Symphony Preview, May 4, 5: Incidentally speaking

Peer Gynt
Photo:: Robert Torres

This weekend, St. Louis Symphony Orchestra (SLSO) Music Director Stéphane Denève returns to conduct the orchestra, chorus, and soloists in the final concert of the season. There’s only one thing on the program: a rewritten serio-comic version of Henrik Ibsen’s 1876 epic play/poem “Peer Gynt” by writer/actor/director Bill Barclay using the original music by Edvard Grieg (1843–1907). First staged for the Boston Symphony Orchestra in 2017 and then taken on the road, this “Peer Gynt” shrinks Ibsen’s five-hour, 40-scene spectacle down to just over two hours (including intermission) with eight actors taking on the play’s 21 roles.

Although popular in Norway, Ibsen’s elaborate five-act tragedy about the globetrotting adventures of a feckless young man who seems afflicted with terminal immaturity has not traveled as well as the great dramatist's other works. Grieg's incidental music, on the other hand, has become an international favorite, thanks to the composer's ability to create appealing themes and paint vivid orchestral pictures of the play's action.

Edvarg Grieg

Grieg wrote around 80 minutes of music for the play, but most concertgoers have heard only the eight pieces Grieg collected in his two suites. And even those have been reworked for concert purposes.

The popularity of the suites is hardly surprising, though. The full score, consisting of 26 numbers, wasn’t published until a year after the composer’s death, in an edition by Norwegian composer Johan Halvorsen (1864–1935). To confuse things even more, the score was thought to be lost until 1986 or thereabouts. It was finally published by Edition Peters in 1988.

I haven’t been able to determine how many of those 26 numbers Barclay managed to include in his concert theatre version of the play, but I was able to locate a recording by Ole Kristian Ruud and the Bergen Philharmonic Orchestra of what’s billed as the “Complete Play With Complete Incidental Music,” even though it runs less than two hours. But the “complete incidental music” part does appear to be correct, so I pulled all the musical numbers (including the ones that include dialog) and used them to create a new playlist on Spotify:

Yes, there are 27 tracks instead of 26. That’s because the recording breaks score No. 12—“The Death of Åse (Prelude to Act III”)—into two separate tracks. That’s understandable since the prelude music is repeated, pianissimo, as underscore for the scene in which Peer’s mother, Åse, actually dies. Since that scene is described in detail in Yvonne Frindle’s excellent program notes, I thought you might like to hear what it sounds like in performance, even if it is in Norwegian.

Listening to Greig’s complete score this way can be a revelation if your only prior experience to the music comes from the two suites. As much as I love them, I have to admit that they leave out a lot of worthy music, including the two brief appearances by the traditional Norwegian Hardanger fiddle (played this weekend by Nordic folk musician Vidar Skrede).

It's also a treat to hear the chorus adding genuine menace as a mob of trolls in the extended “Mountain King” sequence. And the small group of women chorus members singing the roles of the rude “Herd Girls” taunting Peer in Ibsen’s Act II should be fun.

Camilla Tilling
Photo: Maria Östlin

Greig wrote two lovely songs for Solveig (who inexplicably finds something loveable in the otherwise reprehensible Peer). “Solveig’s Song” is the only one that made it into the suite, and then only as an instrumental. This weekend you’ll be able to hear both it and the touching “Solveig’s Cradle Song” from Ibsen’s Act V, sung by Swedish soprano Camilla Tilling, who has substantial credits on both opera and concert stages.

There is much more to be said about Ibsen’s play, Grieg’s music, and the uneasy partnership between the two. Fortunately that’s all covered rather well in the SLSO program notes, so there’s no need for me to repeat it all here. The official Concert Theatre Works “Peer Gynt” web site also has some video sneak peeks which I highly recommend.

The Essentials: Music Director Stéphane Denève returns to conduct St. Louis Symphony Orchestra and Chorus in the regular season finale, “Peer Gynt.” Soprano Camilla Tilling sings the role of Solveig and Vidar Skrede plays the Hardanger fiddle. The production is written and directed by writer/actor/director Bill Barclay and includes most of the incidental music Greig wrote for the play. See the SLSO program notes for a complete list of credits. Performances are Saturday at 7:30 pm and Sunday at 3 pm, May 2 and 3, at the Stifel Theatre.

Symphony Preview: A hazy shade of winter

Hannu Lintu
Photo: Marco Borggreve

Spring may be on its way, but this Friday and Sunday (March 14 and 16) a brisk Nordic breeze will, sonically speaking, waft through the Touhill Performing Arts Center for the first half of  the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra concert as Finnish guest conductor Hannu Lintu presents a pair of works from his native land. They’re part of a tribute to the late Helsinki-born composer Kaija Saariaho, who died of a brain tumor in 2023.

The concerts open with Saariaho’s “Ciel d’hiver” (“Winter Sky”), which had its local premiere on October 7, 2022, under the baton of Jonathon Heyward. My description of it here comes from the preview article I wrote back then.

Since 1982, Saariaho had been living in Paris, where her studies at the Institute for Research and Coordination in Acoustics/Music (IRCAM) convinced her to turn away from serialism and towards spectralism, a movement that treats orchestral color (the sonic spectrum) as a compositional cornerstone.  You can hear that in the rich acoustic palette of “Ciel d’hiver,” which is a 2014 re-orchestration of the second movement of Saariaho’s 2002 suite "Orion."

Kaija Saariaho
Photo courtesy of the SLSO.

Beginning with high woodwinds suspended over growling low notes with not much in between, the work strongly suggests the bleak emptiness of a dark, chilly night. The aurora borealis shimmers in the exotic percussion battery, and eventually the winds begin to moan ominously. Finally the sky clears to a tinkling piano motif and an evanescent cello melody and it all fades to black.

All that suggests, as W.C. Fields repeatedly declaims in “The Fatal Glass of Beer,” that “it ain’t a fit night out for man nor beast.” But this music has a forbidding beauty all the same.

Up next is the local premiere of the 2024 Viola Concerto by Magnus Lindberg (b. 1958) with soloist Lawrence Power, for whom the concerto was written. I interviewed Lindberg about it on my YouTube blog:

Lindberg’s comments on the virtues of writing for an 18th century-sized orchestra (strings, woodwinds, and trumpets only) are especially interesting, as are his thoughts on how his approach to composition has evolved over the decades.

The concerts conclude with the Symphony No. 2 in C major, Op. 68 by Robert Schumann (1810–1856). Written in 1845 and 1846, it’s the product of a time in the composer’s life marked by both an intense burst of creativity and an onset of the illness that would eventually destroy both his mind and body. If the first half of the program is about varieties of darkness, then Schumann’s symphony is about an eventual emergence into the light.

