The program the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra is performing this weekend opens, deceptively, with a blast of quintessential feel-good music: Three Romances for orchestra by Clara Schumann. This is lush romanticism with a wall of violins, so consistently orchestrated (by Benjamin de Murashkin) it would serve as a good sleeper conductor’s audition. You want your conductor to manage wide dynamic range, of course, but maintaining perfection in balance, which Three Romances challenges an orchestra to do, might be just as necessary and difficult. Guest conductor John Storgårds, a frequent SLSO guest, passed his own audition.
Storgårds kept the balancing act by conducting a vastly pared down orchestra in Joseph Haydn’s Cello Concerto in C major. They seated, for example, one line of winds, only four musicians – one less than the winds quintet that took the Sheldon stage to play chamber music the night before this Friday, December 5, orchestra concert. It seems safe to say every musician on the Powell Hall stage for the Haydn could see every other musician, which could not be said for the closing number, the cosmic specimen that is Dmitri Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 15 in A major. The fewer the players, the larger burden of the music each player must carry. This would again make good audition material for the handful of instruments Haydn colored with.
I have never seen a more vivid solo performance before an orchestra…
Everyone plays around the lead cello part, taken by Kian Soltani, an Austrian of Persian descent making his SLSO debut. I know I risk superlative fatigue in recording my responses to this orchestra, but I have never seen a more vivid solo performance before an orchestra. It wasn’t only the performance of music, though that filled the concert hall with the cello’s full wheel of colors: the browns, the ochres, the oranges, the mustards, the magentas.
Even more vivid was Soltani’s enactment of performing this music. I travel with what I call my opera glasses (really very small Bushnell binoculars), so from the lower balcony I had a sharp view of Soltani. He had these classic head swipes hard to the right, then hard to the left, at 90 degree angles that had a classical precision to it. He looked up at the heavens. He had one of those faces you have seen on ancient sculptures, with a groomed shadow beard and a fade cut grown out just the right amount. He wore a dark, uncollared shirt and a blue jacket so loose and light it could have been a windbreaker. Persian leading man vibes was a good look for a guest cello soloist.
There was no preening as if Soltani was trying to cultivate this effect. Haydn kept him too busy to preen were he even the sort to do so. You could sense Soltani’s modesty in those rare moments when Haydn was not leaning on the lead cello but did not give him a break either. Soltani laid back and laid down a supporting cello part like the other cellists – only three, Melissa Brooks, James Czyzewski and David Kim.
For all the grace of the guest soloist, ensemble playing in the Adagio was what stayed with me after the performance. The pared-down orchestra with no percussion to help keep the beat laid bare the musicians’ way of sharing the burden of the time. Music is an art over time, and it is a special performance that shares the musicians’ heightened experience of time. When the Adagio ended and the Finale got underway with fanfare, I could feel and hear the absence of that slow, deep collective beat.
The performance of Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 15 gave me a parallel sense of space. Though only about 45 minutes in length, a long piece of music but no epic, the symphony was so absorbing it began to feel like a landscape we were sharing, a place we inhabited only as long as the musicians created it. Shostakovich wrote for a vast orchestra, too many musicians to count (I did count 14 winds and six percussionists), but he asks them all to sit silent for perverse amounts of time while each of them has its own say.
Shostakovich gave unforgettable voice to a wood block, a clacker, a snare drum, a triangle. The percussionists’ work stations looked like surgery theaters where the team is going in deep and will need all manner of tools, from sawing through bone to sewing up the linings of organs. Low brass brought the sad foreboding as only low brass can. Many instruments spoke in a whisper. I had never heard a tympani whisper, but I have now.
Shostakovich set aside one instrument for extended exploration: the cello (making this and the Haydn cello concerto perfect program mates). Storgårds looked to Melissa Brooks for this choice assignment, a minimalist cello concerto embedded in the symphony, and she told so many stories and silences with her cello. At moments, an orchestra of more than 50 musicians watched Brooks play one string on her cello. During the ovations, Storgårds stood Brooks up and applauded her at the beginning and, after recognizing everyone else in the ensemble, again at the end.
Symphony No. 15 jumps from minimalist masterpiece to tuneful cacophony that made me think about the primary forces of creation, a big musical bang. The modulation between the cellular focus on individual instruments and the eruptions of these big dark nebulas of sound helped create that sense of enduring space. This was sound that had created a space. The space Shostakovich created with his symphony reminded me of the basement bar in the Overlook Hotel, in Stephen King and Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, where Jack is told by the ghoul behind the bar that he had “always been here.” I started to wonder if this symphony would ever end even though I didn’t want it to.
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