Symphony Preview: Big D

"The Germans," observed the great violinist Joseph Joachim, "have four violin concertos. The greatest, most uncompromising, is Beethoven's." This weekend (Saturday and Sunday, January 24 and 26) James Ehnes joins the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra and Music Director Stéphane Denève for the Violin Concerto in D major, Op. 61, by Ludwig van Beethoven (1770–1827) along with another uncompromising essay in D major, the Symphony No. 1 by Gustav Mahler (1860–1911).

[Preview the music with my Spotify playlist.]

The following comments are adapted from my own writing on both works over the last fifteen years.

Like many of the great 19th century composers, Beethoven wrote only one concerto for the violin, but it’s prime stuff. He was, unfortunately, so tardy in completing it that the soloist at the work's 1806 premiere, Franz Clement (for whom Beethoven had written the piece) had no time to rehearse and might have even been obliged sight read the thorny solo part.

The premiere took place on December 23, 1806, at the Theater an der Wien as part of what Brockway and Weinstock (in the 1967 edition of  "Men of Music") call, with classic understatement, "a singular program":

[The concerto's] first movement was a feature of the opening half of the entertainment, and the second and third movement were given during the second half. Intervening was, among other compositions, a sonata by Franz Clement, played on one string of a violin held upside down.

"Beethoven Letronne" by Blasius Höfel
Licensed under Public Domain
via Wikimedia Common

Needless to say, this sort of cheesy showbiz was not the way the composer intended his work to be performed. Not surprisingly, it was poorly received and didn't begin to enter the standard repertoire until nearly two decades after Beethoven’s death. And that was likely because it was championed by Joachim, who first played it in 1844 (at the age of 12) at a concert in London with Felix Mendelssohn at the podium. Joachim also wrote cadenzas for the work that are still frequently performed.

Now the concerto is recognized as a masterful blend of solo showpiece and symphonic statement, with a substantial first movement that accounts for over half of the concerto's 45-minute running time, a mostly serene second, and a cheerfully flashy third.

There is, interestingly, a rarely heard alternate version of the Violin Concerto. As Michael Rodman writes at Allmusic.com, Beethoven later made a transcription of the concerto for piano and orchestra. He added a long cadenza for the soloist that included the tympani and published it as Op. 61a

The revised concerto was first performed in Vienna in 1807, but despite the occasional high-profile recording like the one Peter Serkin did with Seiji Ozawa and the New Philharmonia in the late 1960s, it remains, as the reviewer of that release notes at Classics Today, "a curio."

Mahler’s Symphony No. 1, first performed in 1889, closes the program in spectacular fashion. Clocking in at just under an hour, the First is probably the most economical of Mahler’s symphonies. It’s also, to paraphrase Anna Russell, a kind of Mahler vitamin pill, combining all the composer’s characteristic gestures in one compact work.

Mahler circa 1889
By E. Bieber - Kohut, Adolph (1900)
Public Domain

It’s all here: the vivid invocation of the natural world, the heaven-storming despair, the macabre humor, the jocular impressions of village bands and sounds that would later be labeled “klezmer,” and  a wildly triumphant finale with a full complement of brass—including an expanded horn section—standing and gloriously blazing away. The subtitle “Titan” that’s often applied to this work may have originally referred to a novel of the same title by Jean-Paul Richter, but I think it’s simply an apt description of this music. Its impact is Titanic in every sense of the word.

As music depicting a journey from darkness to the light, the Mahler First feels very welcome at a time when geopolitical darkness seems to be closing in on us. Its hushed, expectant opening, its birdcalls, and what Chicago Symphony Orchestra program annotator Phillip Huscher calls "the gentle hum of the universe, tuned to A-natural and scattered over seven octaves"—all these things bring to mind a world emerging from darkness into light.

Speaking of that opening sequence: if it sounds familiar that’s because it's remarkably close to the little sequence that underscores the words "Space: the final frontier" in the theme of the classic TV show Star Trek. If you doubt me, take a few minutes to view CBC Radio 2 host Tom Allen's tongue-in-cheek video documentary on the lineage of that theme; it's fascinating stuff. 