“For several days,” he wrote to his friend Felix Mendelssohn in September of 1845, “drums and trumpets in the key of C have been sounding in my mind. I have no idea what will come of it.” What came of it was the fanfare-like motif that dominates the Sostenuto assai – Allegro, ma non troppo first movement. Although highly reminiscent of the fanfare that opens Haydn’s Symphony No. 104 (“London”), it’s much more emotionally ambiguous, especially in the overall context of a movement that Judith Chernaik (in Schumann: The Faces and the Masks, 2018) describes as “agitated, even distraught in feeling.” Indeed, both the first movement and the Scherzo second movement can come across as a mix of the energetic and febrile, depending on how the conductor approaches them.

Schumann recognized that there was an element of agony and conflict behind the symphony. “I sketched it out,” he wrote to Mendelssohn, “while suffering severe physical pain; I may well call it the struggle of my mind, by which I sought to beat off my disease.” That struggle is most apparent in the anguished Adagio espressivo third movement, which Chernaik accurately describes as “an unmediated expression” of the composer’s suffering. It’s only in the Allegro molto vivace finale that he shows us his hope of returning health.

P.S. I put together my own playlist for this one so that I could include the world premiere recording of Lindberg’s concerto as well as a recording of the Schumann Symphony No. 2 by the SLSO under the baton of the late Jerzy Semkov, who was Music Director of the orchestra from 1975 to 1979.. 

The Essentials: Hannu Lintu conducts the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra and soloist Lawrence Power in the Viola Concerto by Magnus Lindberg, Kaija Saariaho’s “Ciel d’hiver,” and Schumann’s Symphony No. 2. Performances take place at the Touhill Performing Arts Center on Friday at 7:30 pm and Sunday at 3:00 pm, March 14 and 16. The Friday concert will be broadcast on Saturday night, March 15, at 7:30 pm on St. Louis Public Radio and Classic 107.3.

Symphony Preview The Comeback Kid

For Valentine’s Day weekend, Music Director Stéphane Denève and the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra have a program that features a pair of passionate audience favorites by Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninoff, along with the world premiere of Anna Clyne’s multi-media Concerto for Orchestra, “PALETTE.”

I covered Clyne’s work extensively in an interview with her on my video blog. In this piece I’m going to concentrate of the two Romantic blockbusters by liberally re-writing material I first published about a decade ago.

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

Tchaikovsky circa 1872

There’s little doubt that the "Romeo and Juliet Overture-Fantasy" is one of the Greatest Hits of Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky (1840–1893). First performed in Moscow in 1870 and then revised in 1877 and 1880, the work manages the neat trick of compressing the essential emotional themes of Shakespeare's five-act tragedy into around 20 minutes of music. The "love theme" is, as Daniel Durchholz writes in his program notes for a 2014 St. Louis Symphony performance, "one of Tchaikovsky's best and most memorable melodies." With lyrics by Buddy Bernier and Bob Emmerich, it even became a hit song: "Our Love," recorded by the Larry Clinton band in 1939.

The Piano Concerto No. 2 in C minor, Op. 18 by Sergei Rachmaninoff (1873 – 1943), which concludes the concerts, inspired not one but two pop songs (three if you count a 1975 Eric Carmen ballad), both recorded by Frank Sinatra: “I Think of You” from 1957 (adapted from the second theme of the first movement by Jack Elliott, Don Marcotte) and “Full Moon and Empty Arms.” The latter was adapted by Buddy Kaye and Ted Mossman. Sinatra’s recording rose to number 17 on the Billboard charts in 1945.

Of somewhat more interest than the concerto’s success as a source of Top 40 inspiration, however, is the remarkable story of its troubled origins.

Rachmaninoff’s career got off to promising start. By the age of 20 he had already finished his Piano Concerto No. 1, had his opera Aleko produced to great acclaim at the Bolshoi Theater, and published a plethora of works for orchestra and solo piano. That includes his immensely popular Prelude in C-sharp minor, which the composer would later come to loathe. In short, Rachmaninoff’s star was on the rise

That star fell abruptly when the composer's Symphony No. 1 had its St. Petersburg premiere in 1897. The performance was a debacle. Conductor Alexander Glazunov, a notorious alcoholic, was said to be conducting under the influence and critics hated it. Vituperatively.

Rachmaninoff in 1900
en.wikipedia.org

The psychological impact on the young Rachmaninoff's was devastating. He spiraled down into a depression so severe that friends urged him to seek help from one Dr. Nikolai Dahl, who was then making a name for himself in Moscow with hypnotherapy.

Dahl hypnotized Rachmaninoff daily for three months. "I heard repeated, day after day,” recalled the composer, ”the same hypnotic formula as I lay half somnolent in an armchair in Dr. Dahl's consulting room. 'You will start to compose a concerto—You will work with the greatest of ease—The composition will be of excellent quality.' Always it was the same, without interruption."

The result was everything Rachmaninoff could have hoped for. Ideas for the concerto "began to well up within me," he reported. The second the third movements were completed by the autumn on 1900 and by the spring on 1901 the entire work was ready for a November Moscow premiere under Alexander Siloti, with the composer at the piano. It was a hit and has remained so ever since. Rachmaninoff was on the comeback trail.

The SLSO recorded all of Rachmaninoff’s concertos in 1990 under Leonard Slatkin with Abbey Simon at the keyboard. You can listen to the 2023 remaster of the Concerto No. 2 on Spotify. I think it holds up quite well. The soloist this weekend will be Nikolai Lugansky, who gave us a superlative Rachmaninoff Concerto No. 3 back in 2017 with John Storgårds at the podium. Lugansky recorded all of the concertos in the early 2000s, so this will likely be familiar territory for him.

The Essentials: Stéphane Denève conducts the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra in the world premiere of Anny Clyne’s “PALETTE,” Tchaikovsky’s "Romeo and Juliet Overture-Fantasy," and Rachmaninoff’s Concerto No. 2 with piano soloist Nikolai Lugansky. Performances are Friday and Saturday, February 14 and 15, at 7:30 pm at the Touhill Performing Arts Center on the University of Missouri—St. Louis campus. Saturday night’s concert will be broadcast live on St. Louis Public Radio and Classic 107.3 and will be available as an on-demand stream for a month starting the week of February 17th.

Symphony Preview: The swans of Ainola

Twentieth century American composer William Grant Still (1985–1978) has been getting a fair amount of long-overdue attention in recent years. His one-act opera “Highway 1, USA” got an exceptional production at Opera Theatre of St. Louis in 2021. Just last month on his “Sticky Notes” podcast, conductor Joshua Weilerstein did a detailed analysis of Still’s 1931 Symphony No. 1 (“Afro-American”)— the most popular of all American symphonies until 1950. Search for him on Spotify and you will find an impressive list of recordings of his music. And yet for decades after his death his work was routinely ignored.

