Symphony Review: The SLSO honors musical nomads in the season opener

“A wandering minstrel I,” sings Nanki-Poo as he introduces himself in “The Mikado”; “A thing of shreds and patches.”

You wouldn’t call the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra “a thing of shreds and patches,” but with Music Director Stéphane Denève at the podium for the opening concert of the season last Sunday they were certainly doing some musical wandering. Certainly the first half of the program paid considerable homage to those famous wanderers, the Roma, with concert standards inspired by Hungarian folk tunes and the “Nomad Concerto” by Mason Bates.

Stéphane Denève
Photo: Dilip Vishwanat

Which is rather appropriate for an orchestra that will continue to lead a nomadic existence until the renovation of Powell Hall is completed next fall.

Things got off to an energetic start with a rousing performance of the “Rákóczi March”, a.k.a. the “Marche hongroise” from Part I of  the 1846 opera/oratorio hybrid “La damnation de Faust” (“The Damnation of Faust”) by Hector Berlioz (1803–1869). It’s the sort of orchestral showpiece that never fails to get an enthusiastic response—which it did.

Up next was another favorite, a set of the “Hungarian Dances by Johannes Brahms (1833–1897). Originally composed for piano duet and published in four sets between 1869 and 1880, the dances were orchestrated by various composers, including Brahms. Denève selected the three that the composer orchestrated (Nos. 1, 3, and 10) and played them attacca—i.e., without pause.

It was a smart choice, highlighting the contrast between the energetic first and tenth dances (marked Allegro molto and Presto, respectively) and the more introspective third (Allegretto). The result was a kind of “mini suite” that showed off both the composer’s orchestration and the virtuosity of the band. I was very taken with the flutes (including Ebonee Thomas, who seemed to be holding down the currently vacant Principal position for this concert) in the Dance No. 1, and the playful oboes and bassoons (under Associate Principals Phil Ross and Andy Gott, respectively) were a delight in Dance No. 3.  

Denève gave the dances the “full Roma” treatment, with just the right touches of rubato evoking the music’s folk origins.

The first half concluded with the “Nomad Concerto” by Mason Bates (b. 1977), composed for and premiered in January 2024 by this weekend’s soloist, violinist Gil Shaham. “Envisioned to showcase the legendary Old World sound of Gil Shaham,” writes Bates at his web site, “the concerto is informed by a diverse range of traveling cultures from Eastern Europe to the Middle East.”

Gil Shaham
Photo: Chris Lee

Running just under 30 minutes, the four-movement concerto is, as promised, an ideal virtuoso vehicle for Shaham. The last time I saw him with SLSO in January 2017 I praised his singing tone and the obvious joy of his playing. That’s still true, but this time I was also impressed by the versatility he displayed in delivering the wide range of sounds Bates has written for him. In the first movement (“Song of the balloon man”) his was wistfully Chaplinesque. He and the orchestra exchanged rapid-fire motifs in the brief “Magician at the bazaar” in a way that summoned up visions of flash paper going off all over the string section.  The third movement (“Desert vision: oasis) used the orchestra’s lower voices to suggest an arid expanse of wilderness, with the violin offering brief relief in the form of a yearning  version of the Jewish folk tune “Ani Ma’amin” (“I believe”).

Shaham and the band really cut loose, though, in the concluding movement, “Le jazz manouche.” Inspired by the sound of the legendary 1930s–1940s jazz combo Quintette du Hot Club de France—especially guitarist Django Reinhardt and violinist Stéphane Grappelli—the score has the soloist and orchestra trading licks the way an actual combo would. Shaham and the first violins seemed to be having an especially good time playing off each other here. Will James on jazz percussion and Peter Henderson on piano added considerably to the period atmosphere.

As much as I loved Shaham’s performance, though, I found it difficult to become involved with Bates’s score.  It felt more like a quasi-Impressionist collection of motifs that suggested but never really achieved the status of themes. It reminded me a bit of Debussy, except without the melodies and harmonic infrastructure.