And since both ST:TOS and Mahler’s First are fundamentally optimistic, that seems only right.

The Essentials: Stéphane Denève conducts the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra and soloist James Ehnes in Beethoven’s Violin Concerto and Mahler’s Symphony No. 1. Performances are Saturday at 7:30 pm and Sunday at 3 pm, January 25 and 26, at the Stifel Theatre downtown.

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

Symphony Preview: Czech list

This weekend (November 17–19), guest conductor Christian Reif leads the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra and violinist Randall Goosby in a program of works by three very different composers who all hail from towns that are now part of the Czech Republic.

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

The concerts open with the first-ever SLSO performance of the 1938 “Suita rustica,” Op. 19, by Vítězslava Kaprálová (1915–1940). If you’ve never heard of her before that’s not surprising. Her untimely death from typhoid at the age of 25 was at least partly responsible for her lack of wider recognition, although given the maturity and number of her compositions, it’s not entirely clear why, in the late 20th century, her work apparently gained little traction outside of the Czech Republic.

Vítězslava Kaprálová
Public Domain

Maybe audiences weren’t entirely sure what to make of her combination of Czech folk elements with what were then seen as “modernist” sounds. Or maybe it was just symptomatic of the difficulty women composers have had, until very recently, getting serious attention.

It’s a pity in any case, because after listening to the recording of the “Suita rustica” by Jiří Pinkas and the Brno Philharmonic in the SLSOs playlist, I’m strongly motivated to seek out more of Kaprálová’s music. This lively and colorful three-movement work neatly merges the traditional with the contemporary in a way that’s hard to resist.

Up next is the 1945 Violin Concerto in D major, Op. 35, by Erich Wolfgang Korngold (1897–1957).  Like Kaprálová, Korngold was born in the city of Brünn, Austria-Hungary—now Brno, Czech Republic. Unlike her, he wrote in a far more traditional and clearly Austrian style. The second son of music critic Julius Korngold (1860–1945), Korngold was a skilled pianist at age 5 and was composing by age 7. He was much admired by, among others, Jean Sibelius, Giacomo Puccini, Richard Strauss, and Gustav Mahler (who recommended that he study with Alexander von Zemlinksy).

Erich Wolfgang Korngold

Korngold composed his first ballet at age 11 and his most famous opera, “Die tote Stadt,” at 23. In 1934 director Max Reinhardt enticed him to Hollywood to write the music for his lavish film version of “A Midsummer Night's Dream” (well worth seeing, despite the many cuts in Shakespeare's text). He returned to Austria but was drawn back to California in 1938 to write the score for “The Adventures of Robin Hood.” While he was there, Hitler's Anschluss of Austria took place, and Korngold became an émigré ("We thought of ourselves as Viennese," he would recall later. "Hitler made us Jewish.")

Korngold is most remembered these days, though, as a film composer. The lush, late-19th century romanticism of his scores came to typify the big budget movies of the 1930s and 1940s, especially action/adventure films like “Captain Blood” (1945), “The Adventures of Robin Hood” (1938), and “The Sea Hawk” (1940). He scored his share of straightforward dramas, as well, including “Kings Row” (1942), “Of Human Bondage” (1946), and “Escape Me Never” (1947).

Korngold returned to the concert world for the final decade of his life, but like many other notable composers throughout history, was not shy about recycling his own musical material. For his Violin Concerto he repurposed melodies from the films “Juarez” (1939), “Anthony Adverse” (1936), “Another Dawn” (1937), and—in the lively finale—"The Prince and the Pauper” (1937). The concerto had its world premiere right here in St. Louis in 1947 with Jascha Heifetz as the soloist and the French-American conductor Vladimir Golschmann on the podium. Golschmann was music director of the SLSO from 1931 to 1958 (the longest-reigning SLSO music director to date) and made a number of recordings with the orchestra.

This weekend's soloist, Randall Goolsby, is no stranger to the Korngold concerto, having recently played it with both the Oslo Philharmonic and the Rhode Island Philharmonic. The 27-year-old American violinist also appears to be a rising star on the concert scene, having just recorded concertos by Max Bruch and Florence Price with Yannick Nézet-Séguin and the Phildelphia Orchestra for Decca.