William Grant Still
By Carl Van Vechten/ Adam Cuerden
Public Domain

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

I mention all of this because the local premiere of Still’s 1965 “Threnody: In Memory of Jean Sibelius” opens the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra (SLSO) concerts this weekend (Friday and Sunday, November 22 and 24). Guest conductor Jonathon Heyward (last seen here in 2022) will be on the podium and Yeol Eum Son will make her SLSO debut in a program that includes the Piano Concerto No. 2 in G minor, Op. 16, by Sergei Prokofiev (1891–1953) and (not surprisingly) the Symphony No. 5 by Jean Sibelius (1865–1957).

What motivated Still to honor Sibelius? To begin with, there was the fact that, as Matthew Mendez wrote in program notes for the Boston Symphony, “during the 1920s, when Still was discovering his musical voice, Sibelius’s scores were in considerable vogue in the English-speaking world” and his symphonies “were viewed by many as outstanding achievements with which any young composer would need to come to grips.”  There’s also the fact that Sibelius, like Still, insisted on composing in his own voice, regardless of what particular school was in vogue at any given moment.

The ”Threnody” is short but intense, opening with a dramatic declaration from the brass section followed by a sustained elegy that alternates between lament and funeral march. It’s intensely moving and yet comforting at the same time.

Prokofiev in New York, 1918
Photo by Bain News Service

The Prokofiev concerto that follows sounds like something of a lament at first, possibly because the composer’s friend pianist Maximilian Schmidt had committed suicide just a few months before the concerto's first performance in 1913. Then fate dealt the composer a second blow in the form of a fire that incinerated the original manuscript along with the composer’s apartment.

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

Number it how you will, the G minor concerto is, as I wrote in a 2019 preview, a testament to Prokofiev's skill at the keyboard. It's a wildly difficult piece, with four movements in which the tempo never falls below Allegro and a stunningly challenging first movement cadenza that, at around five minutes, takes up almost as much time as the rest of the movement. In fact, as David Nice wrote in BBC Music Magazine, even Prokofiev “got into a terrible mess trying to perform it with [Ernest] Ansermet and the BBC Symphony Orchestra in the 1930s, when it had gone out of his fingers."

Finally, a few words about the Sibelius Symphony No. 5 in E-flat major, Op. 82. Originally composed in 1914 and 1915 and first performed on the composer’s 50^th birthday in 1915, the Fifth went through several subsequent rewrites, reaching its final form in 1919. Having heard both the original four-movement 1915 version and final three-movement 1919 version, I have to say that the composer saved the best for last.

Ainola, photographed in 1915 By Unknown author
Public Domain

Slightly shorter and more structurally compact that it was the first time around, the final version of the symphony covers a vast swath of emotional territory.  From the first movement’s mellow horn quartet, swirling woodwind figures, and mysterious bassoon solo over pianississimo strings, to the grand sweep of the Allegro molto final movement, this is music that overflows with both the light and darkness of Finland’s wild beauty. Possibly the most glorious example of that comes at the very end of that movement with the famous “swan theme”—so called because Sibelius wrote it after witnessing a flight of sixteen swans, which he described as “one my greatest experiences”:

Lord God, what beauty! They circled over me for a long time. Disappeared into the solar haze like a gleaming silver ribbon… Strange to learn that nothing in the whole world affects me—nothing in art, literature, or music—in the same way as do these swans and canes and wild geese.

In fact, before he turned thirty Sibelius had already left urbanity to live closer to the soil. From 1892 until his death in 1957, Sibelius lived and worked in Ainola, a home he had built entirely of wood (he didn't want to hear the sound of rain in metal gutters) on Lake Tuusula in the Finnish forest, where he often went for long walks. That love of nature informs every bar of the both the first and final versions of the Symphony No. 5. This weekend, you’ll hear the latter. Done well, it will be inspiring.

The Essentials: Jonathan Heyward conducts the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra and piano soloist Yeol Eum Son in William Grant Still’s “Threnody: In Memory of Jean Sibelius,” Prokofiev’s Piano Concerto No. 2, and Sibelius’s Symphony No. 5. Performances are Friday at 10:30 am and Sunday at 3 pm, November 22 and 24, at the Touhill Performing Arts center on the UMSL campus. A recording of the Friday morning concert will air on Saturday, November 23, at 7:30 pm on St. Louis Public Radio and Classic 107.3.

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

Symphony Preview: Sous le ciel de Paris

This weekend (November 15 and 16) Stéphane Denève conducts the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra in the second of two programs devoted almost entirely to the music of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756–1791). It’s all Mozart all the time—except for the 12 minutes or so that will be Anna Clyne (b. 1980).

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

An English-born composer now residing in the USA, Clyne’s name is one that should be familiar to SLSO regulars. The orchestra has played a number of her works over the last decade or so, usually to appreciative (and well-deserved) applause. In fact, the Clyne work we’ll hear this weekend was the first of her compositions that the SLSO played.

That work is “Within Her Arms” for string orchestra. Written as an elegy for the death of the Clyne’s mother in 2008, the piece is (as I wrote back then) a kind of memory play. Its somewhat mysterious music, which at times seems to harken back to Vaughn Williams or even Thomas Tallis, rises from a whisper to a roar before finally fading away, slowly, into nothingness. “The rest,” as Hamlet says, “is silence.”

Anna Clyne
Photo by Christina Kernohan courtesy of the SLSO

“Within Her Arms” is the only work on the program that’s missing from the SLSO’s Spotify playlist. Which is a bit surprising since there’s quite a splendid performance of it there by the adventurous chamber orchestra The Knights. When you listen to the SLSO’s playlist, just pause it and play “Within Her Arms” right before Mozart’s Symphony No. 31 (“Paris”) for the full effect.

The concerts open with Mozart’s Symphony No. 1 in E-flat major, K. 16, penned when Mozart was eight years old and known primarily as a piano prodigy. It’s a modest and charming three-movement piece that sounds more like work of Johann Christian Bach (1735–1782) than Mozart. Still the somewhat enigmatic second movement does include, according to the anonymous program annotator for the Kamuela Philharmonic Society Orchestra, “a four-note motif that also appears in several later Mozart compositions, including his Symphony No. 33, and the finale of his Jupiter Symphony.” And it does end with a jolly little Presto.

