The St. Louis Symphony Orchestra premiered three works by Mizzou student composers – JT Wolfe, Harry Gonzalez and Atticus Schlegel – at the Touhill Performing Arts Center on Wednesday, March 26, led by SLSO Assistant Conductor Samuel Hollister. It was a brief but engaging concert where some of the planet’s best musicians got to be the first orchestra to fully flesh out into public space what had mostly been inside the heads of young composers.
Though a smaller version of the orchestra, this was still very much the spectacularly finessed SLSO, featuring some first chairs taking the call for a community concert – I saw Beth Guterman Chu on viola and Erik Harris on double bass. Yin Xiong, who just shredded lead cello on the SLSO premiere of John Williams’ Theme from Seven Years in Tibet, led the downsized cello section. A workhorse second violinist who always gets the call and always takes it, Shawn Weil, was doing his essential thing helping to hold up the midrange of the band.
“Harmonies emerge from the blur,” Gonzalez aptly described the progression of his piece. When they emerged, the melodies came like a broken music box – suitably for a child imagining the memory of his mother.
They opened with JT Wolfe’s La Sal Sketch, a tone poem about the Utah desert that spreads below the composition’s namesake mountain range. Writing desert sounds for orchestra is never a bad idea, and these deft players delivered with whooshy percussion – this entire program had tasty parts for the orchestra’s backline – thrummed strings, spectral piano runs, timpani rumbles, and now shimmering, now screeching, strings. The orchestra collaboratively voicing a desert wind near the end lingered in my mind’s ear.
This was a free community concert, but I invited one of my go-to plus-one companions for reviewing the SLSO big shows. U.S. Marine Corps Gunnery Sergeant Sean Jackson (ret.) talked with me after the concert. He said the composer’s prefatory remarks helped him to hear this composition. “He wasn’t kidding when he said he was going to transport us to an alien landscape,” Gunny Jackson said. “And when he said it would open up at the end and get more lush, that’s exactly what it did.”
La Sal Sketch was followed by Harry Gonzalez’s Fragments of a Memory. The composer told us he had in mind a memory of his mother’s without telling us what that memory was, which opened up the imagination to a unique and challenging piece. It started with what I would call a slow build on eerie sonorities and whirring wines, but it didn’t build. Like a memory, the orchestra was not quite frozen but also didn’t have anywhere to go, because it was already gone. The form was that of a fractured mirror, a similar feature repeated with distortions but not motion. The brass section lurked in the background ominously in a way I have never heard from an orchestra.
“Harmonies emerge from the blur,” Gonzalez aptly described the progression of his piece. When they emerged, the melodies came like a broken music box – suitably for a child imagining the memory of his mother. It must have been a frightful memory; both Jackson and I thought this piece sounded like a short horror movie soundtrack. I saw Erik Harris, double bass first chair, really lean in on this one. How fun it must be, when you can play Beethoven and Brahms from muscle memory, to help tell a young composer what he is trying to say speaking some of his first words.
With the smaller orchestra and the sparseness of the first two compositions, there were opportunities to hear individual players more clearly than at subscription series concerts. At one point in the Gonzalez, SLSO viola first chair Beth Guterman Chu was doing most of the playing, and that provided a momentary glimpse into just how much big sound she can get out of that one piece of wood.
In closing, Atticus Schlegel’s Deer of Great Soul provided whimsical uplift after a night of desert crawls and horror shows. The composer told us we were “meant to have fun” listening to this musical portrait of his father, Paul Schlegel, also a composer and a major musical influence on his son.
Deer of Great Soul – why that was the father’s nickname went wonderfully unexplained – was a ton of fun. The strings opened plucking melodies, percussion got feisty early and remained an integral and abruptly changing force, and the orchestra had their first fully fleshed-out melodies to perform as an ensemble for the night’s program. The band evidently had fun. The violin players started moving more of their full bodies with the music, and Guterman Chu at one point seemed to guffaw, though silently – ecstatic, but not disruptive.
When I was talking to Jackson after the concert, I finally formulated what I had been thinking about the Schlegel: “It was like a children’s party that is surprisingly fun.”
We were talking about the concert at Narrow Gauge Brewing in Florissant. By the way – cheers to an inspiring program of music that still gets you to your local craft brewery before 9 p.m. last call. The bartender, Thomas, ear-hustled my comment and repeated it back, with a chuckle, “Like a children’s party that is fun.”
“Surprisingly fun,” I insisted. “Surprisingly fun.”
More information on the New Music Initiative at Mizzou: https://newmusic.missouri.edu.