Wrapping everything up is the Symphony No. 7 in D minor, Op. 70, by the most thoroughly Czech composer of them all, Antonín Dvořák (1841–1904). Dvořák’s Seventh has always been a favorite of mine, for reasons that are difficult to articulate. I can’t hear it without thinking of a long journey down a dark mountain river. Flashes of light illuminate the trip, but we don’t see the sun until the work’s final moments, when the tonality changes from D minor to D major.

Composed between December 1884 and March 1885, the symphony was written for the Philharmonic Society of London, which had just made the composer an honorary member. Indeed, as a letter to his friend Antonin Rus indicates, he was a bit obsessed with the project. “Everywhere I go,” he wrote, “I think of nothing else than my work, which must be such as to shake the world, and with God’s help it will be so.”

His obsession paid off handsomely. The symphony’s premiere took place on April 22, 1885, with the composer conducting the Philharmonic Society Orchestra at St. James’s Hall and it was, as Alec Robertson writes in his 1962 biography of Dvořák, “a huge success. The work, which pleased conservatives and progressives alike, was favourably compared to Schubert’s C major symphony, and declared to be more immediately appealing than the Brahms F major [Symphony No. 3, Op. 90, published in 1884].”

Anton and Anna Dvořák in London, 1886
en.wikipedia.org

That placed him in some pretty august company. Schubert’s Symphony No. 9, D. 944, which was first published in 1828 (but not performed until eleven years later), was nicknamed “The Great” to distinguish it from an earlier symphony in the same key. By the 1880s, it had achieved the status of greatness among audiences and critics alike. As for the Brahms Symphony No. 3 in F major, Op. 90, the critic Eduard Hanslick called it “artistically the most nearly perfect” of the composer’s symphonies. Dvořák himself was among the work’s greatest admirers, describing it to his publisher Simrock as “[surpassing] his first two symphonies; if not, perhaps, in grandeur and powerful conception—then certainly in—beauty.”

The Dvořák Seventh got similar responses from critics both past and present. In his chapter on Dvořák in the first volume of Robert Simpson’s “The Symphony” (Pelican Books, 1966), Julius Harrison doesn’t hesitate to call it “the finest of them all… Dvořák now scales the heights of Parnassus as he was never to do again.” Robertson calls it “undoubtedly a great work.” I agree, of course, and I think you will probably do so as well.

I’m not sure what approach Reif will take to the  Seventh, although Simon Thompson (writing for Bachtrak) called his performance of it last year with the Royal Scottish National Orchestra “smooth as silk” with the finale “feeling like a rich overflowing towards which the whole evening had been building.” If it’s anything like the legendary 1960 recording by George Szell and the Cleveland Orchestra in the SLSOs playlist (one of my personal favorites), it should be memorable.

The Essentials: Christian Reif conducts the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra and violinist Randall Goosby in the “Suita rustica” by Vítězslava Kaprálová, Erich Wolfgang Korngold’s Violin Concerto, and Antonín Dvořák’s Symphony No. 7. Performances are Friday at 10:30 am, Saturday at 7:30 pm, and Sunday at 3 pm, November 17 through 19, at the Touhill Performing Arts Center. The concert will also be broadcast Saturday night at 7:30 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: 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: Good day sunshine

“Grab your coat and get your hat / Leave your worry on the doorstep / Just direct your feet / To the sunny side of the street” – Dorothy Fields, “The Sunny Side of the Street,” 1930.

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

Sunshine is good for us. It’s a source of vitamin D, a deficiency of which can cause a raft of health issues. Inadequate sunshine can exacerbate sleep disorders and contribute to Seasonal Affective Disorder, which is a fancy way of saying weeks on end of gloom tends to make one gloomy.

Hannah Eisendle
Photo courtesy of the SLSO

But, like any other good thing, too much of it is no good at all. Too much vitamin D can lead to a nasty assortment of illnesses. Too much exposure to the sun can increase your chance of skin cancer. And the combination of excessive sun and heat can lead to heat exhaustion, dehydration, irritability, and sunstroke—the medical term for which is heliosis.