Up next is the more substantial Piano Concerto No. 20 in D minor, K. 466. It was, I believe, last presented by the SLSO in 2017, at which time I described it as engrossing, menacing, and filled with the kind of high drama that audiences would come to love so much in the ensuing decades of the 19th century. Beethoven, for one, loved this concerto, performing it often and composing two cadenzas for it, Mozart's own having been lost to history. It is, in fact, sufficiently "modern" for its time that Viennese audiences might have been put off by it, had it not been the work of a man who was at the peak of popularity.

Mozart, age 6
Painter unknown

The soloist this weekend will be the talented young (born in 1990) pianist Behzod Abduraimov. I last saw him in 2018 when he played the Grieg Concerto with Gemma New on the podium. At the time, I praised the ideal mix of technical flash and sensitivity in his performance. Which bodes well for this weekend.

Next, it’s the overture to Mozart’s early opera “Mitridate, re di Ponto” (“Mithridates, King of Pontus”), which is filled with engaging tunes that belie the work’s tragic finale. First performed at the Teatro Regio Ducale in Milan, it was something of a hit despite the fact that the composer was only 14. Mozart’s more mature operas have overshadowed it since then and revivals are rare.

The concerts will close with the Symphony No. 31 in D Major, K.297 (300a) ("Paris") composed in the City of Light in June, 1778. Mozart and his ailing mother Anna Maria had arrived there after a concert tour in search of additional professional opportunities, but the pickings were slim, and the pair soon found themselves in debt. The arrival of a commission for a new symphony from Jean LeGros, the director of the high-profile Concert Spirituel, was therefore a welcome development.

The audience at the symphony's June 18th public premiere was enthusiastic, if Mozart's account is accurate. The work was interrupted by applause several times (both between and within movements) and the composer was ebullient. "I was so happy," he wrote to his father, "that as soon as the symphony was over, I went off to the Palais Royal, where I had a large ice, said the Rosary as I had vowed to do—and went home.”

His joy was short-lived. Although Anna Maria was at first invigorated by the weather and the attentions of old friends like the tenor Anton Raaff and horn player Franz Joseph Heina and his wife, even small outings tired her out. A day at the Jardin du Luxembourg with the Heinas on the 10^th left her exhausted and her health began to worsen.

Behzod Abduraimov
Photo: Evgeny Eutykhov courtesy of the SLSO

As Mozart scholar and conductor Jane Glover relates in “Mozart’s Women” (Harper-Collins, 2006), by June 26th the situation was grave enough that Mozart “was told that she should make her final confession, which she did on the 30^th. At 10:21 on the evening of 3 July, with a nurse and Heina and her beloved Wolfgang beside her, Anna Maria died.” She was only 58.

You won’t hear any of the mental anguish Mozart must have felt as he watched his mother’s health deteriorate, though, in this vigorous and graceful three-movement work. Instead, you hear the Parisian sunshine and revel in the composer’s use of what the BBC’s Tom Service calls “the biggest orchestra Mozart had used in a symphonic context.” Service’s article includes an excellent analysis of the piece, in fact, and I highly recommend it as a bit of pre-concert reading.

The Essentials: The SLSO’s Mozart celebration concludes this weekend (Friday and Saturday, November 15 and 16, at 7:30 pm) with Mozart’s Symphony No. 1 in E-flat major, Symphony No. 31 (“Paris”), and Piano Concerto No. 20 in D minor, K. 466. Behzod Abduraimov will be the soloist. Performances take place at the Touhill Performing Arts Center at the University of Missouri–St. Louis. Saturday’s concert will be broadcast live on St. Louis Public Radio and Classic 107.3.

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

Symphony Preview: The final problem

This weekend (November 9 and 10) Stéphane Denève conducts the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra in the first of two programs devoted almost entirely to the music of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756–1791). Think of it as a mini-version of the fabled Mostly Mozart Festival at New York City’s Lincoln Center, which featured the work of Mozart along with other classical-era composers as well as contemporary composers inspired by the period.

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

The two contemporary composers featured in our mini-festival weren’t directly inspired by 18^th-century music, but they have been cannily chosen to fit the mood and theme of each concert. Indeed, this week’s composer, Detlev Glanert (b. 1960), cites Mahler and Ravel as his primary influences. But in an evening that will feature Mozart’s last work, the Requiem in D minor, K. 626, Glanert’s "Vier Präludien und ernste Gesänge" ("Four Preludes and Serious Songs") is a perfect fit.

Published in 2005 and last heard here a decade ago, the work is an arrangement for baritone and orchestra (the original is for baritone and piano) of the last thing Brahms wrote, the Op. 121 "Four Serious Songs." The songs are pure Brahms, but the preludes that separate them are a mix of the two composers. Quoted in the program notes from its 2014 local premiere, Glanert says of the original music: "...I tried to use it and transform it like a stylistic muscle, so that the music starts in his world, is sliding slowly into our world, and then falling back again." Check out the SLSO’s Spotify playlist to find out what that sounds like.

Detlev Glanert
Photo: Bettina Stoess
Courtesy of the SLSO

Before Glanert, though, there will be Mozart: the Adagio and Fugue in C minor, K. 546, for strings. Described on the SLSO web site as “a dark and almost mystical vision,” the piece is a bit of an enigma in that it’s not clear why Mozart wrote it. “Perhaps,” writes Martin Pearlman in a program note for Boston Baroque, “it was a way of taking a brief time-out from symphony writing. But one might also wonder whether it may have been a way of immersing himself briefly in his old counterpoint studies before turning to his last symphonies and the intricate counterpoint that ends the ‘Jupiter.’”

Like Glanert’s “Four Preludes and Serious Songs,” the work is a mix of the old and new. The Fugue is an arrangement of Mozart’s Fugue in C minor, K. 426, for two pianos from 1783. Mozart composed a new Adagio to act as a prelude and, on June 26, 1788, entered the new work in his catalogue as “a short Adagio for two violins, viola, and bass for a fugue I wrote a long time ago for two pianos."

While the fugue was somewhat out of fashion by Mozart’s time, the work of German Baroque masters like Bach and Handel was still highly respected, especially by diplomat and enthusiastic musical amateur Baron Gottfried von Swieten. A patron of Mozart, Haydn, and Beethoven, it was von Swieten who encouraged Mozart to study the music of Bach and Handel. By 1782, Mozart was a regular guest at the von Swieten household. As he wrote to his father Leopold that April, “I go every Sunday at twelve o'clock to the Baron van Swieten, where nothing is played but Handel and Bach.”

The results of that exposure to Baroque musical forms can be found in many of Mozart’s works other than the C minor Adagio and Fugue. The Symphony No. 41 (“Jupiter”), for example, concludes with a multi-voice fugato. More to the point, though, is Mozart’s use of counterpoint in the “Requiem”—most prominently in the “Kyrie” fugue but also in the opening “Requiem aeternam” and the “Recordare” sections.

