Symphony Review: Sunshine and shadow with Mǎcelaru and the SLSO

Have you ever walked out of a fiercely air conditioned building and directly into the kind of parboiled summer weather we had this past summer? It’s like smacking into a wall. The impact is visceral.

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

That’s the sensation I had this past Sunday (October 15, 2023) at the Touhill Center when the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra and guest conductor Cristian Măcelaru cranked up the first few measures of the program opener, “heliosis.” Which is exactly what the composer had in mind.

Commissioned by the Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra, “heliosis” (the medical term for heat exhaustion) is the work of Austrian composer/conductor/pianist Hannah Eisendle (b. 1993). Eisendle calls it a “summer piece,” and so it is. But the summer it evokes is dirty, suffocating, sticky with dust.”  Not so much the languorous summer of, say, Honegger’s “Pastorale d’été” (presented by the SLSO in 2021) as that of The Lovin’ Spoonful’s “Summer in the City.”

So that first massive 15-second orchestral assault perfectly set the stage for a brilliantly orchestrated six-minute run through a heat-drenched acoustic landscape. Unorthodox effects like string harmonics and glissandos suggested  something surreal or unearthly (summer on Mars, perhaps?). At one point they combined to produce an effect very much like a tape recording grinding to a halt. There was also an aggressive march that wouldn’t have been out of place in a Shostakovich symphony, and the whole thing built to a final blast reminiscent of the last measures of Stravinsky’s “Sacre du Printemps.”

It was all very unsettling, as Eisendle apparently intended it to be. More to the point, it was brilliantly played by Măcelaru and the band—no small accomplishment, given the wild and wooly nature of the score. It certainly deserved more than the single round of applause that it got, if only for the quality of the performance.

L-R: Cristian Măcelaru, Benjamin Beilman 

Ah, well. The Mozart Violin Concerto No. 5 that followed dissipated any aural heat exhaustion in short order. The last of the composer's violin concertos, the Fifth is filled with unexpected turns of phrase, including the so-called "Turkish" interlude of the finale in which the cellos and basses strike their strings, col legno, to produce an exotic percussive effect. Or it would have if Mǎcelaru hadn't downplayed it.

There are also multiple cadenzas—one in each of the first two movements and two more in the finale—plus an abrupt interruption in the opening Allegro aperto movement for a six-bar solo Adagio. Mozart was playing around a bit with the concerto form and since he was the original soloist, he had plenty of opportunities to do so.

All this means that there are plenty of chances for the soloist to shine, which Benjamin Beilman emphatically did. Fully engaged with the music, his fellow performers and Măcelaru, he brought a beautifully full tone and wide emotional range to the concerto. I don’t know whether the cadenzas were his own or not—many violinists have written their own, going back to (at least) Joseph Joachim (1831–1907)—but in any case, they exhibited a gratifying variety of expression.

Warm applause was followed by an encore: a pair of Béla Bartók’s brief 44 Duos for Two Violins with Cristian Măcelaru as his performing partner—a reminder that the conductor started his musical life as a violinist, as well as a demonstration that he remains quite a good one.

Concluding the program was the Symphony No. 2 in D major, Op. 73, by Brahms. Written and first performed in 1877, it boasts one of the sunniest final movements you will ever hear, a fact which has led many commentators (including yours truly) to view it as, in the words of Redland Symphony program annotator James Keays, “one of the most cheerful of Brahms' mature works.”

Which it is, at least in its last two movements. The sonic sky is almost cloudless during the Allegretto grazioso (Quasi Andantino) third movement and the Allegro con spirito finale wraps everything up in a blaze of glory. But taken together these constitute only around a third of the work’s roughly 45 minutes. The Allegro non troppo first movement opens with some aural sunshine in the horns, but clouds quickly move in via an ominous roll on the tympani that anticipates the violent confrontations of the ensuing Adagio non troppo.

The Brahms Second is, like many of the composer’s works, a multi-layered work that operates on more than one emotional level at once. It’s one of the things that makes him a great composer and that can make conducting his symphonies a challenge.

When Măcelaru began his performance with a more leisurely tempo than I would have expected, I was afraid that this might be an interpretation that leaned too heavily on the dark side. As the symphony progressed and I became more engrossed in his well-shaded rendering of the composer’s emotionally complex canvas, however, it became clear that such fears were unjustified. Indeed, given the wide interpretive range Măcelaru has displayed with the SLSO in past appearances, I realized that I should have known better. This is a conductor who rarely makes a misstep.

This is an orchestra that now seems incapable of them as well. While all the musicians were in top form, special kudos must go Principal Horn Roger Kaza and the rest of his section. Brahms has given the horns some pretty choice stuff here, and they gave it their all. The long solo in the first movement coda was a “perfect 10.” Congratulations to the strings as well on those wide leaps Brahms hands them early in that same movement.

A few comments on the venue itself are in order. With a smaller stage than the Stifel Center and about half the seating capacity (1600 seats vs. 3100 at Stifel) the Anheuser-Busch Performance Hall at the Touhill Center has a somewhat warmer acoustic signature than Stifel, but it’s still “dry” enough to make individual instrumental voices easy to discern. This was especially beneficial in the Mozart concerto, where even the most subtle of Beilman’s playing was clearly audible. And, of course, the small size means that it’s difficult to get too far away from the orchestra. It is, altogether, a fine symphonic space, at least from the audience standpoint.

Next at the SLSO: Elim Chan conducts the SLSO and piano soloist Ingrid Fliter in a program consisting of Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 3, Mendelssohn’s Symphony No. 3 (“Scottish”), and the symphonic poem “Moondog” by contemporary composer Elizabeth Ogonek. Performances take place at the Touhill Center on Friday at 10:30 am and Saturday at 7:30 pm, October 20 and 21.  The Friday morning performance will be broadcast Saturday evening on St. Louis Public Radio and Classic 107.3 and will be available for streaming for a limited time at the SLSO web site.

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

Symphony Preview: Moonlight over Edinburgh

This weekend guest conductor Elim Chan leads the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra and pianist Ingrid Fliter in a concert that brackets the second installment of the orchestra’s Beethoven piano concerto cycle with a pair of works that evoke strong visual images.

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

Elizabeth Orgonek
Photo: Kajaka Studios

The concerts open with the first of those two highly visual pieces, “Moondog” by contemporary American composer Elizabeth Ogonek (b. 1989). Written for and premiered by the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra this past January, “Moondog” is too new to be available anywhere online, so the best I can do is refer you to Steve Holt’s interview with the composer for the SFSO.

In it, Ogonek notes that a “moondog” is “kind of halo that happens around the moon because of the way the ice crystals in clouds refract light” and that her intention was to “do a vocalese [a melody without words] for the orchestra. I wanted to evoke this sense of nighttime and dreaminess.”

