Symphony musicians all learn the same zombie stare for when they are seated onstage but not playing. Like wearing uniform concert blacks, it rightly places emphasis on the music rather than the musicians. At the Friday, November 22 St. Louis Symphony Orchestra performance, concertmaster David Halen broke this form. He could not take his eyes off the piano playing of guest soloist Yeol Eum Son. Not that Halen was emoting or drawing attention to himself, but he had the best seat in the house to watch this sizzling piano performance and he evidently took advantage of the opportunity.
In her SLSO debut, Yeol Eum Son joined the orchestra – led by guest conductor Jonathon Heyward – on Sergei Prokofiev’s Piano Concerto No. 2. I could see why Halen could not take his eyes off her performance. The conductor played piano at the 1913 premiere (and again at the 1924 premiere of his reconstruction after the original score was destroyed by fire), and Prokofiev said his own piano part wore him out. Son wore me out with her emotionally resonant and physically acrobatic performance. She was not showy, just expressive without restraint, rising off the bench to attack more vigorous parts and ending long piano lines with full arm sweeps away from the keys.
Two vivid physical moments that were entangled in the thrilling musical performance: she was blinded by her own flowing hair during a long, intricate stretch of piano playing with no break to pin it back behind her ears; and she held a stare upward during a pause between workouts, as if summoning strength from the heavens to continue.
Jonathon Heyward, in his second stint leading the orchestra, kept the soloist behind him but just visible with a far left stretch and twist from his young and limber spine. He never presumed to cue the star soloist, but he often swept far left to connect with her and to savor clutch moments. Perhaps, like the concertmaster – and the timpanist, who also peered through the woodwind players to enjoy the piano show – the conductor could not keep himself from watching her performance.
To my ears, the Prokofiev stole the thunder from the marquee closing number, Jean Sibelius’ Symphony No. 5, which should have been programmed to close the first half, not to follow this monster of a piano concerto. SLSO promoted the concert on social media with Heyward speaking artfully about Sibelius, saying to think of this symphony as a landscape, not a portrait. I wish I could hear their attentive, responsive performance of this gorgeous, atmospheric music when Yeol Eum Son and Sergei Prokofiev had not just scorched the concert stage in the shape of a piano.
That said, this was a supple and dynamic performance of a symphony that runs white hot, whispery quiet, and just shimmery weird. It makes sense that Bernard Herrmann, who scored Psycho (1960) and six other Alfred Hitchcock films, liked to conduct Sibelius. Symphony No. 5, which was first performed in 1915 but not perfected until 1919, set the gold standard for building eerie musical tension. At the same time, Sibelius calls for the tiniest of sounds – at times, it’s almost an inaudible orchestra. Contemporary composers who write for instruments, especially strings, by squeezing most of the music out of them are following Sibelius by a century.
Most of the audience at the Touhill Performing Arts Center clearly had not been burnt to a crisp by the Prokofiev, because they went wild over the Sibelius, even erupting in spontaneous applause between the movements. David Halen caught my eye again, after bringing down the band to end with a bang, by almost lurching toward the young guest conductor with a big, open grin.
A program themed for Sibelius opened aptly with William Grant Still’s Threnody: In Memory of Jean Sibelius (1965), an overdue SLSO premiere of an underperformed African-American composer. This delightful piece of ear candy should remain in repertoire. In a seamless ensemble performance of music so fluent you feel like you have heard it before, I savored the harp, trombones, tuba, and snare. Simply listing the tones that Threnody spotlit makes me want to hear something written for just those four instruments, maybe in memory of William Grant Still.
Heyward – a young African-American conductor from South Carolina – introduced Still from the stage as “a fantastic African-American composer from Mississippi” who obviously was inspired by a Finnish composer. Without dragging politics too openly into the concert hall, Heyward suggested that maybe we still need to remember that we can learn from and appreciate people unlike ourselves from other cultures.
A sizable and diverse group of music students from Parkway West High School heard that message. I chatted with some of them during intermission. Many were dressed in concert blacks like they were attending a dress rehearsal. During one frenetic moment as the Sibelius was sawing to a close, I heard what sounded like a couple of strikes on a woodblock coming, on beat, from the crowd. I do not condone selfish disruptions of symphony concerts, but when I think of all the zombie stares that lie ahead in the future of a classical musician, maybe I would forgive a student percussionist who snuck in an instrument, played along with the pros for a moment there, and got away with it.
SLSO will perform this concert again 3 p.m. Sunday, November 24. Visit slso.org.