The concert concluded with the Big Event, Berlioz’s splendiferous 1830 “Symphonie Fantastique.” Denève and the orchestra played this wildly hallucinatory work (Leonard Bernstein once dubbed it "the first psychedelic symphony in history”) back in 2019, as the closer of his last concert as Music Director Designate (he became the official MD that fall). At the time I described Denève’s interpretation as consistently engrossing, filled with interesting details (something that would prove to be a hallmark of his work on the podium) and concluding with a downright hair-raising final two movements. I’m repeating myself here because all of that still applies to what we experienced last Sunday.

The St. Louis Symphony Orchestra season continues October 4th and 6th at the Touhill Performing Arts Center; check out my preview for more information or head over to the SLSO web site.

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

Symphony Preview: The Grand Tour

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

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

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

Prokofiev in New York, 1918
Photo by Bain News Service

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

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

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

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

The interior of Grieg's hut at Troldhaugen

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

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

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

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

Rachmaninoff in 1921
Public Domain, Wikimeida Commons

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

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

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

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

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

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

Symphony Review: An enlightening journey into darkness with Karen Gomyo and the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra

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

This weekend (October 18-20) Stéphane Denève returned to conduct the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra (SLSO) in an early 20th century program that moved from light to darkness (or at least twilight) with a lyrical pause in between.

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

Stéphane Denève
Photo courtesy of the SLSO

The concert, which I saw on Friday the 18th, opened with the bright and witty suite from Francis Poulenc's 1923 ballet "Les Biches." The title has multiple meanings in France, but Friday night it mostly translated as "vastly entertaining" as Mr. Denève conducted the orchestra in a performance that was as effervescent and intoxicating as the Champagne they're serving at the bar. It was crisp, detailed, and filled with the little nuances that Mr. Denève infallibly finds in even the lightest material. The orchestral playing was consistently excellent, including some fine solos by Principal Oboe Jelena Dirks, Associate Principal Trumpet Tom Drake, and Tzuying Huang on bass clarinet.

Up next was Prokofiev's Violin Concerto No. 1 in D major, op. 19, composed in 1917 but, because of the Russian revolution, not actually performed until 1923. It wasn't particularly well received, partly because its overall lyricism seemed tame compared to the kind of sarcastic and savage music for which the composer was known at the time.

Still, as I have noted in the past, "lyrical" is hardly a synonym for "easy." The concerto is filled with challenges both emotional and technical, including a finale that has the soloist playing a chain of trills that moves higher and higher to the very top of the instrument's range, where playing in tune becomes increasingly more difficult.

In an intermission interview Saturday night on the St. Louis Public Radio broadcast of the concert, soloist Karen Gomyo noted that the concerto is not one she has played often, but you would hardly have known that from the fierce emotional commitment and polished technique she displayed on Friday. The last time I saw Ms. Gomyo here was just this past April, when I praised her Tchaikovsky concerto as "technically pristine and warmly expressive." I frankly can't think of a better or more accurate way to describe her way with the Prokofiev.

Karen Gomyo
Photo courtesy of the SLSO

The inevitable and richly deserved standing ovation she received was followed by an encore that proved to be an ideal emotional match for the finale of the Prokofiev concerto: Astor Piazzolla's "Tango Etude No. 4." There was a time not so very long ago when the music of the Argentinian composer and bandoneon virtuoso was unlikely to show up on a concert stage, much less as an encore work. It's good to hear more of his work, especially when played with the sensitivity Ms. Gomyo brought to it.

Night descended in dramatic and powerful fashion after intermission with Rachmaninoff's 1941 "Symphonic Dances." It was the composer's last completed work (he died two years after its premiere), and there's a sense throughout of a life approaching its conclusion. Rachmaninoff had, in fact, originally titled the three sections "Noon," "Twilight," and "Midnight," but he later dropped the titles, preferring to let the music speak for itself. Which it does eloquently.