“My three orchestral gods are Stravinsky, Debussy, and Sibelius,” she says in response to question about what her music sounds like. “I’m a very visual composer. I think when people hear my music, they can get that sense. It tends to be sort of cinematic, not in a “movie music” kind of way, but just visually evocative.” The whole interview is worth a read, but those are the bullet points.

Trivia note: As some of you may be old enough to recall, Moondog (real name: Louis Thomas Hardin, 1916–1999) was also an eccentric composer/performer whose

Next is the Piano Concerto No. 3 in C minor, Op. 37, of Ludwig van Beethoven (1770–1827). A dramatic work that was the beginning of Beethoven’s break with the influences of Mozart and Haydn, the Third Concerto shows the composer in a role for which he is not, in my experience, always given enough credit: that of an "early adopter" of technology.

Beethoven in 1803
Painted by Christian Horneman

The technology in question is that of the piano. At the time Beethoven was writing the C minor concerto (around 1800, although he had ideas for it a few years earlier), major technological advances were being made in the design and construction of the instrument. It was becoming bigger and heavier; the sound was getting more robust and the range of notes wider. When Beethoven began composing in the 1780s, the piano (then called the fortepiano) was basically an amped-up harpsichord with strings that were struck instead of plucked and a range of around four or five octaves. By the time he died in 1827, the piano had evolved into something closely resembling the contemporary concert grand, with a range of nearly eight octaves and the ability to produce the kind of thunderous climaxes that composers like Franz Liszt loved so much.

A major player in this technological revolution was the English firm of John Broadwood and Sons. As part of their marketing campaign, they sent their new pianos to Beethoven, with the result that Beethoven made use of the expanded range of notes for his new concerto. “As originally composed,” wrote René Spencer Saller in program notes for the SLSOs 2016 performance of the work, “his Third Concerto requires the soloist to play a high G, which is believed to be the earliest instance of that particular note in the piano repertory.”

That said, it’s hard to be sure exactly what the piano part looked like for the concerto’s 1803 premiere at the Theater an der Wien since it hadn’t been written down yet. Beethoven was the soloist and played the whole thing from memory, which drove Ignaz von Seyfried (his student and page turner) to distraction. “I saw empty pages with here and there what looked like Egyptian hieroglyphs,” he would later recall, “unintelligible to me, scribbled to serve as clues for him… So, whenever he reached the end of some invisible passage, he gave me a surreptitious nod and I turned the page.” Fortunately, it became one of those stories that get funnier after the fact. “My anxiety not to miss such a nod amused him greatly,” wrote Seyfried, “and the recollection of it at our convivial dinner after the concert sent him into gales of laughter.”

The soloist for the concerto’s second Viennese performance a year later was Ferdinand Ries (another pupil) when, happily, everything was written down and there were no blank pages.

The ruins of Holyrood Abbey
By Kaihsu at English Wikipedia

The concerts conclude with the Symphony No. 3 in A minor, op. 56, ("Scottish") by Felix Mendelssohn (1809–1847). Although not completed until 1842, the symphony’s genesis dates back to an 1829 walking tour of the British Isles, when Scotland in general and Edinburgh in particular made a strong impression on him. He got the idea for the slow introduction to the first movement when he visited the ruined Holyrood Chapel in Edinburgh. "In the evening twilight," he wrote, "we went today to the palace where Queen Mary lived and loved... Everything round is broken and mouldering and the bright sky shines in. I believe I today found in that old chapel the beginning of my 'Scottish' Symphony."

But how “Scottish” is the Symphony No. 3, really? The composer himself never referred to it as anything other than his third symphony, and as this week’s program notes remind us, he was “notoriously reluctant to assign explicit programs or narratives to his music.” Eric Bromberger (in notes for the San Diego Symphony), went so far as to declare that the work “tells no tale, paints no picture, nor does it quote Scottish tunes."

On the other hand, British composer and conductor Julius Harrison (in "The Symphony," edited by Robert Simpson, 1967) thought the symphony "illustrates the near-scenic aspect of Mendelssohn's romantic art" and felt that the jaunty clarinet theme of the Vivace non troppo second movement has "a touch of 'Charlie is My Darling' about its dotted quavers—something Mendelssohn may have remembered and set down." Given that the composer’s 1829 walking tour included a bagpipe concert, a visit to Sir Walter Scott, and extensive hiking around the highlands, that wouldn’t be surprising.

I fall more into the late Mr. Harrison's camp, but wherever you come down on the "Scottishness" of this music, there's no getting around its unflagging appeal and elegant construction. To hear this music is to love it. It was the last Mendelssohn symphony to be performed in the composer’s lifetime (the Fourth and Fifth symphonies were performed before the Third but published after it). Not a bad swan song, as those things go.

The Essentials: Elim Chan conducts the SLSO and piano soloist Ingrid Fliter in a program consisting of Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 3, Mendelssohn’s Symphony No. 3 (“Scottish”), and the symphonic poem “Moondog” by contemporary composer Elizabeth Ogonek. Performances take place at the Touhill Center on Friday at 10:30 am and Saturday at 7:30 pm, October 20 and 21.  The Friday morning performance will be broadcast Saturday evening on St. Louis Public Radio and Classic 107.3 and will be available for streaming for a limited time at the SLSO web site.

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

Symphony Review: Everyplace old is new again

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

The St. Louis Symphony Orchestra concert last Sunday (September 24, 2023) was a special one, and not just because it was the season opener. It was also an immensely satisfying program of familiar concert favorites performed with expert flair by the orchestra and guest violin soloist Hilary Hahn. And it was the first opportunity to hear the orchestra in what was for decades its home base: The Stifel Theatre, née the Kiel Opera House.

The Stifel Theatre from the balcony

Built in 1934 and extensively renovated in 2010, Kiel was the SLSO’s home until the orchestra moved to Powell Hall in 1968. For the next two seasons it will be one of two principal venues for SLSO concerts (the other being the UMSL’s Touhill Performing Arts Center) while Powell Hall undergoes extensive expansion and renovation. I don’t know what the revamped Powell will sound like, but I hope it will be more like the new Stifel than the old Powell.

In his introductory remarks SLSO Music Director Stéphane Denève said that St. Louis is unusual in having two world-class concert halls. Based on what I heard Sunday, I have to agree. The sound of the renovated Stifel Theatre is bright, clean, and somewhat dry: rather like a good prosecco. The wider stage results in a wider soundstage with clearer separation of orchestral sections, and the less reverberant acoustics make it easier to distinguish the sounds of both individual instruments and  the soloist.