Last heard here in 2022 under the baton of Houston Grand Opera’s Artistic and Music Director Patrick Summers, the “Requiem” must surely be one of the most controversial of all Mozart’s major works. Setting aside, for the moment, the raft of apocryphal stories surrounding its composition—of which there were many, even before Peter Shaffer’s play and film “Amadeus” added to the pile—it is, to begin with, only partly a Mozart composition.

The “Requiem” was written in the last year of Mozart’s life, 1791—the same year he composed not only “La Clemenza di Tito” but also “Die Zauberflöte” (“The Magic Flute”) and his K. 622 Clarinet Concerto. Maybe that’s why (as I wrote back in 2022) Mozart died before he could complete it—his creative spirit was just too strong for a body weakened by poverty and illness.

Indeed, the only part Mozart completed in its entirety was the opening “Introitus—Requiem.” The following “Kyrie” was mostly finished, but the rest was in various stages of completion when the composer died. What happened after that has been in dispute ever since.

We know that Mozart’s pupil and copyist Franz Xaver Süssmayr (1766–1803) was there right to the end to write down the music Mozart’s mind could create but that his dying body, racked with fever and with hands too swollen to hold a pen, could not commit to paper. Süssmayr’s completion, which included some of his own music along with Mozart’s, has long been the version most often encountered in concert halls and on recordings.

Choral director Duain Wolfe, Yannick
Nézet-Séguin, Philadelphia Orhcestra
and Colorado Symphony Orchestra Chorus
in the Mozart Requiem in 2023 
Photo courtesy Bravo! Vail

But at least two other completions were done in the early 19th century and many musicologists have produced their own over the last four or five decades. Last year at the “Bravo! Vail” festival, for example, Yannick Nézet-Séguin conducted the Philadelphia Orchestra in a 1971 edition by German violinist and musicologist Franz Beyer (1922–2018).

Perhaps the most extreme revision was published in 1988 by British mathematician and musicologist Richard Maunder (1937–2018), who jettisoned everything Süssmayr had done and substituted his own work. If you’re wondering what that sounds like, Christopher Hogwood’s 1983 recording of it with the Academy of Ancient Music is available on Spotify.

I have no idea which version Maestro Denève will be using this weekend but given that the SLSO’s playlist includes Herbert von Karajan’s very traditional recording with the Berlin Philharmonic, I’d lay odds on some version of Süssmayr. The only way to know for sure is to attend one of the concerts.

The Essentials: Stéphane Denève conducts the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra Saturday at 7:30 pm and Sunday at 3 pm, November 9 and 10, in Mozart’s Adagio and Fugue in C minor, K. 546; Detlev Glanert’s “Four Preludes and Serious Songs”; and Mozart’s Requiem in D minor, K. 626. Bass-baritone Dashon Burton is the soloist for the Glanert. For the Requiem he’s joined by soprano Joélle Harvey, mezzo-soprano Kelley O'Connor, and tenor Josh Lovell. Performances take place at the Stifel Center downtown. 

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

Symphony Preview: Mix and match

Back in the days when I was still doing a weekly show at KDHX, I loved to put together different and often seemingly unrelated songs into sets designed to highlight the relationships among them.  St. Louis Symphony Orchestra Music Director Stéphane Denève often takes a similar approach to his programming, zooming in on connections that aren’t obvious at first glance. Or at first hearing, as the case may be.

[Preview the music with my Spotify playlist.]

Berlioz in 1832
Painting by Émile Signol

You’ll witness and exceptionally fine example of this in concerts that open the new SLSO season this weekend (Friday and Sunday, September 27 and 29). The first half opens with the “Marche hongroise” (“Hungarian March”) from Part I of  the 1846 opera/oratorio hybrid “La damnation de Faust” (“The Damnation of Faust”) by Hector Berlioz (1803–1869). In the context of the full work (performed so splendidly by the SLSO in 2023), the sound of the Hungarian army tramping off to war gives Faust the opportunity to compare the enthusiasm of the soldiers with his own indifference to worldly joys. “Et quel feu dans leurs yeux,” he muses. “Tout cœur frémit à leur chant de victoire ; Le mien seul reste froid, insensible à la gloire.” (“And what fire burns in their eyes! Every heart throbs to their song of victory; Only mine remains cold, insensitive to glory.”)

Played more often as an instrumental excerpt, as it will be this weekend, it’s a rousing piece that shows off the composer’s flair for colorful orchestration. It doesn’t sound particularly Hungarian, but it’s so much fun that it hardly matters. And Berlioz wasn’t really interested in cultural fidelity anyway.

Brahms c. 1872
Photographer unknown
Public Domain

More authentically Hungarian are the 21 “Hungarian Dances” by Johannes Brahms. Based mostly on Hungarian folk tunes, the dances were originally composed for piano duet and published in four sets between 1869 and 1880. They were then orchestrated by various composers, including Brahms. This weekend we’ll hear the only ones orchestrated by the composer himself: No. 1 in G minor, No. 3 in F major, and No. 10 F major (E major in the original piano version).

As George S. Bozarth and Walter Frisch write in Grove Online, Brahms was first “exposed to the style hongrois, a blending of Hungarian musical gestures and gypsy performing style…when Hungarian political refugees on their way to the USA passed through Hamburg after the suppression of the revolutions of 1848.” Which makes the local premiere of the “Nomad Concerto” by Mason Bates a logical way to conclude the first half of the program.

Composed for and premiered in January 2024 by this weekend’s soloist, violinist Gil Shaham (brother-in-law of former SLSO Music Director David Robertson), this four-movement work, as the composer writes at his web site, “explores the mysterious and soulful music of the wanderer”:

Envisioned to showcase the legendary Old World sound of Gil Shaham, the concerto is informed by a diverse range of traveling cultures from Eastern Europe to the Middle East.  In the same way that nomadic musics have continually reimagined themselves, the many styles informing the concerto are swirled together into a unique soundworld.

The ”Nomad Concerto” is too new to be available on the usual streaming sources, including YouTube, so I’m unable to offer my own impressions of the work. That said, Peter Dobrin, reviewing the world premiere for The Philadelphia Inquirer, wrote that “Bates in this new piece once again proves a composer unusually commanding of atmosphere and emotion.” So you now know as much about it as I do.

This won’t be the first appearance of a Mason Bates work on an SLSO program, though. His 2015 “Anthology of Fantastic Zoology” got its impressive local debut by the band under the baton of Leonard Slatkin in 2023. As I wrote back then “his is an eclectic and inventive voice that is very much welcome these days. I hope to see and hear more of his work here in the future.” It looks like I got my wish.