Which, by no coincidence at all, is the title of the first work Cristian Măcelaru will conduct on the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra program this weekend (October 13 and 15) at the Touhill Center.

Commissioned by the Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra and first performed by that ensemble under the baton of chief conductor Marin Alsop last March, “heliosis” [sic] is the work of Austrian composer/conductor/pianist Hannah Eisendle (b. 1993). This is not the cheery evocation of summer in Fields’s lyrics but rather, as Eisendle (quoted in this week’s program notes) says, the kind of summer that is “dirty, suffocating, sticky with dust.”  Not “The Sunny Side of the Street” so much as the Lovin’ Spoonful’s “Summer in the City”: “All around, people looking half-dead / Walking on the sidewalk, hotter than a match head.”

“Eisendle’s threatening brass and multiplicity of percussion effects,” wrote David Karlin of the August 2002 performance at the BBC Proms, “took us on a short, vivid journey across the terrors of a desert landscape, weirdly glissando strings perhaps giving a clue to our disorientation.”

Having listened to the BBC Proms performance on YouTube, I can only agree. It’s a tour de force of orchestration and, at a little over six minutes, it’s just the right length. Because of what I wrote above about “too much of a good thing.”

Mozart by
Johann Nepomuk della Croce
Public Domain

Next, things cool down a bit with the Violin Concerto No. 5 in A major, K.219, by Mozart (1756–1791), first performed in 1775 with the composer as the soloist (a role filled this weekend by Benjamin Beilman). 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. The result is a work "very nearly in line with the instrumental concerto of the next century,” as Blair Johnson points out at Allmusic.com. “Though the piece itself is clearly within the Classical chamber concerto tradition, its scale (better than 25 minutes, usually) and the degree of its technical demands mark the work as something new for the violin."

After intermission, it’s back to the Dorothy Fields brand of sunshine with the Symphony No. 2 in D major, Op. 73, by Brahms (1833–1985). Written and first performed in 1877, the Second concludes with one of the sunniest final movements you will ever hear. Indeed, as James Keays writes in program notes for the Redland Symphony, the Second "is one of the most cheerful of Brahms' mature works, so much so that it is often called his 'Pastoral,' an obvious reference to Beethoven's symphony of the same name."

The comparison is an apt one since Brahms, like Beethoven, loved nature and often drew inspiration from it. “Raised in a hard-scrabble part of Hamburg,” wrote Tim Munro in program notes for the SLSOs 2013 performance “he took long walking trips with his family. Later, escaping Vienna meant he could breathe and be alone with his thoughts."

The escape that led to the Second Symphony was to the Austrian town of Pörtschach am Wörthersee. Brahms loved the place and rhapsodized that "the melodies flow so freely that one must be careful not to trample on them." He rented two small rooms for himself at the village that summer, and if his correspondence is an indication, he couldn't have been happier, as Philip Huscher writes in notes for the Chicago Symphony:

"It is delightful here," Brahms wrote to Fritz Simrock, his publisher, soon after arriving, and the new symphony bears witness to his apparent delight. Later that summer, when Brahms's friend Theodore Billroth, an amateur musician, played through the score for the first time, he wrote to the composer at once: "It is all rippling streams, blue sky, sunshine, and cool green shadows. How beautiful it must be at Portschach."

Brahms c. 1872
Photographer unknown
Public Domain

Listening to the symphony once again, I was struck by the sense of serenity, openness, and good humor in the piece. I was also struck by the similarity between the second theme of the first movement and Brahms's famous "Lullaby" ("Wiegenlied" in German) from 1868. Whether that was intentional or not is hard to say but, as Dick Strawser of the Harrisburg Symphony points out in a 2010 blog post, Brahms does report that the rooms where he was staying in Pörtschach am Wörthersee were near the summer home of Bertha and Arthur Faber, the couple for whom he wrote the "Wiegenlied" in the first place. Personally, I like to think that it was a genial nod to his friends and to the joy he felt in composing this cheerful work.