And it’s quiet. So quiet that Hahn could be sure that the softest harmonics could be clearly heard. So quiet that Denève could make use of the orchestra’s full dynamic range. So quiet, in short, that even up in the mezzanine, the merest whisper of sound could be clearly heard.

So much for acoustics. As to the music itself, I couldn’t have asked for a better way to open the season. Hahn played Mendelssohn’s first and only concerto with a perfect blend of flash and finesse. She filled the first movement with dramatic virtuosity, sang the second movement Andante sweetly, and (to quote Mr. Gilbert) went “gaily tripping, lightly skipping” through the Puckish Allegro molto vivace finale.

And she was paying attention. Even when she wasn’t playing she was deeply engaged with the music, the SLSO musicians, and Maestro Denève. When I reviewed Hahn’s Tchaikovsky concerto at Bravo! Vail in July, I noted that she and conductor Yannick Nézet-Séguin were in constant and friendly communication the entire time and that both were quite clearly enjoying themselves. “That sort of thing,”  I wrote, “always spreads to the audience and increases our engagement with the music.”

Judging from the enthusiastic response, Sunday’s audience appreciated the results. Hahn returned for not one but two encores, both by Bach: the lively Gigue from the Partita No. 3 in E major, BWV 1006 and the Sarabande from the Partita No. 2 in D minor, BWV 1004. Hahn recorded both partitas in their entirety back in 1997 for Sony.

The rest of the concert covered a wide range of music, from the overture to Mozart’s “The Magic Flute” (1791) to Paul Dukas’ popular “Sorcerer’s Apprentice” (1897), along with two symphonic poems by Richard Strauss: “Don Juan” and “Till Eulenspiegel’s Merry Pranks.” All four works received that combination of wide expressive range and meticulous attention to detail that has become emblematic of Denève’s style.

Stéphane Denève and Hilary Hahn
Photo: Chuck Lavazzi

“Don Juan” got things off to an energetic start as the legendary lover leapt on to the musical stage in a wild, ecstatic theme in the strings and horns. The theme reappears throughout the work, alternating with passages of romance and longing. The most notable of these appears in the long solos for oboe and clarinet in the lyrical central episode, played with great feeling by Principal Oboe Jelena Dirks and Principal Clarinet Scott Andrews.

The horn section was in particularly fine form both here and later in “Till Eulenspiegel.” The famous wide-ranging solo that opens the latter was expertly played by Principal Horn Roger Kaza. Andrew Cuneo’s bassoon section was important in “Till” as well, contributing mightily to the sense of nose-thumbing slapstick in the score. This is genuinely comic music, delivered with a wonderful sense of fun by Denève and the band.

There was much fun to be had as well in “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice,” surely one of the most vivid bits of “tone painting” in the repertoire.  When Disney’s artists turned it into animation in the 1940 film “Fantasia” all they had to do was paint on animation cells what the composer had already painted in notes. Here the bassoon section had a genuine star turn as the sonic embodiment of the enchanted broom which quickly escapes from the control of the hapless apprentice of the title. That sequence when the supposedly smashed broom slowly groans itself back to life in the contrabassoon and bass clarinet? In the hands of, respectively, Ellen Connors and Tzuying Huang it was comedy gold.

The “Magic Flute” overture might have felt a bit out of place amidst all this tomfoolery, especially given the reverential solemnity with which Denève invested those three opening E-flat major chords, but the sheer vivacity of the fugal sections that followed were a reminder that this was, after all the, preface to one of Mozart’s more beloved comedies.

The new season continues at the Touhill Center on Friday at 10:30 am and Saturday at 7:30 pm, September 29 and 30, as Stéphane Denève conducts the orchestra and piano soloist Jonathan Biss in a program consisting of Beethoven’s "Coriolan Overture" and Piano Concerto No. 1 along with Unsuk Chin’s “subito con forza” and Schumann’s Symphony No. 4. The Saturday evening performance will be broadcast live on St. Louis Public Radio and Classic 107.3. For more information, visit the SLSO web site.

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

Symphony Preview: Just folks

Folk traditions, in one form or another, serve as the basis for the penultimate St. Louis Symphony Orchestra (SLSO) program this weekend (Saturday and Sunday, April 29 and 30). Music Director Stéphane Denève conducts with piano soloist Piotr Anderszewski.

[Preview the music with my Spotify playlist.]

The program opens with the local premiere of the tone poem “Apu” by Gabriela Lena Frank, Composer-in-Residence with the Philadelphia Orchestra, founder of the Gabriela Lena Frank Creative Academy of Music, and a graduate of my alma mater, Rice University.

Gabriela Lena Frank
Photo by Mariah Tauger

Ms. Frank's background is one of ethnic diversity, as her biography clearly attests:

Born in Berkeley, California (September, 1972), to a mother of mixed Peruvian/Chinese ancestry and a father of Lithuanian/Jewish descent, Frank explores her multicultural heritage most ardently through her compositions. Inspired by the works of Bela Bartók and Alberto Ginastera, Frank is something of a musical anthropologist. She has traveled extensively throughout South America and her pieces often reflect and refract her studies of Latin American folklore, incorporating poetry, mythology, and native musical styles into a western classical framework that is uniquely her own.

In short, as Frank says in an interview for the Detroit Symphony Orchestra, “I don't look like most composers in classical music. I'm not white; I'm a woman; and I'm alive... And: I'm hearing-impaired.”

The Peruvian side of her background is on display in “Apu,” as it was in her "Leyendas," selections from which were performed here in 2020 as part of the SLSO’s chamber music series. “In Andean Perú,” says Frank in her program notes, “spirits are said to inhabit rocks, rivers, and mountain peaks…The apu is one of the more well-known spirits that is sometimes portrayed as a minor deity with a mischievous side who is rarely seen.”

Like the supernatural practical jokers in other folk traditions around the world, Apu is probably someone you want to keep happy. “Simple folk song and a solemn prayer often successfully placate the apu,” says Frank, “to ensure safe passage through the mountains.” That song is the subject of the first movement, Pinkillo Serrano, while the prayer is heard in the second movement, Haillí. Apu himself shows up in the final movement, traipsing through the tuned percussion instruments and generally raising a ruckus before evaporating like the morning dew.

You won’t find a recording of “Apu” on the Spotify playlist, but fortunately you can watch Marin Alsop conduct the 2017 world premiere performance by the National Youth Orchestra on YouTube.

Since Frank cites Béla Bartók as a source of inspiration, it’s only right that the next item on the program is the "Piano Concerto No. 3", which he wrote during the final year of his life (1945) in New York. Unlike his first two concertos, which he wrote for himself (he was a formidable pianist), the third was composed for his second wife, Ditta. The hope, according to Geoffrey Norris in a 2016 article for The Gramophone, was "that it would give her some sort of legacy after his death, both in terms of her own profile as a pianist (though she seems never to have played it in public) and in the income she might accrue from royalties when it was taken up by others."