Maestro Denève brought a wider variety of expression to the work than I have sometimes heard in the past. The central section of the first movement (marked non allegro), for example, was slower and more intense than I have sometimes heard in other performances. Mr. Denève also does not shrink from using the composer's pauses to make silence a key component of the music. It can be a risky choice in an episodic piece like this one, but I thought it had tremendous emotional impact, especially in the dark and dramatic final movement.

The "Symphonic Dances" can be a real showpiece for a top-flight orchestra, and it was certainly all of that Friday night. Everyone was playing at a high level of skill and emotional commitment. The key solo moments (and there are a lot of them) were spot on. That includes (but is certainly not limited to) the contributions of Concertmaster David Halen, Cally Banham on English horn, Nathan Nabb on alto sax, Principal Harp Allegra Lilly, and Nina Ferrigno on piano. Every section of the orchestra was essentially at perfect form. Nice job, ladies and gentlemen.

It was, in short, another fine evening at the symphony, and a very appropriate one for the lengthening shadows of autumn. That said, the size of the crowd Friday night was disappointing. I understand that the early concerts in the season are usually not the most well attended, but even so the fine work being done at Powell Hall deserves a bigger turnout.

Next at Powell Hall: Expect much larger crowds this coming weekend when Norman Huynh conducts the SLSO for a showing of the film "Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince," with the score performed live. Performances are Friday and Saturday at 7 pm and Sunday at 2 pm, October 25-27.

Symphony Preview: My favorite Beethoven

Christian Macelaru

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This weekend (October 21 - 23, 2016) a pianist popular with local audiences, Orli Shaham, returns to perform my favorite Beethoven piano concerto with the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra in a program that begins and ends with Russian music. Philadelphia-based conductor Cristian Macelaru is at the podium.

The concerto in question is Beethoven's Concerto No. 4 in G major, Op. 58, composed in 1806 and first performed in March 1807 at a private concert of the home of Prince Franz Joseph von Lobkowitz. The public got its first exposure to it at a concert on December 22nd of the following year at Vienna's Theater an der Wien, with the composer as both soloist and conductor.

The hall was freezing cold, the musicians poorly prepared, and program a four-hour monster, including the premieres of not only the fourth concerto but also the Choral Fantasy for piano, chorus and orchestra (a work often seen as a kind of "first draft" for the finale of his Symphony No. 9), the Symphony No. 5, and Symphony No. 6 (the "Pastorale"). Still, as audience member Johann Friedrich Reichardt (cited in program notes for the Los Angeles Philharmonic reported, the concerto made quite an impression: “[Beethoven] played with astounding cleverness and skill and at the fastest possible tempi. The Adagio [sic], a masterly movement of beautifully developed song, he sang on the instrument with a profound, thrilling melancholy.”

Orli Shaham

The Fourth is my favorite in part because it's so concise. I don't think there's a spare note in the entire work and everything is perfectly proportioned. It's also remarkably innovative for its time-beginning with the unusual opening, in which a short declaration by the solo piano is then taken up by the orchestra. Normal procedure would have been to have the orchestra state all the major themes before the piano made its first entrance. Instead, the movement seems to grow out of a dialogue between the soloist and the orchestra.

The second movement is a dialogue between the soloist and the band as well, but this time it's in the form of a call and response, in which dramatic pronouncements by the orchestra are met, at least initially, with more subdued and lyrical material by the soloist.

As Paul Schiavo writes in his program notes for these concerts, this unusual structure has given birth to "a tradition that equates the music with the mythic scene of Orpheus taming the Furies of the underworld with his song" (a notion first advanced by Beethoven's biographer Adolph Bernhard Marx in 1859). When I first heard this movement, though, I had a very different response to it. To my ears it's an argument (or maybe a debate), with the aggressive stance of the orchestra met, at first, with attempts at calm reason, then with agitation, and finally with a kind of resignation. It's as if, after trying in vain to calm and placate its orchestral partner, the piano finally sighs and say, "OK, OK, you win. Let's just drop it."

Anyone who has ever gotten into a political firefight on Facebook will recognize the progression.