Mason Bates
Photo: Ryan Schude, courtesy of the SLSO

After intermission it’s back to Berlioz with his splendiferous 1830 “Symphonie Fantastique.” I have always loved it to pieces, despite the rather unsavory story of its origins (tl;dr: it’s the result of the composer’s amatory pursuit of the Irish Shakespearean actress Harriet Smithson in a manner that would get him a restraining order these days, if not an actual prosecution). Maestro Denève conducted a bang-up reading of this work in May 2019 so I admit to looking forward to his latest thoughts on the matter.

The Essentials: Stéphane Denève conducts the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra and violinist Gil Shaham in the St. Louis premiere of the “Nomad Concerto” by Mason Bates. The concert includes Berlioz’s “Hungarian Marche” from “The Damnation of Faust” and the “Symphonie Fantastique, as well as three “Hungarian Dances by Brahms. Performances are Friday at 7:30 pm and Sunday at 3 pm, September 25 and 27, at the Stifel Theatre downtown.

On Saturday, September 26, at 8 pm Mason Bates, in his alter ego of DJ Masonic, joins St. Louis DJ Alexis Tucci for “Symphonie Electronique.” Described as “a genre-defying electronic dance music party with SLSO musicians and the audience,” “Symphonie Electronique” takes place at The Hawthorn nightclub on Washington Avenue downtown.

Symphony Preview: Requiem for heavyweights

There's only one work on the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra and Chorus program this weekend, but it's a big one: the "Messa da Requiem" (Requiem Mass) by Giuseppe Verdi (1813–1901).

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

If you haven't heard Verdi's "Requiem" before, you might think a setting of the traditional Latin mass for the dead would be a somber (not to say dreary) business, steeped in religiosity. You'd be completely wrong.

Title page of the Messa da Requiem
 first edition (1874), Casa Ricordi

To begin with, Verdi wasn't all that religious. Although raised Roman Catholic, he had little patience with clerical arrogance. “Stay away from priests," he once warned his cousin Angiolo Cararra Verdi. “For some virtuous people," noted Verdi's second wife, Giuseppina Strepponi (quoted in "Verdi: A Biography" by Mary Jane Phillips-Matz, 1993), "a belief in God is necessary. Others, equally perfect, while observing every precept of the highest moral code, are happier believing in nothing.” She saw her husband as an example of the latter.

Besides, Verdi was first and foremost a man of the theatre. So his "Requiem" is overtly and profoundly theatrical. When conductor and music critic Hans von Bülow, after a quick glance at the score before the work's Milan premiere, described it as Verdi's "latest opera, though in ecclesiastical vestments," he thought he was being snarky and dismissive. He was, in fact, pointing out the work's real strength, even if he was too clueless to notice it.

When, for example, Verdi depicts Judgment Day in the "Dies Irae" section, he uses the full orchestra and chorus complete with an expanded brass section (including four extra trumpets placed strategically around the hall for surround sound) and great whacks on the bass drum with the dynamic marking ffff (which effectively translates as "as loud as possible"). It really does sound like the end of the world. When the mezzo and tenor sing "Quid sum miser, tunc dicturus?" ("What shall I, a poor sinner, say?") they're echoed by a plaintive rising figure on the bassoon. The "Lux aeterna" section, depicting the shining light of salvation, begins with a shimmering melody in the violins.

And so it goes, one completely right dramatic gesture after another, for a bit over eighty minutes. The “Requiem” is ultimately a dramatic work—an opera, if we must use the word—in the form of a requiem mass. It’s an opera about facing the inevitability of death and the uncertainty of what comes after. As Hamlet muses in Act III, scene 1:

Who would fardels bear
To grunt and sweat under a weary life
But that the dread of something after death
The undiscovered country from whose bourn
No traveller returns, puzzles the will
And makes us rather bear those ills we have
Than fly to others that we know not of?

Verdi’s “Requiem” wasn’t written from the point of view of a believer, who is convinced that simply groveling before the Almighty will eventually bring peace after death. Nor is it written from the perspective of the committed atheist, who is just as convinced that there is nothing after death. It is, rather, written from the perspective of a doubter. Which is to say, from the perspective of Verdi.

As George Martin writes in “Aspects of Verdi” (1988), Verdi understood that while believers were convinced that there must be a heaven for some and a hell for others, nonbelievers held that “after death there may be nothing, or something.”

There is always, after all, the possibility that the nonbelievers are mistaken in their view, and then on the judgment day, so unexpected, where will they stand? To whom can they turn for support? Verdi had the courage to peer into the unknown, and to be afraid. The Requiem is his account of what he saw.

1848 portrait of Alesandro Manzoni
Drawn by his stepson Stefano Stampa.

This stands in opposition to the devout Christianity of the man who inspired the “Requiem” in the first place, Alessandro Manzoni (1785–1873). Manzoni was a celebrated poet, author, and (like Verdi) a strong supporter of the political movement known as the Risorgimento, which had as its goal the independence and unification of Italy. It was a cause he advanced in his two verse dramas “Il Conte di Caramagnola” (1820) and “Adelchi” (1822) and, most memorably, in his one and only novel “I promessi sposi” (“The Bethrothed,” 1827).

The novel was a massive hit in Italy, both in its original version and in Manzoni’s later re-write in the Tuscan dialect, effectively making that the standard version of the Italian language. It accomplished on a linguistic level what the Risorgimento strove for on a political level. “The final edition of I promessi sposi (1840–42),” says Encyclopedia Britannica, “rendered in clear, expressive prose purged of all antiquated rhetorical forms, reached exactly the sort of broad audience he had aimed at, and its prose became the model for many subsequent Italian writers.” It is still taught in Italian schools today and has been translated into almost every possible language.

Manzoni was one of Verdi's two personal heroes (Rossini was the other). "I esteem and admire you," he once wrote to Manzoni, "as much as one can esteem and admire anyone on this earth, both as man and a true honor of our country so continually troubled. You are a saint, Don Alessandro!" When Manzoni died on May 22, 1873, Verdi was determined to memorialize him with a requiem mass, to be performed on the first anniversary of the great man's death.

This was not the first time Verdi had been inspired to honor the demise of one of his heroes with a requiem. When Rossini died five years earlier, Verdi had proposed that he and a dozen other Italian composers each write part of a requiem that would be performed in the Church of San Petrino in Bologna on the first anniversary of Rossini’s death. Alas, the project collapsed, and a year later all Verdi had to show for it was the part assigned to him, the closing “Libera me.”

The first performance of the Verdi Requiem
at La Scala on 25 May 1874

When Manzoni died, Verdi decided to do the honors himself, and soon the music originally written for Rossini had become the germ of the memorial for Manzoni. He began work on it in Paris in 1873 and finally completed it back home in Italy on April 10, 1874. Rehearsals for the Milan premiere began in May and the piece had its first performance, as scheduled, on May 22, 1874 with Verdi himself conducting.