A more prosperous Bartók in 1927

That was probably a good bet. Although Bartók's three concertos have never been as popular as those of Big Guns like Tchaikovsky or Rachmaninoff, they have always had their ardent supporters. And the third concerto is probably the most accessible of the three. It is, in Norris's words "altogether of a gentler, more reflective if scarcely (in the outer movements) less dynamic mien" than the first two. "András Schiff," he notes, "describes it as 'a wise man's farewell.’" And so it was; when the composer died on September 26, 1945, it fell to his friend, the violinist and composer Tibor Serly, to complete the final 17 measures. The concerto was his last musical will and testament.

That's not to say it's funereal. Lively dance-like elements dominate both the opening and closing movements, and the Adagio religioso that separates them is classic Bartók "night music", with emotionally intense chorales flanking a middle section that evokes the nocturnal sounds of nature. And all the way through, you can hear the influences of the folk music he collected during his life.

That brings us to the Big Finale, the score for the 1913 ballet "Le Sacre du Printemps” (“The Rite of Spring”) by Igor Stravinsky. The third in a series of series of successful collaborations between Stravinsky and impresario Serge Diaghilev's Ballets Russes (the previous two being "The Firebird" from 1910 and "Petruska" from 1911), "Sacre" was, like “Apu” and the Bartók concerto, inspired by folk elements (Russian ones, to be precise).

The first performance of “Sacre”—at the newly opened Théâtre des Champs-Elysées on May 29, 1913, with Pierre Monteux conducting—became a notorious succès de scandale. "It is arguably," writes Paul-John Ramos at classic.net, "the most famous debacle in western artistic history":

Audience members found the quiet, yet active, introduction ridiculous. When the curtain rose and [choreographer Vaslav] Nijinsky's dances began, the auditorium went into a rage, their sophistication insulted… Debris was thrown, as well as punches. The work was performed in full, but only with the help of Nijinsky calling steps from atop an offstage chair.

Later performances were less riotous. In fact, when Monteux conducted a concert performance in the Casino de Paris the following year, Stravinsky was carried from the hall in triumph on the shoulders of audience members. Today the music sounds less radical but still packs a tremendous dramatic punch, as was the case when David Robertson opened the 2011-2012 SLSO season with it.

Stravinsky in 1903
By Unknown Photograf -
archives de FinitoR
Public Domain, Link

A wide assortment of performances of both the orchestral score and the ballet are available online. The SLSO picked the composer’s own 1962 Columbia Symphony Orchestra recording for its Spotify playlist, but I find it rather bloodless. As he got older and more austere in his musical language, Stravinsky the conductor tended to treat the music of his younger self as something that needed taming.  For my playlist, I have instead chosen a thoroughly unbuttoned 2005 recording by Peter Eötvös and the Junge Deutsche Philharmonie.

I have also included the 1929 recording by Monteux himself with the Grande Orchestre Symphonique for its glimpse of what it was like to play this insane music before it became a standard repertoire item. On his “Sticky Notes” podcast, Joshua Weilerstein points out that the rhythmic instability Stravinsky wrote into the work’s final moments by using “off balance meters that have 5 or 7 beats in the bar” can be lost in more streamlined recent performances. “You can almost hear the panic” in this performance, observes Weilerstein, “but in a way this recording, which is unstable and not together, has more of that visceral excitement that Stravinsky surely wanted.” For a deeper dive into the music, there's also a version of Leonard Bernstein's 1958 New York Philharmonic recording synchronized with pages from the score.

As for videos of the ballet itself, you can see not one but two recreations of Nijinsky's original choreography performed by the Orchestra and dancers of the Ballet Mariinski Theater under Valery Gergiev at the Mariinski Theater in 2008 and at the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées in 2013. The sound and videography are great in both cases. It's as close as you'll ever get to seeing what so excited and outraged audiences over a century ago.

“Sacre” was originally scheduled as the season closer in 2020, but the pandemic put that plan on hold. It will be good to finally hear Denève’s approach to this remarkable piece at last.

The Essentials: Stéphane Denève returns to conduct Gabriela Lena Frank’s “Apu,” Bartók’s Piano Concerto No. 3 (with soloist Piotr Anderszewski), and Stravinsky’s “Le Sacre du Printemps.” Performances are Saturday at 8 pm and Sunday at 3 pm, April 29 and 30. The Saturday performance will be broadcast live on St. Louis Public Radio and Classical 107.3.

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

Symphony Preview: A light in the darkness (over at the Lichnowsky Place)

Now that we have set our clocks back and the shades of night, to paraphrase Longfellow a bit, are falling faster, the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra is getting into the spirit with concerts in which musical darkness is predominant—at least until after intermission.

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

Let me explain.

This Friday at 10:30 am and Saturday at 8 pm, November 11 and 12, conductor John Storgårds and violinist Leila Josefowicz perform the tone poem “Night Ride and Sunrise” by Jean Sibelius (1865-1957), the US premiere of the 2016 Violin Concerto by British composer Helen Grime (b. 1981), and the Symphony No. 4, Op. 60, by Beethoven (1770-1827). All three begin in darkness, but only the second effectively stays there.

Sibelius in 1913
By fi:Daniel Nyblin (1856–1923) -
What We Hear in Music, Anne S. Faulkner,
Victor Talking Machine Co., 1913.,
Public Domain, 

Sibelius composed “Night Ride and Sunrise” in 1908, at a time of stress and personal crisis. His family was expanding—his daughter Margareta had just been born—but his finances were shrinking. He was up to his eyeballs in debt and was failing to meet his composing commitments to his new German publisher Robert Lienau. He had promised four new works per year between 1905 and 1909, but by 1908 had delivered only a handful.

Worse yet, he had developed a throat tumor that required multiple operations. Fearing cancer as a result of his years of smoking and heavy drinking, his doctors had advised him to abstain from both. “Sibelius,” write Fabian Dahlström and James Hepokoski in Grove Music Online, “was haunted by the shadow of death, and much in his music and thought at this time turned towards the darker and the more introspective.”

Certainly the first half of “Night Ride and Sunrise” evokes a wintry nocturnal journey with a repeated “galloping” motif that builds in intensity, gradually morphing into a rising and falling woodwind theme that suggests a bleak, windswept landscape. Slowly the mood changes and eventually rising themes in the brasses and strings suggest the rising sun. It’s a cold Finnish sun, to be sure, but it’s a source of light nevertheless.

Surprisingly, “Night Ride and Sunrise” is getting its first-ever performances by the SLSO this weekend.