The Essentials: Cristian Măcelaru conducts the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra, with violin soloist Benjamin Beilman, in Hannah Eisendle’s “heliosis”; Mozart’s Violin Concerto No. 5 in A major, K.219; and the Symphony No. 2 in D minor, Op. 73, by Brahms. Performances are Friday at 7:30 pm and Sunday at 3 pm, October 13 and 15, at the Touhill Center on the UMSL campus. The Friday performance will be broadcast on Saturday the 14th 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 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: We open in...Stifel

[Preview the music with my Spotify playlist.]

This weekend (Saturday and Sunday, September 23 and 24), the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra, with Music Director Stéphane Denève at the helm, will do something it hasn’t done in over a half-century: perform in the Kiel Opera House. Or as it is now known, the Stifel Theatre.

It’s a matter of necessity rather than nostalgia since Powell Symphony Hall, the orchestra’s home since 1968, is closed for extensive renovation and expansion until 2025. The new season will, as a result, be a wanderjahr for the orchestra with concerts not just at Stifel but also at the Touhill Center on the University of Missouri–St. Louis campus. There will also be chamber concerts at the Sheldon Concert Hall and the Pulitzer Center and a performance of Gabriel Fauré’s transcendent “Requiem” at the Cathedral Basilica on Lindell.

Richard Strauss, age 24

The program for the opening concerts is a varied and festive one, with the beloved Violin Concerto by Felix Mendelssohn (1809–1847), the overture to “The Magic Flute” by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756–1791), and three popular examples of the genre known as “program music”. Two are by that master of the genre Richard Strauss (1864–1949) and the third is by France’s Paul Dukas (1865–1935), whose music often doesn’t get the respect it deserves.

Sometimes used dismissively, “program music” refers to any composition either inspired by or intended to depict something nonmusical.  Said inspiration can come from the dramatic, literary, or visual arts, although history, nature, and even architecture figure prominently as well. That covers a lot of territory, as this weekend’s program demonstrates.

The concerts open with Strauss’s “Don Juan.” First performed in 1889, this second in a long series of tone poems takes its inspiration from Paul Heyse’s play “Don Juans Ende” (based on an unfinished verse play by Nicolaus Lenau), which the composer saw in Frankfurt in 1885. As Bryan Gilliam and Charles Youmans write in Grove Online, the work “earned Strauss his international reputation as a symphonic composer” thanks to “its provocative subject matter, dazzling orchestration, sharply etched themes, novel structure, and taut pacing.”

It also nearly killed him. He had just been appointed Kapellmeister to the Grand Duke of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach in Weimar, had just met his future wife, and was becoming highly regarded as a conductor as well as a composer. “All this feverish activity,” observe Gilliam and Youmans, “left Strauss exhausted, and by the end of the 1891–2 season he had become gravely ill.” Fortunately he spent the following winter recuperating in Greece and Egypt and was back at Weimer, hale and hearty, in 1893.

He was still in fine fettle two years later when he wrote the piece that closes the program, “Till Eulenspiegel’s Merry Pranks.” Based on the exploits of the popular “trickster” character from German folklore, the work is beloved by audiences and critics alike. It can also strike fear in the hearts of even the best horn players thanks to the wide-ranging solo for that instrument that opens the piece. Roger Kaza nailed it the last time the SLSO played “Till Eulenspiegel” in 2012, so I expect it’s in good hands.

Illustration for "Der Zauberlehrling", 1882
by Ferdinand Barth

Before that, it’s the popular 1897 tone poem "The Sorcerer's Apprentice" by Paul Dukas. Inspired by "Der Zauberlehrling," a 1797 poem by Goethe, the piece is a vivid portrait of a magician in training whose attempts to transform a broom into a water carrier lead to disaster. It's filled with brilliant orchestral details, from the delicate opening measures for flutes, clarinet, harps, and strings, to the comically animated broom depicted by the bassoons, to the massive orchestral climaxes as the hapless apprentice tries to bring that broom under control.

Those of you who have seen Walt Disney’s 1940 animated classic “Fantasia” may find it hard not to keep picturing Mickey Mouse as the hapless apprentice.