In Italy, at least, it was a massive hit. The Italian public loved Verdi to begin with, and they were not disappointed with his latest work. Others had sharply differing opinions. Brahms thought it a work of genius. Wagner dismissed it. They loved it in Vienna but were indifferent in London. Personally, I agree with George Bernard Shaw (cited in Philip Huscher's program notes for the Chicago Symphony), who said that none of Verdi's works would prove to be as enduring as the "Requiem."

One final note: until relatively recently, the work on the program this weekend was routinely billed as “Verdi’s Manzoni Requiem,” both in Italy and elsewhere. “Vocal and piano scores”, writes Martin, “always carried a prominent notice of the dedication or even made of it a separate, handsome page.” Performers and audience alike, as a result, could not escape the questions raised by the two radically different belief systems the work represented. That contrast has been lost along with Manzoni’s disappearance from modern copies of the score, a fact which Martin regards as a distinct loss.

When you see this weekend’s performance, you might want to contemplate that ambiguity. I know I will.

The Essentials: Stéphane Denève conducts the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra and Chorus along with soloists Hulkar Sabirova (soprano), Judit Kutasi (mezzo-soprano), Russell Thomas (tenor), and Adam Palka (bass) in Verdi’s "Messa da Requiem". Performances take place Saturday at 7:30 pm and Sunday at 3 pm, April 27 and 28, at the Stifel Theatre at 14th and Market downtown.

Symphony Preview: Distant drums

In Act I, scene 1 of Shakespeare’s comedy “Much Ado About Nothing,” Leonato, the Governor of Messina, plays down his niece Beatrice’s insulting description of Benedick, saying that there is “a kind of merry war betwixt Signior Benedick and her. They never meet but there’s a skirmish of wit between them.”

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

You can hear that wit in the opening measures of the work that opens the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra concerts this Friday and Saturday (March 22 and 23) as Music Director Stéphane Denève leads the band in a performance of the overture to Hector Berlioz's 1862 operatic treatment of “Much Ado About Nothing,” "Béatrice et Bénedict.” The short, playful opening theme immediately calls to mind the thrust and parry of the verbal duel that invariably begins when Beatrice and Benedick meet.

Berlioz in 1832
Painting by Émile Signol

Berlioz wrote the libretto himself (even though he neither spoke nor read English all that well), considerably condensing the original "battle of the sexes" comedy in the process. Huge swathes of plot were axed, along with great comic characters like Constable Dogberry to create what the composer called “a caprice written with a point of a needle.” Written just after the monumental “Les Troyens,” the opera had great success at its Baden-Baden premiere as well as in Weimar a few months later. There was no French performance until 1890, though, and "Béatrice et Bénedict.” has never really made it into the standard repertoire.

The overture has fared better in concert halls. It gets high marks for the skill with which Berlioz uses themes from his score to create a kind of vitamin pill version of the opera, with all the comedic and dramatic ingredients combined into a single eight-minute tone poem. “Though drawn from no less than six different arias or ensembles,” writes Michel Austin at The Hector Berlioz website, “the music is seamlessly fused by Berlioz into a coherent symphonic whole, much as Weber had done in his overtures to Der Freischütz, Euryanthe, and Oberon."

Julia Wolfe
Photo: Peter Serling

Up next is the local premiere of “Pretty” by contemporary American composer Julia Wolfe (b. 1958). A co-commission by the SLSO, Berlin Philharmonic (where the world premiere took place last June), Houston Symphony, and the Philadelphia Orchestra, the work’s title is frankly ironic. One might even say that it’s at war with the actual music which, based on the brief excerpts I’ve heard at the Berlin Philharmonic’s Digital Concert Hall, is a high-energy jamboree that’s anything but “pretty” in the conventional sense.

“The word ‘pretty’ has had a complicated relationship to women,” writes the composer on her website.  “It implies an attractiveness without any rough edges, without strength or power…My Pretty is a raucous celebration – embracing the grit of fiddling, the relentlessness of work rhythms, and inspired by the distortion and reverberation of rock and roll.”

War pops up once again as the backdrop for the work that concludes this weekend's concerts, Beethoven's Piano Concerto No. 5 in E-flat major, op. 73 (“Emperor”). Indeed, the concerto was composed under the cloud of war and occupation.

When Beethoven was writing the concerto in 1809, Vienna was not so much the fabled “City of Dreams” as a metropolis of nightmares. The French laid siege to it with shelling so fierce that at one point the composer took refuge in his brother's house and covered his head with pillows to escape the din. The royal family—including Beethoven's friend and patron Archduke Rudolf—fled, along with many of the notable families with whom the composer had become close.

Left alone and, once the French occupation began, in difficult financial circumstances due to rapid inflation, Beethoven had little else to do but compose. The fifth concerto is probably the most famous work to emerge from this difficult period, although the Op. 81a piano sonata (“Les Adieux”) is probably a close second. Both were dedicated to Rudolph.

Beethoven
As if you didn't know.

Much has been written about the Concerto No. 5 and, in fact, the program notes this week (based on earlier notes by Paul Schiavo and Yvonne Frindle) provide quite a good map of the composer’s stunning musical landscape. The magisterial first movement, the wistful second, and the jolly concluding rondo all show Beethoven at his best.

The soloist this weekend is Tom Borrow (b. 2000), a 2024 Artist-In-Residence with the São Paulo Symphony Orchestra and winner of the Terence Judd-Hallé Orchestra Award 2023. His big professional break came in 2019, when he was called in at the last minute (the last 36 hours, to be precise) to replace Khatia Buniatishvili in a series of twelve concerts with the Israel Philharmonic. "Tom Borrow is already a star,” wrote Yossi Schiffman of the Israel Broadcasting Corporation, “and we will all surely hear more about him."

I was unable to locate anything by Borrow on Spotify but he does appear in several videos on YouTube, including the second and third movements of Ravel’s Piano Concerto in G major from that legendary 2019 concert.

The Essentials: Stéphane Denève conducts the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra and soloist Tom Borrow in the Piano Concerto No. 5 (“Emperor”) by Beethoven, along with the overture to "Béatrice et Bénedict” by Berlioz and the local premiere of “Pretty” by Julia Wolfe. Performances are Friday at 10:30 am and Saturday at 7:30 pm at the Touhill Performing Arts Center on the UMSL campus. The Saturday concert will be broadcast live on St. Louis Public Radio and Classic 107.3 and will be available for streaming for a limited time afterward at the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra site.