Sibelius’s reliance on the repetition of a small number of short melodic phrases as building blocks for his musical structures led Dahlström and Hepokoski to refer to this and other works from the period as “proto-minimalist…breaking more decisively away from the sonata principle through multiple, cumulative rotations.” It even has the kind of strong rhythmic pulse that characterizes 20th century minimalists like John Adams and Philip Glass, although to a less obsessive degree.

“Proto-minimalist" is also not a bad description of Grime’s concerto, the American premiere of which is up next.

Helen Grime
Photo courtesy of the SLSO

Running around 22 minutes, the 2016 Violin Concerto is essentially built on a series of elaborations and expansions on the brief triplet theme first heard at the very beginning in the upper registers of the violin and orchestra and frequently punctuated by syncopated whacks from the bass drum. Although played as one continuous movement, the work is divided up into three separate sections (clearly marked in the score) with, to quote the composer, “extensive dreamlike interlinking passages that connect them.” The mood throughout is ominous and anxious, even in the more serene passages—which seems somehow fitting, given how the world at large has been faring since 2016.

That said, Grime’s inspiration for the concerto came not from international politics but rather from her previous collaborations with Swedish violinist Malin Broman, for whom the concerto was written. “I was immediately struck by the ferocity, power and passion in her playing,” writes Grime. ”At turns she is able to play with a sort of wild abandon but also with great tenderness, sensitivity and with many different colours…I wanted to highlight and showcase these striking, opposing qualities. Violent, virtuosic music covering the whole range of the violin is contrasted with more delicate and reflective filigree material that features oscillating natural harmonic passages and searching melodies.”

At that, she certainly succeeds. The agitated first section, the dreamlike (and slightly nightmarish) second, and the wild finale (with its unexpectedly abrupt ending) require the soloist to squeeze pretty much every possible sound out of the instrument and utilize its entire range—often at a frenetic pace and with frequent changes of meter. Needless to say, orchestra has to be equally on its toes.

You won’t find the work in the helpful SLSO Spotify playlist for this weekend, but there is, fortunately, a recording of the work’s premiere performance by the Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra on YouTube. Daniel Harding conducts with Broman as soloist. Not so fortunately, whoever did the video somehow managed to paste bits of the first movement on at the end of the concerto, interrupting both the closing credits and the applause. Although the video runs over a half hour, the actual performance ends at around 22:44 with a brief silence (because of that abrupt finale, I suspect) followed by the truncated applause.

Beethoven’s Symphony No. 4, which closes the program, also opens in a form of musical darkness, although in this case it’s more of a sonic twilight. A mysterious Adagio introduction suggests “the start of something big” and after a few minutes we get it in the form of an energetic Allegro vivace. From there on, the Fourth is all a-bubble with good humor.

The Red Castle at Hradec nad Moravicí

Whether or not you go along with the "Music History 101" notion that Beethoven’s even-numbered symphonies are lighter in tone than his odd-numbered ones (Schumann called the Fourth “a slender Grecian maiden between two Nordic giants”), there’s no getting around the fact that this one simply radiates good cheer. From the lively first movement, to the comical little descending passage for bassoon that interrupts the coda of the finale, this is music by a composer young enough to be optimistic but mature enough to have mastered his craft.

It probably helped that he wrote it during a stay at the Silesian country estate of one of his major patrons, Prince Lichnowsky (Beethoven described him as “one of my most loyal friends and promoters of my art”) during one of the composer’s rare periods of relatively good health. Beethoven loved going for walks in the country and Lichnowsky’s lavish estate (now open to tourists as the State chateau Hradec nad Moravicí) is perched picturesquely on a heavily forested bluff overlooking the Moravice river. No wonder the composer was in such good spirits.

The Essentials: John Storgårds conducts the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra and violin soloist Leila Josefowicz in “Night Ride and Sunrise” by Sibelius, the US premiere of the 2016 Violin Concerto by British composer Helen Grime, and the Symphony No. 4 by Beethoven. Performances are Friday at 10:30 am and Saturday at 8 pm, November 11 and 12 at Powell Hall in Grand Center. The Saturday night 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 Review: Flash and finesse with an all-Russian program at the St. Louis Symphony

Watching pianist Sir Stephen Hough and conductor Thomas Søndergård give us their nuanced and balletic take on Tchaikovsky’s venerable Piano Concerto No. 1 in B-flat minor at the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra concert last Saturday (October 29th), I once again found myself wondering how the composer’s first choice as a soloist, the Russian composer/pianist Nikolai Rubinstein, could have dismissed the work as “worthless and unplayable.” How could such an immensely appealing piece have inspired such an ugly response?

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

Certainly there was nothing to complain about in Hough’s performance and everything to praise. I have no idea how many times I have experienced this concerto both live and on recordings, but even so Hough found subtle shadings of emotion, tempo, and dynamics that made it fresh. His reading of the first movement cadenza, in particular, had an appealing sense of improvisation and discovery. He and Søndergård also brought out the choreographic elements in a work which is, after all, dominated by danceable triple meters (3/4 and 6/8).

The Big Moments were brought off with the requisite drama and flash as well, including the powerful statement of the opening theme and the electrifying intensity of the Allegro con fuoco finale. But there was also plenty of heart, most notably in the opening pages of the Andantino simplice second movement, with a delicate solo by Associate Principal Flute Andrea Kaplan. The ovation was justifiably enthusiastic.

Not surprisingly, there was an encore, and an exceptionally well chosen one at that: Chopin’s “Nocturne” No. 2 in E-flat major, Op. 9 No. 2. It’s graceful, a bit sad, and utterly different from the fireworks of the Tchaikovsky. Hough played it with the sort of light touch which, we are told, characterized Chopin’s own performances.

Thomas Søndergård
Photo courtesy of the SLSO

There’s not much lightness to be found in the work that concluded the concert, Symphony No. 7 in C-sharp minor, op. 131 by Sergei Prokofiev. It was his last symphony—his last completed work, in fact—and it was the work of a man whose physical and fiscal health were both at a low ebb thanks to the condemnation by Stalin’s cultural enforcer Andrei Aleksandrovich Zhdanov. Although written in a simpler and more approachable style than some of the composer’s earlier works, the Seventh is elegant and even witty on the surface but dark and despairing underneath.

Søndergård did an impressive job of showing us both the light and the darkness—a delicate balancing act, executed with a skill that would do credit to the Flying Wallendas. The Moderato first movement was elegant and elegiac, while the Allegretto second movement and perfect mix of bumptious humor and snarling sarcasm with a properly hysterical, “all fall down” coda. The dark nostalgia of the Andante espressivo came through clearly as did the cheerful children’s march that opens the Vivace finale. The romantic, Korngold-esque theme that materializes towards the end was appropriately glossy, and the quiet, wistfully sad moment for xylophone and muted trumpets that follows would have been tremendously effective if Søndergård had allowed it to conclude the symphony as Prokofiev originally intended it to.