It's hard to say what Beethoven actually had in mind. The great pianist Arthur Rubinstein once described the movement as having been “written by a man in mortal fear.” And Beethoven's pupil Carl Czerny (cited in program notes for the San Francisco Symphony) said that "in this movement (which, like the entire concerto, belongs to the finest and most poetical of Beethoven's creations) one cannot help thinking of an antique dramatic and tragic scene, and the player must feel with what movingly lamenting expression his solo must be played in order to contrast with the powerful and austere orchestral passages.” The bottom line is that when it comes to its tragic conclusion, I have always felt a need to exhale slowly to prepare myself for the jolly, Haydnesque Rondo finale.

Serge Rachmaninoff, circa 1936

After intermission, we get a work that's also tinged with a kind of calm resignation: Serge Rachmaninoff's Symphonic Dances from 1941.

When I first heard this piece (a 1961 LP recording by Eugene Ormandy, who conducted the work's world premiere), I was immediately struck by the “late night” feel of the music-and not just because of the chimes in the last movement. I was not surprised to learn, then, that Rachmaninoff had originally titled the three sections “Noon,” “Twilight,” and “Midnight”. This was the composer's last completed work (he died two years after its premiere), and there's a sense throughout of a life approaching its conclusion.

The composer dropped the titles, preferring the let the music speak for itself, and it does so eloquently. The work is filled with evidence of Rachmaninoff's genius as an orchestrator, with elaborate and complex string writing, inventive use of brasses and winds (including a short but poignant solo for alto sax), and an effective but never overwhelming use of the large percussion battery. This is dramatic music that is nevertheless steeped in fall melancholy-very appropriate given that we passed the autumn equinox a month ago.

This weekend's concerts will open with a work that will probably be unfamiliar to you unless, like me, you're a big fan of late 19th century virtuoso piano works. It's Islamey, an "Oriental Fantasy" written in 1869 and then revised in 1902 by Mily Balakirev. We'll be hearing the orchestral arrangement by Sergey Lyapunov, but the piano original is widely viewed as one of the most technically difficult works ever written for that instrument. "It is a score that demands the fanciest of finger work," observes Tim Page in his liner notes for the spectacular 1998 recording by Yefim Bronfman, "as well as an extraordinary range of tone color and a certain intensity of conviction to hold it all together." Check out Bronfman's recording on YouTube to hear what he means.

The orchestral version is pretty colorful as well, building over the course of nine minutes to what Mr. Schiavo accurately describes as an "animated coda that concludes the piece with a display of virtuoso orchestral fireworks." It's lively, fun stuff and an excellent way to open a concert.

Balakirev, by the way, was part of a group of Russian composers commonly referred to as the "Mighty Handful" (a.k.a. the "Russian Five") who were important in the formation of the Russian nationalist school of composition; César Cui, Modest Mussorgsky, Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov and Alexander Borodin were the other four. Balakirev, unfortunately, was far less prolific than his compatriots and less comfortable as a composer, although we're told he was a pretty spectacular pianist. These days Islamey is the only one of his works that gets any attention, but in his time he was remarkably influential. Here's how the Encyclopedia Britannica summarizes his legacy:

"It has been said that it was Balakirev, even more than Glinka, who set the course for Russian orchestral music and lyrical song during the second half of the 19th century. He developed an idiom and technique that he imposed on his disciples (above all on Rimsky-Korsakov and Borodin, and to some extent on Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky) not only by example but by constant autocratic supervision of their own earlier works. His music is superbly colourful and imaginative, but his creative personality was arrested in its development after 1871, and his later work is couched in the idiom of his youth."

The Essentials: Cristian Macelaru conducts the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra, with piano soloist Orli Shaham, on Friday and Saturday at 8 p.m. and Sunday at 3 p.m. October 21 - 23. The concerts take place at Powell Symphony Hall, 718 North Grand in Grand Center. The Saturday concert will be broadcast live on St. Louis Public Radio.