The weekend after Thanksgiving is a strange time. Thanksgiving and its companion shopping holiday have lost their hold on us, and Christmas and the New Year have not yet taken hold, but it is not business as usual either. We are down to the last month of the year, knowing that half of the month will be swallowed by the holidays. It is a time to take stock of where you are and where you are likely to be and where you would like to be. That creates a frame of mind that is ideally suited to listening to carefully performed and complex music. This was a good weekend to spend time at Powell Hall, listening to the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra, and thinking.
SLSO and guest conductor Kevin John Edusei, making his debut leading the orchestra, programed very good thinking person’s music for this weekend.
The program opened with Béla Bartók’s Dance Suite, not heard here for a dozen years. Though first performed in 1923, the suite sounded consonant with more contemporary music. Bartok played with diminished sounds and innovative voicings. The first violins were orchestrated to sound like glass, and the woodwinds, especially the oboes, were given a jazz edge. At one point Peter Henderson was joined on the piano bench by Matthew Mazzoni for piano four hands. The orchestra sounded a succession of strange composite chords, each to my ears unprecedented.
Yet, as its titular reference to dance would suggest, the suite’s innovations did not come at the expense of a rollicking good time. Bartok threw in some classic flute trills. Not for the last time on this program, the horns (especially Roger Kaza) had heavy rhythmic duties. Bartok gave the trombones (Amanda Stewart and Christopher Bassett) more fun work to do than I can remember from any other piece this season. Bartok dug his trombones.
Moving from the Dance Suite to Sergei Rachmaninoff’s Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini felt more like a new movement of the same piece rather than a new composition, the transition was so artful, except for Joyce Yang taking the stage on spotlit piano. Rachmaninoff’s piano lines are lyrical like nothing in the Bartok, and Yang clearly relished the opportunities to play these rolling rhythms and charming melodies. (It is telling that she would choose Gershwin for her eventual encore.) Yang made the virtuosic look effortless and never overshadowed the orchestra playing a solo part that is intricately interwoven with the ensemble.
I heard Bartok carried forward in Rachmaninoff’s use of open space and hushed sounds. You know the old sight gag of playing the world’s tiniest violin, with the first joint of your index finger bowing the first joint of your thumb? I believe we heard that violin’s tiny sound as well as that of a tiny viola.
Rachmaninoff and Edusei brought Wang and the orchestra back up to full-ensemble throttle – including five percussionists banging busy parts – in a way that got me thinking about this time of year and all the things that I, that we, have to think about. The music was utterly lifelike in its gradual complication and immersion – that is just exactly what it feels like to be alive. As so often happens with life, the rhapsody ended unexpectedly, and I did not want it to be over.
When Edusei and a smaller version of the orchestra came back out to perform Ludwig van Beethoven’s Symphony No. 7 in A major to close the show, I at first quibbled with the programming, as I almost never do with SLSO. The Beethoven sounded like the Platonic ideal of a symphony, exquisite – but less adventurous and idiosyncratic than the Bartok or Rachmaninoff. Had the show opened with Beethoven, the three selections would have been heard in chronological order, and Beethoven’s grandeur notwithstanding, we would have experienced a consistent evolution rather than two distinct halves of one program.
Then I saw how the bodies of the musicians, especially the string players, responded to playing the Beethoven. I heard the master’s use of silence and remembered that no one, not even Bartok and Rachmaninoff, had anything to teach Beethoven about modulating an orchestra from silence to ensemble. By the third movement, I saw Edusei’s disarming and candid grinning begin to spread among the orchestra. This was not an act you would want even Bartok and Rachmaninoff to follow. When Edusei called for the final crash (after a long, thrilling timpani run by Shannon Wood), the audience responded with thunderous calls of “bravo!” and rabid squealing more familiar from Beatlemania than a Sunday at the symphony.
Edusei, a countryman of Beethoven’s making his SLSO debut, cut a compelling figure. The grin he spread around on Symphony No. 7 was on offer throughout the show. He appeared to be having the time of his life and wanting to express that. He showed a light touch, evoking finesse from this resourceful orchestra with his long, spidery fingers. Even Beethoven sounded, with apologies to Majic 108, like a quiet storm. Speaking of urban radio, Edusei (who looked from the lower balcony like a wiry Cory Booker) had a more spontaneous and (dare I say) clublike set of moves than most conductors. It makes sense that timpani was his first instrument. He definitely conducts to the beat of his own drummer.
As I look forward to this last month of this challenging year, thinking about all the thinking that I, that we, need to do, I am thankful for this orchestra for helping me start to sort things out. I will do so mindful of this young guest conductor trying his hand for the first time leading this world-class orchestra and not even trying to disguise how much he was loving his life.
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I was there too – what a great and accurate accounting of Maestro Edusei throughout the night. I thought he was utterly captivating…challenging of his artists through leadership. I thought it pretty remarkable how he did not utilize a score of any kind during Beethoven’s 7th symphony. He is also a compelling figure given his size and command of the podium. Thanks for this great article!