Unfortunately, Søndergård chose the version of the final movement that Prokofiev created at the suggestion of conductor Samuil Samosud, who felt that a more upbeat finale would stand a better chance of netting the composer the 100,000 ruble Stalin Prize. That version, which simply tacks the opening march theme on to the original ending, sounds just like the last-minute addition that it was. Which is probably why most conductors seem to have stuck with the composer’s original.

That odd choice aside, though, Søndergård was never less than persuasive on the podium, and his reading of the opening work, Anatoly Liadov’s miniature “The Enchanted Lake” Op. 62, was a shimmering, gravity-defying delight. There was an almost pointillist delicacy to the short motifs in the horns and woodwinds and a dreamy evanescence to the whole business.

Next at Powell Hall: the regular season pauses while the orchestra plays John Williams’s score for the film “Jurassic Park” live to accompany the film on the big screen at Powell. Showings are Friday and Saturday at 7 pm and Sunday at 2 pm, November 4-6. The regular season resumes November 11 and 12 as John Storgårds and violinist Leila Josefowicz perform music by Sibelius, Beethoven, and the US premiere of Helen Grime’s Violin Concerto.

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

Symphony Preview: It was a dark and stormy night

The St. Louis Symphony Orchestra (SLSO) concerts this weekend (Friday and Saturday, January 31 and February 1) open with a pair of works by two composers who, despite significant differences in temperament and musical style, were close friends.

Manfred on the Jungfrau
Painting by John Martin, 1837

The concerts open with the overture to Robert Schumann's 1848 "Manfred: Dramatic Poem with Music in Three Parts," Op. 115. Based on Byron's "Manfred: A dramatic poem," Schumann's complete "Manfred" consists of the overture we'll hear this weekend along with 15 additional numbers for orchestra, choir, and soloists, dramatizing scenes from Byron's three-act work.

The titular Manfred is not the animated sidekick of Tom Terrific but rather a brooding count living in the Alps and tormented by guilt for somehow (it's never really clear how) causing the death of his beloved Astarte. He summons seven spirits from the deep, hoping to be granted forgetfulness. They can't manage it, but the demonic spirit Nemesis does summon up the shade of Astarte. She grants Manfred the forgiveness that will allow him to die.

In the last scene the spirits return to convince the dying Manfred to join them by preying on his guilt. Manfred, however, isn't having any of it:

Thou didst not tempt me, and thou couldst not tempt me;
I have not been thy dupe nor am thy prey,
But was my own destroyer, and will be
My own hereafter.--
Back, ye baffled fiends!
The hand of death is on me-- but not yours!

An elderly Abbot offers to pray for him, but Manfred rejects all forms of spiritual intervention. He will be his own man to the end. "Old man! 't is not so difficult to die," he exclaims. And proves it by promptly expiring. "He's gone," cries the Abbot; "his soul hath ta'en its earthless flight -- /Whither? I dread to think -- but he is gone."

That would be when the curtain would descend if "Manfred" were an actual play. But, although written as a script complete with scene descriptions and minimal stage directions, "Manfred" was actually an example of the genre known as "closet drama": a play never meant to be staged but rather to be read, either silently or aloud. Schumann, however, fully intended his version to be performed.

Presented for the first time in 1852 at the Leipzig Gewandhaus, Schumann's "Dramatic Poem" never really caught on with audiences, probably because Byron's deliberately archaic poetry didn't translate well into German and partly because (as Judith Chernaik writes in a recent biography of the composer, "Schumann insisted that the work was not an opera, a Singspiel, or a melodrama, but 'a dramatic poem with music' which he considered 'completely new and unprecedented.''' It was, in short, a hard sell and, given the number of performers required, expensive to produce to boot.

The overture, on the other hand, has pretty much entered the standard repertory, even though the SLSO hasn't played it in over 32 years. Its appeal is not hard to understand, packed as it is with stormy drama.

The overture opens with three powerful chords which quickly yield to a slow, brooding introduction suggesting the opening scene ("a Gothic Gallery. --Time: Midnight") in which Manfred ponders the limits of human knowledge and prepares to summon the spirits. Trumpets announce the dramatic main theme, the tempo quickens to "Leidenschaftlich" ("impassioned"), and the music becomes anguished and filled with dark conflict. Lyrical interludes suggest memories of the lost Astarte. Finally, there's a massive climax (the final confrontation with the spirits?) that yields to what Shakespeare might have called "a dying fall" as Manfred slowly shuffles off this mortal coil in a few soft closing chords. The final moments suggest that he has passed in neither hope nor despair, the master of his own fate to the end.

Portrait of Mendelssohn by
James Warren Childe
(1778–1862), 1839
en.wikipedia.org

Schumann identified strongly with Byron's tormented heroes. Indeed, Ms. Chernaik suggests that the composer, who contracted syphilis at an early age, might have identified with Manfred's guilt as a result. "What is unquestionable," she writes, "is that the figure of the solidary nobleman, Byron's alter ego, guilty and despairing, spoke him in a profoundly personal way, inspiring some of his greatest music."

Up next is the Piano Concerto No. 2 in D minor by Felix Mendelssohn from 1837. It opens, like the "Manfred" overture, on "a dark and stormy night" as descending runs in the piano fight it out with a dramatic ascending theme in the orchestra. The exchanges become shorter and more insistent until the orchestra wins out. The piano uses that dramatic theme as the basis for a more lyrical second subject but, this being a movement in classical sonata form, the minor key drama forcefully returns at the end, only to die out, within a few measures from fortissimo (very loud) to piano (soft). The piano takes over again with a gently rising theme and mini-cadenza that leads without pause to the gentle second movement.

That theme, which starts out sounding very much like transformation of the dark melody of the first movement, slowly changes in a way that produces, in the words of Zoran Minderovic at allmusic.com, "a hypnotic atmosphere of tranquil meditation, mystery, and melancholy."

The pace picks up again in the Presto scherzando final movement as the key shifts to D major, but now there's a playful and almost terpsichorean grace to the piano part that's reflected in the interchanges with the orchestra. The opponents of the first movement have morphed into friendly dance partners in the third.

Unlike "Manfred," in short, there's a happy ending.

