's Symphony No. 1, Tchaikovsky's Symphony No. 6 ("Pathetique") and the world premiere of "The Paper Lined Shack" by Jeff Beal. Performances take place at Powell Symphony Hall in Grand. Center

Symphony Preview: Old French wine, new bottles

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

A couple of weeks ago we had an all-French evening at the St. Louis Symphony. This weekend Resident Conductor Gemma New will lead the orchestra in a program of three works for which the inspiration was French, even if the composers aren't.

Composer Thomas Adès
Photo by Brian Voce

The concerts open with a local premiere, the "Three Studies after Couperin" by contemporary British composer Thomas Adès (b. 1971). Commissioned by the Basel Chamber Orchestra and first performed by them in 2006, the "Three Studies" are orchestrations/transformations of keyboard works by the great French composer François Couperin (1668-1733).

Known as Couperin le Grand ("the Great") to distinguish himself from other not-quite-as-prominent members of his very musical family, François Couperin wrote, among other things, four volumes of harpsichord music between 1713 and 1730 for a total of over 230 individual pieces, many with highly descriptive and often fanciful titles. The three Adès selected for his "Studies" are "Les Amusemens" ("Amusements"), "Les Tours de Passe-Passe" ("Sleight of Hand"), and "L'âme-en-peine" ("The Soul in Pain"). As Guardian music critic Tom Service points out in his notes on the Faber Music web site, Adès calls these "studies" because they expand on the originals:

Each piece...has the same number of bars as the original, and contains the same harmonies and rhythms. So why, then, are these pieces 'studies' and not simply 'arrangements'? Adès may take nothing away from Couperin's original pieces, but he adds to them. Using an orchestra--really two, since the heart of the ensemble is a double string orchestra-- Adès makes each piece an investigation of a different musical idea: the textural amusement of the first, the way the melody melts from the bass flute solo to bassoon, to the strings and the brass, or the amplification of Couperin's pain-wracked soul in the third piece into a multi-faceted musical space. The second, Couperin's 'magic tricks' is the most spectacular of all, as Adès's own compositional sleight of hand creates a rhythmic tempest in the music's final moments.

If you'd like to get a preview of the music, the links in the previous paragraph will take you to performances by the Chamber Orchestra of Europe, conducted by the composer, so it's a safe bet they're authoritative. "Les Tours de Passe-Passe" is especially interesting in the way Adès has traditionally low instruments play at the top of their ranges. As Yvonne Frindle writes in her SLSO program notes, "[t]he frenetic sharing of melody notes between parts threatens disaster--hocus pocus!"

Parenthetical note: the literal translation of "Les Tours de Passe-Passe" would be "the passe-passe towers." Given that magicians still perform a trick today called the "passe-passe bottles," I strongly suspect that the present-day trick had its origins in an illusion Couperin depicted in his music.

Mozart, as drawn by Doris Stock, 1789

Up next will be Mozart's Concerto in C major for Flute and Harp, written in 1778 during a trip to Paris. Mozart was only 22 and already a seasoned traveler at the time, but this particular trip was not, like his earlier journeys to Europe's capitals, part of a concert tour. This time Mozart was looking for regular employment, and he thought he'd found it when the Duke of Guînes commissioned him to write a concerto that the Duke--an accomplished flutist--could perform with his harpist daughter.

Unfortunately, the Duke turned out to be the kind of rich guy who contracts for services and then refuses to pay for them (sound familiar?). Mozart never got paid for the work and it never got a public performance in his lifetime. Still, it's a lively and charming piece that will shine the spotlight on two of our local musical stars, Principal Flute Mark Sparks and Principal Harp Allegra Lilly.

It's interesting to note that at the time Mozart wrote this concerto the harp wasn't taken seriously as an instrument. Here's Chris Myers writing for the Redland Symphony:

Though popular in amateur settings, the instrument had a number of technical limitations that kept it from establishing a foothold in the concert hall (the modern concert harp as we know it wasn't even invented until 1810). Mozart seems to have decided to approach the instrument as a kind of plucked piano. Not only does the concerto lack the glissandi and broadly dramatic arpeggios we think of as so typically "harpish" today, but those listeners familiar with Mozart's piano works will recognize many of the gestures typical of his keyboard writing in the harp part. Though he left few clues as to his feelings about the experience, it is perhaps telling that he never used the instrument in another piece--an unusual omission for an eager adopter of new technology and an early champion of instruments such as the clarinet and the glass harmonica.

