When guest soloist Nikolaj Szeps-Znaider walked back onto the Powell Hall stage on Friday, November 1, yielding to the audience’s call for an encore, he described his experience playing with the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra, under the musical direction of Stéphane Denève. “There is something in the sound and approach to music,” Szeps-Znaider said, “that feels very natural.”
That was an apt description of how the orchestra sounded playing an utterly classic classical program of Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto in D major and Sergei Rachmaninoff’s Symphony No. 2 in E minor.
The orchestra opened the Tchaikovsky sounding supple and loose, comfortably leaving ample open space for the music to breathe. Once the soloist had provided melodic and rhythmic examples, the strings got a prolonged workout on those themes and motives. The woodwinds and a six-piece brass line – particularly the oboe and trumpet, early on – lent punctuation. The bassoons emerged as a faithful counterpoint to the violins. The most memorable melody Tchaikovsky wrote for anyone other than the violin soloist in this concerto went to the flute, performed by Demarre McGill.
The masterful yet relaxed ensemble playing – that naturalness the soloist described – laid bare the composer’s art, what a carefully constructed and balanced piece of music this is. They must teach this concerto in composer school: whatever else you might want to do, you must first learn how this is done.
Szeps-Znaider took a restlessly lyrical solo violin part and really made it sing. This violin part begs to be scored for voice – you have a ready-made opera here, just add the words. I was not surprised to read in his Playbook bio that Szeps-Znaider conducts opera on the side. He conducted a phantom opera in his performance of the Tchaikovsky.
Tchaikovsky wrote more than songs for the violin in this concerto. He also wrote jaunty dance steps. He wrote frenetic avant garde episodes that make it hard to place this concerto’s premiere all the way back in 1881 (in Vienna). What the soloist performed at times appeared to be humanly and mathematical impossible, even as we saw him playing it. From singing melody on horsehair to conjuring new sounds never heard before, he provided a master class on bow technique.
Tchaikovsky asked a lot of his soloist in between the few breaks he gave him. The first time Szeps-Znaider took five, he dropped both his arms like someone shrugging off a burden. At his second break, that shrug-shudder was accompanied a vigorous head shake and one of those massive exhalations that elicit a subconscious mouth action.
The intensity of the relationship between soloist and conductor was a recurrent dramatic theme. At the outset of the concerto, Denève looked Szeps-Znaider dead in the eye for a good, long while before turning to the orchestra and cueing everyone. The conductor as good as said, “This is your stage.” After a long unaccompanied violin passage, Denève looked at his soloist, perceptibly waiting for his cue, and then soloist and conductor more or less cued one another at the same time, in effect exchanging the baton. I have never seen that before.
As for that encore, the soloist put his material where his mouth was by calling for an ensemble encore rather than taking his bows alone. He asked the entire orchestra to join him in performing Estrellita (My Little Star), a Mexican pop song by Manuel Ponce arranged by Jascha Heifetz (that Heifetz also favored for his own encores). This tune called for relatively simple technique, so both soloist and orchestra were deprived of pyrotechnics and had to live or die by sheer fluency and feeling – that naturalness thing, again.
When the orchestra came back out to play Rachmaninoff’s Symphony No. 2 in E minor, without their gifted and generous guest, they were a bigger band – more brass and percussion – and they had a solid hour of uninterrupted live music on their hands. Rachmaninoff and the orchestra started with a vigorous but deliberate episode, giving all the musicians (except for some role players in the percussion section) a chance to use every part of their bodies they were going to need for the next hour, like marathoners establishing a wide range of body motion during that first mile.
Their mixture of virtuosity and naturalness enabled this orchestra to illustrate what a master orchestrator Rachmaninoff was. In Powell Hall, I could visualize the separations of sounds, kind of like a Tchad Blake mix (think: Los Lobos, Colossal Head) where, even if you do not consume psychedelics, you can see in physical space where every different instrument appears in the mix. Powell Hall became a Rachmaninoff Omnimax theater.
I heard other musical echoes that looked far beyond the 1908 premiere of this symphony (with the composer conducting in St. Petersburg). In the first movement, the double basses and cellos kicked into this repeating folk form that you could chip out into a killer Andrew Bird song. Then the whole band played some hard blues, almost proto-bebop, 12 years before the birth of Charlie Parker in Kansas City. This also is one of those Rachmaninoff symphonies that appears to have been plundered for melodies by everyone from Eric Carmen to Bread to Burt Bacharach to even Elton John.
Rachmaninoff understood stereophonic sound some decades before sound recording caught up with him. This SLSO performance showed how Symphony No. 2 was written for the two sides of the human head, left and right, with the violins often trading volleys across the stage with the low strings and brass, while the woodwinds were positioned in the middle, lending support to both sides. Rachmaninoff also showed interest, not only in stereo sound, which is horizontal sound, but also in vertical sound, sound going from very small to gigantic. The second movement has a severe, sheer sonic climb from silence to a resounding propulsive boom that will make some tough work for whoever has to master the recording of this performance, which Denève said the symphony was making for a future release.
Both these compositions should be studied in purely formal terms – anyone who wanted to make anything could benefit from their templates once you took the time to figure them out, which is what orchestras get to do for a living. I was left thinking about how Rachmaninoff deployed the woodwinds as a kind of neutral Switzerland poised between the often-antiphonal high strings versus low strings and brass. In the winds, whatever else was going down around them, I heard patient witness, peaceful coexistence, calm persistence, and resilient sanity.
That sounds like a good template for these United States in November 2025: patient witness, peaceful coexistence, calm persistence, and resilient sanity.
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