Mendelssohn found the composition process unusually difficult with his second concerto. Commissioned in 1837 by the Birmingham Music Festival for a performance that fall, the concerto was almost forgotten by Mendelssohn as he went on an extended honeymoon with his new bride, Cécile Jeanrenaud. "With his mind and body otherwise occupied," writes Georg Predota at Interlude, "he wasn't very excited about the prospect of having to travel to London and Birmingham and wrote to his friend Karl Klingemann, 'I really should compose a concert for England, but haven't even started yet; for some reason this is proving to be very difficult.'" He finished it just in time for the September premiere (where he was the soloist) but, as Mr. Predota notes, "even then he was not satisfied, as he wrote to the pianist and composer Ferdinand Hiller in December 1837, 'I believe you would abhor my new piano concerto.'"

Even Mendelssohn's friend Schumann wasn't very impressed--unusual, given how much he praised the composer's work in general. As he wrote in the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik (which he had founded three years earlier):

This concerto, to be sure, will offer virtuosos little in which to show off their monstrous dexterity. Mendelssohn gives them almost nothing to do that they have not already done a hundred times before. We have often heard them complain about it. And not unjustly!...It resembles one of those works thrown off by the older masters while recuperating from one of their great exertions." (cited in Schumann on music: a selection from the writings, edited by Henry Pleasants)

For many years, the Concerto No. 2 was largely eclipsed by the more popular Concerto No. 1. As SLSO program annotator Thomas May points out, however, "contemporary performers have been reclaiming the Second Concerto and making a persuasive case that Schumann's verdict sells the music short by a considerable measure."

Sleeping Beauty at the Royal Ballet, 2008
By scillystuff from UK
Sleeping Beauty, CC BY 2.0, Link

The SLSO last presented it in 2007 with Jonathan Biss at the keyboard. This week's soloist is Saleem Ashkar, who has an unusual background for a successful classical pianist. "Born into a culture where Classical music played very little to no part at all," writes Mr. Ashkar (an Israeli-born Palestinian Christian), "my love for this music and eventual obsessive pursuit of it, was a journey, very much into the unknown, both mentally and practically. I simply had no path to follow!" Given that he made his Carnegie Hall debut at the age of 22 and has performed with orchestras such as the Wiener Philharmoniker, Royal Concertgebouw, London Symphony, Detroit Symphony, Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin, and Orchestre National de Lyon, it would seem that the path he has forged for himself has certainly not led him astray.

The concerts this weekend conclude with music that requires little in the way of an introduction: a suite from Tchaikovsky's 1890 ballet "Sleeping Beauty" assembled by guest conductor Nikolaj Szeps-Znaider. Based on Charles Perrault's retelling of the classic tale of an enchanted princess sleeping in a castle surrounded by impenetrable thorns, the ballet got a lukewarm reception from Tsar Alexander III at its premiere, but has been embraced by audiences all over the world.

Tchaikovsky's music even made its way on to the screen when George Bruns adapted large chunks of it for Walt Disney's 1959 animated version of "Sleeping Beauty." The "Grande valse villageoise" (which we'll hear this weekend) actually became a popular tune, "Once Upon a Dream," with lyrics by Jack Lawrence and Sammy Fain. Trust me, you'll recognize it.

The Essentials: Nikolaj Szeps-Znaider conducts The St. Louis Symphony Orchestra, along with pianist Saleem Ashkar on Friday at 10:30 am and Saturday at 8 pm, January 31 and February 1. Performances take place at Powell Symphony Hall in Grand Center.

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

Symphony Review: Leonard Slatkin returns with an entertaining evening of music old and new

The evening air was crisp and so was the playing of the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra (SLSO last night (Saturday, October 12) as Conductor Laureate Leonard Slatkin led the band in an entertaining and expertly played program of music that spanned nearly 250 years.

Leonard Slatkin
Photo courtesy of the SLSO

The concert opened with a new version of a piece that Mr. Slatkin originally commissioned in 1996, his final year with the orchestra. As a kind of farewell present, he asked four composers who had been in residence at the SLSO during his tenure--Joseph Schwantner, Joan Tower, Donald Erb, and Claude Baker--to each create a different variation of the "Caprice No. 24" by Niccolò Paganini. Slatkin wrote one of his own as well and titled the result "Yet Another Set of Variations (on a Theme of Paganini)."

As Mr. Slatkin approached his 75th birthday he thought a revision might be in order. The new version has the same title as the original but it now has thirteen short movements by a dozen composers (including Mr. Slatkin) that's just under 20 tremendously entertaining minutes in length. The wide emotional range of the suite runs from the solemnity of Truman Harris's "Sarabande" (featuring the bassoon, Mr. Harris's instrument) and the drama of John Corigliano's "Apotheosis (:90)" (referring to the fact that each variation was supposed to run between 60 and 90 seconds) to the Spike Jones-ish comedy of Mr. Slatkin's "Introduction, Theme, and Variant (with apologies to S.R.)."

The latter makes fun of the most famous set of Paganini variations--the "Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini" by Sergei Rachmaninoff (i.e. "S.R") as does Mr. Slatkin's "Quodlibet and Finale," which references all the other composers involved and includes Kelly Karamanov playing the Rachmaninoff's famous 18th variation offstage from what sounded like on old upright piano.

Mostly, the work was about colorful orchestration, musical in-jokes, and a general sense of fun. Donald Erb's "Ave Atque Vale L.S." sounds like an intoxicated after-party. Film and television composer Daniel Slatkin (son of Leonard) covered an impressive number of musical movie memes in his "Paganini Goes to the Movies." And William Bolcom's "Presto scherzando" sounds like a soundtrack for Mr. Toad's Wild Ride.

"Yet Another Set of Variations (on a Theme of Paganini)" also sounds like a wild ride for the musicians, who are inundated with what were clearly virtuoso passages. Needless to say, the members of the SLSO pulled it off with their customary assurance.

Jelena Dirks
Photo courtesy of SLSO

Speaking of assurance, SLSO Principal Oboe Jelena Dirks displayed plenty of that in a graceful rendition of Mozart's one and only Oboe Concerto that honored what program annotator David Garrett accurately calls the "galant manner" of the piece. And she did it with sparkling precision and a good sense of what Donald Francis Tovey (as cited by Mr. Garrett) saw as the operatic underpinnings of the concerto. The "Adagio non troppo" second movement, for example, could easily be a little love song from one of Mozart's comic operas, and the "Rondo: Allegretto" finale actually quotes a tune from "The Abduction from the Seraglio." Ms. Dirks's oboe sweetly sang the former and skipped cheerfully through the latter.

As a bonus (and something of a reference to the work that opened the concert), Ms. Dirks finished each movement with a cadenza written by a different composer. So we had John de Lancie (long-time Principal Oboe of the Philadelphia Orchestra) for the first movement, English oboist Melinda Maxwell for the second, and John Mack (also a former Principal Oboe with the Philadelphians) for the third.