Reproduction of a late 18th-century flute
by flute-maker Boaz Berney
Photo by I, Aviad2001, CC BY 2.5
commons.wikimedia.org

Not only was Mozart uncomfortable with the harp, he didn't much care for the flute either. That might have been because the instrument was, in 1778, a fairly primitive wooden contraption with a small number of keys that was hard to keep in tune. The Duke's instrument apparently was a cutting edge English model with extra keys (for which Mozart wrote some extra low notes) but it still almost certainly bore little resemblance to the complex modern instrument Mr. Sparks will be playing. It's a safe bet that it was (to steal a joke of uncertain origin) an ill wind that nobody blows good.

English 6-key flute circa 1800
From oldflutes.com

The concerts will conclude with another instance of old French wine in new bottles: the suite from Richard Strauss's music for a revised and greatly expanded version of Molière's 1670 comedy about social climbers, "Le Bourgeois gentilhomme" (roughly "The Middle Class Gentleman"). The revision, by Strauss's frequent collaborator Hugo von Hofmannsthal, took a fake Turkish "marriage ceremony" in the original play and turned it into a full-length opera, "Ariadne auf Naxos."

The resulting very long evening (around four hours) was a flop. "Theater people," according to Aspen Music Festival program notes, "thought the opera took too much attention away from the play; opera buffs hated to have to sit through a play before the singing started. Moreover it was impractical and expensive, since a producer had to hire both a theater company and an opera company to put it on!"

These days "Ariadne" is often performed all by itself (the most recent local production was in 2016). Strauss prepared a suite of his incidental music for Hofmannsthal's version of the play, publishing it in 1919 as his Op. 60. It's not performed as often as it ought to be, in my view (the SLSO last did it in 1991), given what a continual delight it is.

Richard Strauss in London, 1914

Most of the music is original to Strauss, although he did base three of the nine movements in the suite on music originally composed for the play by Jean-Baptiste Lully (1632-1687), the celebrated French composer who frequently collaborated with Molière. The piece is a mock-Baroque amusement park, chock filled with solo small ensemble passages that give members of the band a chance to strut their stuff.

The "Menuett," for example, prominently features the flutes, while the movement that follows ("The Fencing Master") has some comically loopy bits for trombone, trumpet, and piano that portray the elaborate parry and thrust of the class. "The Entrance and Dance of the Tailors" offers a violin part so substantial it could almost be a mini-concerto.

As if all that weren't already enough fun, the final movement ("The Dinner") is filled with musical in-jokes, as detailed in the Aspen Festival Notes cited above:

It begins with an entrance march for the guests, and a series of courses identified musically and followed by the opportunity for some (musical) conversation: The fish is salmon (a quotation from Wagner's Ring tells us that it must have been caught in the Rhine). The meat is mutton (the sheep from Strauss's own Don Quixote). A lovely meditation for cello follows, perhaps for no better reason than that thinking of Don Quixote brought made Strauss think of the instrument featured in that score. Roasted songbirds are identified partly by the larks heard at the beginning of Rosenkavalier (and, for some strange reason, Verdi's "La donna è mobile"). Finally an omelette surprise is marked by the sudden arrival of a kitchen lad who performs a lively, suggestive waltz, though Strauss's music is filled with simple joie de vivre.

In short, if this music doesn't send you out of Powell Hall with a smile on your face, you might need to heed the advice of lyricist Lew Brown: "Life is just a bowl of cherries / Don't take it serious; it's too mysterious."

But don't take my word for it. There's a fine performance by Vladimir Jurowski and the Chamber Orchestra of Europe on YouTube that's marred only by commercials between some of the movements. There's also one conducted by JoAnn Falletta who was recently named Classical Woman of the Year by Performance Today listeners. It doesn't have the fancy camera work of the Jurowski performance, but on the other hand it doesn't have commercials.

The Essentials: Gemma New conducts the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra along with soloists Mark Sparks, flute, and Allegra Lilly, harp, on Friday at 10:30 am, Saturday at 8 pm, and Sunday at 3 pm, April 5-7. The concert takes place at Powell Symphony Hall, 718 North Grand in Grand Center.