The overture to “The Magic Flute” opens the second half of the evening. Written towards the end of the composer's sadly brief life (Mozart had only a few months to live when it premiered in September of 1791), “The Magic Flute” was intended not for an audience of nobles at court but rather for ordinary folks at a suburban theater where the repertoire ran more towards lighter fare. A singspiel with spoken dialog instead of recitatives and a text in German instead of the fashionable Italian, the work is the fantastic tale of heroic prince Tamino and princess Pamina, daughter of the Queen of the Night, who must undergo a series of magical trials at the court of Sarastro, High Priest of the Sun, before they can attain enlightenment and be united in marriage. Accompanying Tamino in his quest is the comic bird catcher Papageno.

Mozart was a Master Mason in the "Zur Wohltätigkeit" ("Beneficence") Lodge in Vienna and “The Magic Flute” is stuffed full of Masonic symbolism, including frequent use of the number three. That includes the three chords that open the overture. None of the tunes in the opera show up in the overture, though, so one need not know the secret handshake to appreciate the lively music.

The big event of the evening is the Violin Concerto by Felix Mendelssohn (1809–1847). Mendelssohn, like Mozart, died before age 40 and his Violin Concerto, like Mozart’s opera, was composed near the end of his all too brief life. Like “The Magic Flute,” the concerto was also a great success and remained so ever since.

Portrait of Mendelssohn by
James Warren Childe, 1839
en.wikipedia.org

That said, the concerto was a long time in coming. Although the composer announced his intention to write it in a letter to his friend, the violinist Ferdinand David, in 1838, it wasn't until March of 1845, two years before the composer’s death, that the E minor concerto finally saw the light of day. Mendelssohn was ill at the time, so the Danish composer Niels Gade conducted the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra (where Mendelssohn had been Principal Conductor since 1835) with David as the soloist. Which was only fair, as the composer sought David's technical and compositional advice throughout the concerto's six-year gestation period.

This weekend’s soloist is the internationally renowned Hilary Hahn. I saw her most recently at the Bravo! Vail festival in July, where her Tchaikovsky Violin Concerto (with the Philadelphia Orchestra under Yannick Nézet-Séguin) was warmly received. She hasn’t appeared with the SLSO since 2003, her planned 2020 visit having been a victim of the radically downsized season made necessary by COVID-19. I look forward to seeing what she does with the Mendelssohn in a live performance, given the enthusiastic critical reception of her 2002 recording for Sony Classical.

The Essentials: Stéphane Denève conducts the SLSO and violin soloist Hilary Hahn in Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto, Dukas’s “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice,” the overture to Mozart’s “The Magic Flute, and Richard Strauss’s tone poems “Don Juan” and “Till Eulenspiegel’s Merry Pranks.” Performances take place Saturday at 7:30 pm and Sunday at 3 pm, September 23 and 24. Details are available at the SLSO web site.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

William Bolcom
Photo: Katryn Conlin

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Symphony Preview: Ex cathedra

"Stepping inside a cathedral, we are filled with awe," runs the description of the program this weekend (February 15 and 16) at the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra (SLSO) web site. "Our breathing slows, our senses awaken. The music of Bruckner and Gubaidulina captures this feeling of escaping the everyday world for something beyond."

Sofia Gabaidulina
Photo courtesy of Boosey and Hawkes

Being well-acquainted with the Bruckner work on the program (his Symphony No. 7) and having listened to Russian composer Sofia Gubaidulina's "Offertorium" more than once, I'd say that's not a bad description, although the "something beyond" in question is vastly different for the two composers.

Originally written for and first performed by the noted violinist Gidon Kremer in 1981, "Offertorium" was revised in 1982 and 1986, finally getting a recording in its final form by Mr. Kremer and the Boston Symphony in 1988. It's music that makes extravagant demands on both the violinist and the audience. Which is somewhat appropriate, given the events that inspired its main theme.

That theme is the one that Bach used as the subject of the great six-part fugue (the Ricercata) from the 1747 "Musical Offering" which was, itself, the result of an extravagant demand by Frederick the Great of Prussia. At a meeting in 1747, the king presented Bach with a long and highly chromatic theme (supposedly his own, although he may have lifted it from Handel) and challenged him to use it as the subject for a three-voice fugue. A skilled improviser, Bach did so on the spot, at which point the king, in what might have been an attempt to teach this wise guy a lesson, upped the ante to a six-voice fugue. Two months later Bach replied with his Musical Offering--two ricercars, ten canons, and (for good measure) a sonata all based on that theme. Game, set, and match.