The concert concluded with a glorious, wide-screen, hi-def performance of Richard Strauss's colorful and rousing tribute to himself, "Ein Heldenleben" ("A Hero's Life"). Maestro Slatkin gave it a sweepingly romantic interpretation that did not neglect the fine details of Strauss's inventive use of the orchestra. Richard Freed once observed that "Ein Heldenleben" "represented in its time a new level in the exploitation of the resources of the modern orchestra, and it remains an outstanding landmark in that respect," and you could certainly hear all of that in this utterly compelling performance.

Richard Strauss in 1898
By Fritz Erler (died 1940)
Private collection, Public Domain
commons.wikimedia.org

And the SLSO musicians played flawlessly. Big laurel wreathes are especially due to the horns and the massive brass section as a whole, which sounded great, even in the softest passages. It helped that Mr. Slatkin had the brass section spread out across the entire width of the stage, just in front of the percussion, which made it easier to hear the individual sections, even during the rock concert--level din of the "Hero's Battlefield" section.

Concertmaster David Halen had what is essentially the star turn in "The Hero's Companion" section. It's a loving tribute to Strauss's wife, soprano Pauline de Ahna, in which the violin plays the role of Ms. de Ahna, and an emotionally varied one it surely is. In a letter to Romain Rolland (cited by Mr. Freed), the composer described her musical character as "very complex, a trifle perverse, a trifle coquettish, never the same, changing from minute to minute." Mr. Halen neatly captured the character's many moods.

Principal English Horn Cally Banham also had a lovely moment in the transition to the final section, "The Hero's Retreat from the World and Fulfillment," but ultimately the entire orchestra performed heroically under Mr. Slatkin's skilled direction. I'm a sucker for Strauss, granted, but this was nevertheless a well-balanced and unfailingly arresting performance.

Next at Powell Hall: Stéphane Denève returns to lead the orchestra and violin soloist Karen Gomyo in Prokofiev's Violin Concerto No. 1. The program also includes a suite from Poulenc's ballet "Les Biches," and Rachmaninoff's "Symphonic Dances." Performances are Friday and Saturday at 8 pm, and Sunday at 3 pm October 18-20 at Powell Symphony Hall in Grand Center.

Symphony Preview: Back to the future

It's a mix of the old and new at the St. Louis Symphony this weekend (Friday and Saturday, October 28 and 29) as Jun Märkl returns to conduct the orchestra and soloist Jeremy Denk in Mozart's Piano Concerto No. 23 in A major (K. 488), Liszt's Prometheus, and the Brahms Piano Quartet in G minor, op. 25, as arranged by Arnold Schoenberg.

Franz Liszt in 1858
Photo by Franz Hanfstaengl

Prometheus, which opens the concerts, is old because it was first performed in 1855. But it's also new because this is its first appearance with the SLSO.

Prometheus was already something new at its first performance, even though the composer conducted an earlier version for chorus and orchestra in Weimar in 1850. That's because this revised version was one of the first examples of the symphonic poem, a.k.a tone poem, a genre that Liszt effectively invented.

Many composers have written works labeled "symphonic poem" since then (Liszt himself wrote a total of thirteen), and what they all have in common is a reliance on some external, non-musical source for their inspiration. That source could be almost anything, including a novel (Albert Roussel's Resurrection), a poem (Schoenberg's Verklärte Nacht), a painting (Rachmaninoff's Isle of the Dead), a place (Respighi's Pines of Rome), or a historical event (Smetana's Sárka). Or, in the case of Prometheus, a story out of mythology.

We all know the story of the Greek god Prometheus, punished for giving mankind the gift of fire by being chained to a rock and having his liver eaten every day by an eagle, only to have it grow back overnight (talk about your extraordinary rendition…). For Liszt, it was a story of pain, redemption, and triumph, with a grand fugue and a triumphant ending.

The piece was regarded as radical "new music" at the time and got, as a result, its share of negative press (the infamous Eduard Hanslick, who gave Wagner such grief, called it "an interestingly orchestrated instrument of torture"). These days it's just great musical drama.

The Mozart piano concerto is likely to be the most familiar piece on the program but here, too, there are surprises. The relationship between the soloist and the orchestra is a close one, with lots of give and take between the two, and the piano part looks both backward towards Bach with complex contrapuntal passages and forward to the Romantic era with harmonies that would probably have sounded a bit radical to the composer's Viennese audiences. That's most apparent in the first movement cadenza (which, contrary to his usual practice, Mozart actually wrote down) as well as in the touching Adagio second movement.

In a 2013 interview for San Francisco Classical Voice this weekend's soloist, Jeremy Denk, observed that "a very important part of playing a Mozart concerto is the wonder of each moment." So take the time to enjoy those moments when you see him on stage this weekend.

The concerts conclude with music that's old and new simultaneously: Arnold Schoenberg's 1937 orchestral transcription of Brahms's 1861 Piano Quartet in G minor. That might seem like an odd combination, given the kind of music for which Schoenberg is best known, but in his essay "Brahms the Progressive" Schoenberg claimed that the earlier composer was actually "a great innovator in the realm of musical language, that, in fact, he was a great progressive.”

It's an argument that has been met with some skepticism but there's not much doubt that Schoenberg was a great admirer of Brahms, and his orchestral expansion of the 1861 piano quartet-it's far too elaborate to be described as straightforward orchestration-sounds like both a homage to and a radical re-thinking of the original.

Arnold Schoenberg
By Man Ray, CC BY-SA 2.0

You can hear that in dramatic opening of the first movement. The notes are all Brahms, but the music feels Wagnerian in its intensity. As René Spencer Saller points out in her SLSO program notes, the orchestration is also very different from the sound world of Brahms, with instruments that the earlier composer would never have used such as the xylophone, bass clarinet, and E-flat clarinet.

In a 1939 note to San Francisco Chronicle music critic Alfred Frankenstein, Schoenberg said that his intention was "to remain strictly in the style of Brahms and not go farther than he himself would have gone if he lived today" and "to watch carefully all the laws which Brahms obeyed and not to violate them, which are only known to musicians educated in his environment." I'm not convinced that he actually did that, but what he did accomplish was to pour some old musical wine into new bottles without damaging the vintage in any way. This is the mid-19th century seen through the lens of the early 20th, and if accepted on its own terms it's very rewarding.

The Essentials: Jun Märkl conducts the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra with piano soloist Jeremy Denk in Mozart's Piano Concerto No. 23, Liszt's symphonic poem Prometheus, and an orchestral transcription of the Brahms Piano Quartet in G minor. Performances are Friday at 10:30 a.m. and Saturday at 8 p.m., October 28 and 29 at Powell Hall in Grand Center. The Saturday concert will be broadcast on St. Louis public radio.