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

Symphony Preview: The sounds of silence

I have often written that the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra (SLSO) Music Director Stéphane Denève knows how to use silence as a musical element. So it’s not surprising to see him saying the following in the program notes for the concerts he will conduct this weekend (February 17 and 18): “Life starts and ends with nothingness. Music is the same: from silence to silence.”

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

We’ll hear that in the first half of the evening, in which Denève will perform three strongly contrasting works attacca (without pause)—creating in the process a single half hour of music that should range from a nearly inaudible whisper to a shriek that will blow your hair back. Assuming that, unlike me, you have hair.

Arvo Pärt
By Woesinger - Arvo Part,
CC BY-SA 2.0, Link

It all begins with the 1977 "Cantus in Memoriam Benjamin Britten" for string orchestra and chime (a.k.a. tubular bell) by Arvo Pärt (b. 1935). Composed to honor the death the previous year of the British composer, whom Pärt greatly admired for "the unusual purity of his music," the work is, like much of the contemporary Estonian composer's music, a massively complex sonic structure that still sounds very simple.

Using only the pitches of the A minor scale, the "Cantus" opens with three soft strikes of the chime, after which the strings enter softly while the chime continues to sound. The music moves slowly to an ecstatic climax on an A minor chord that abruptly stops, leaving only the fading overtones of the chime. It's simultaneously despairing and hopeful—both a dirge and a celebration.

“From silence to silence,” as Maestro Denève said. But not for long. Because the next sound you hear will be the agitated opening of “Icarus” by contemporary Russian composer Lera Auerbach (b. 1973). Based on “Humum mandere” and “Requiem for Icarus” (the last two movements of her seven-movement Symphony No. 1, “Chimera,” from 2006), this 2011 tone poem strongly evokes the tragic figure from Greek mythology whose desire to fly took him just a little too close to the sun. Like its namesake, “Icarus” rises to great dramatic heights, only to finally succumb and fall to earth in a great crash of percussion. The quietly elegiac section that concludes the work ends with the soft, eerie sound of a percussionist rubbing her moistened finger along the rim of a partially filled wine glass—a primitive version of Benjamin Franklin's glass harmonica.

Lera Auerbach
wisemusicclassical.com

Because it’s not available on Spotify, “Icarus” isn’t part of the SLSO’s playlist, but you can see it performed by Mark Wigglesworth and the National Youth Orchestra of Great Britain on YouTube at the 2019 Young Euro Festival. The recording by John Fiore and the Düsseldorf Symphony (also on YouTube) is more polished and includes the optional theremin for that extra touch of otherworldliness, but there's an urgency to the live performance that makes it hard to beat.

The theremin is presumably optional because it’s hard to find people who can master an instrument that’s played simply by moving one’s hands in the air. Fortunately, the SLSO has found composer/thereminist/violinist and AV engineer Darryl Kubian to tame that particular beast.

Like Pärt’s “Cantus,” Auerbach’s “Icarus” also returns us to silence. This time it’s broken by the bass clarinet as we begin the concert version of the “Liebestod” from the opera “Tristan und Isolde” by Richard Wagner (1813–1883). The “Liebestod” is usually performed in combination with the opera’s Act I “Prelude,” with its famous "Tristan chord."  The “Prelude” sets up a harmonic tension that isn’t resolved until nearly four hours later when Isolde, in the "Liebestod," wills herself to join her lover Tristan in death.

We have, once again, music that fades away in the end. “The rest,” as the dying Hamlet says, “is silence.”

There’s considerably less silence in the work that makes up the second half of the concert, “Carmina Burana” by Carl Orff (1895–1982). Once described by British critic Richard Osborne as “the best known new composition to emerge from Nazi Germany, ” "Carmina Burana" was something of a cult item in this country until John Boorman's 1981 epic "Excalibur" appropriated bits of it for the soundtrack. The resulting upswing in popularity was not unlike that experienced by Richard Strauss's "Also Sprach Zarathustra" (or the first two minutes of it, anyway) after the release of "2001: A Space Odyssey."

Carl Orff in 1940
By Hanns Holdt (1887-1944)
abebooks, Public Domain

Orff envisioned this material as the basis for a choral cantata with some mimed action and “magic tableaux.” And, in fact, the first performance in Frankfurt in 1937 was fully staged, with dancers, sets, and costumes. It's usually presented strictly as a concert piece these days (although the Nashville Ballet gave us an impressive staging of it in 2013), but the composer's theatrical intentions are evident in every note.

“Carmina Burana” derives its title from an 1847 collection of secular poetry by anonymous authors from the 12th and 13th centuries that turned up in 1803 in the Benedictine monastery in Beuren, Germany. As befits their “vulgar” status, the poems celebrate not the theoretical joys of heaven but rather the practical ones of earth: spring, sex, food, sex, drink, gambling, and sex. They also recognize something that we moderns have lost track of, to our detriment: the heavy influence of blind chance on our lives. The setting of “Fortuna Imperatrix Mundi” (“Fortune, Empress of the World”), which opens and closes the work, reminds us that the wheel of fortune is always turning and that none of us should get too cocky, as the universe tends to dope-slap the excessively smug.

Although "Carmina Burana" is mostly about the chorus, there are some great moments for the soloists. Highlights include "Olim lacus colueram"—a macabre little piece about a roasted swan seen from the bird's point of view—which pushes the tenor soloist up to the very top of his tessitura; “Dulcissime,” which opens with an absurdly difficult upward glissando for the soprano; and “Estuans interius,” a dramatic baritone aria that boils over with the rage and frustration of the disappointed sensualist.

The singers this week—all of whom have substantial experience with “Carmina Burana”—are soprano Ying Fang, baritone Thomas Lehman, and tenor Sunnyboy Dlada. Die Deutsche Bühne has described Dlada’s voice as “crisp, clearly focused, brightly timbred…agile and coloratura oriented,” which sounds ideal for the role of the swan.

If you're curious as to what the "Carmina Burana" poems might have sounded like back in their original form, check out the René Clemencic Consort’s 1975 and 2009 recordings on Spotify. Also on Spotify: the 1992 recording of “Carmina Burana” by Leonard Slatkin and the SLSO. The recording in the SLSO’s playlist is the 2005 recording by the London Symphony Orchestra.

The Essentials: Stéphane Denève conducts the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra and Chorus along with soloists Ying Fang (soprano), Sunnyboy Dlada (tenor), and Thomas Lehman (baritone) in Carl Orff’s “Carmina Burana.” The concerts open with Arvo Pärt’s "Cantus in Memoriam Benjamin Britten," Lera Auerbach’s “Icarus,” and Wagner’s “Liebestod” from “Tristan und Isolde.” Performances are Saturday at 7:30 pm and Sunday at 3 pm, February 17 and 18, at the Stifel Theatre.

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