The king's reaction has been lost to posterity.

Anton Webern's orchestration from nearly two centuries later (1934-35) raised the ante even further by making this mid-18th century piece sound entirely new. An advocate of Klangfarbenmelodie--the practice of breaking a melodic line up and distributing it to individual instruments a few notes at a time--Webern shattered and re-assigned the individual voices in ways that sound the way a kaleidoscope looks.

When Ms. Gubaidulina introduces the Bach/King Frederick theme at the start of her "Offertorium," it's in Webern's style, with each note given a different instrumental voice. Listen closely to it, because both it and you will soon be off on a wild ride.

The theme is stated a total of three times, with each statement followed by something of a fantasia for the violin and various parts of the orchestra on the interval created by the last two notes. The first time, it's the interval of a minor second based on the notes F and E. The second time around the first and last notes have been dropped (along with a host of rhythmic and orchestral changes), so the final two notes are now G and F (a major second). By the third statement two more notes are gone and the final notes are D and G, leaving lots of fourths and fifths to play with.

Those fantasias tend to be on the aggressive and anguished side, in keeping with the notion that this is an act of sacrifice. It all leads, at around the halfway point, to a massive orchestra blowup (led by the brasses and horns) followed by a long violin cadenza that leads to a more tranquil section.

Anton Bruckner
By Otto Schmidt -
Österreichische Nationalbibliothek,
Bildarchiv Austria,
Inventarnummer: 154.959 - B,
Public Domain, Link

The tranquility soon gives way to an angry, biting orchestral scherzo that crashes into silence from which the violin, backed up by the strings, returns with a hymn-like figure over a repeated descending piano and percussion melody that suggests the structure of a passacaglia. In marked contrast to the previous 25 minutes or so, the hymn is a beautiful thing that continually ascends towards the heavens in a way that put me in mind of some of Leonard Bernstein's work, finally ending on a soft high D on the violin.

Both this week's soloist, the young Latvian violinist Baiba Skride, and the guest conductor Rafael Payare (a graduate of Venezuela's celebrated El Sistema musical education program) will have their work cut out for them with this complex and challenging piece.

Following intermission, we get the major event of the concert, the Symphony No. 7 by Anton Bruckner, in the 1951 Nowack edition.

Writers of music criticism seem unable to discuss the symphonies of Anton Bruckner without invoking the cathedral imagery cited at the top of this article. Perhaps that's because they so strongly suggest a connection between the material and ethereal planes--great blocks of sound alternating with moments of otherworldly beauty. In Bruckner's music you can hear both great, heaven-storming power and quiet mystery. Time seems to act differently in a Bruckner symphony, with each movement incorporating so much emotional depth that it can feel both shorter and longer than the clock indicates. Amazing stuff, really.

First performed in 1884 and last heard here in 2011 under David Robertson, the Seventh is (as I noted at the time) in some ways the quintessential Bruckner symphony. The opening movement alternates moments of great, heaven-storming power and quiet mystery, the Adagio builds to a rapturous climax, the Scherzo swings back and forth between the demonic and the bucolic, and the finale builds inexorably to sheer, brass-heavy exultation. If you only wanted one Bruckner symphony in your collection, this would be it.

Each movement of the Seventh is a kind of world unto itself, and not just because of the sheer length of each ("In the first movement alone," Sir Thomas Beecham once remarked, "I took note of six pregnancies and at least four miscarriages."). The challenge for the conductor is to fully realize each of those musical environments without losing a sense of what Mr. Robertson referred to back in 2011 as the work's "insistent pulse." What will Mr. Payare make of it? We'll see this weekend.

The Essentials: Rafael Payare conducts The St. Louis Symphony Orchestra, along with violinist Baiba Skride on Saturday at 8 pm and Sunday at 3 pm, February 15 and 16. 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: An enlightening journey into darkness with Karen Gomyo and the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra

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

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

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

Stéphane Denève
Photo courtesy of the SLSO

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

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

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

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

Karen Gomyo
Photo courtesy of the SLSO

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

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

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

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

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

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