We were seeing and hearing double this weekend at Powell Hall during the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra’s program led by guest conductor (and beloved former music director) David Robertson.
There were two musical husband and wife couples: Robertson and guest soloist Orli Shaham, and the composers Steven Mackey and Sarah Kirkland Snider, who both had pieces on the program.
There were two soloist performances on piano by Shaham: on Robertson’s piano concerto Light forming and on Leonard Bernstein’s The Age of Anxiety – Symphony No. 2 for piano and orchestra.
There were two compositions by the guest conductor: Light forming and the U.S. premiere of …A Joyful Noise… The doubling thing breaks down, here, as that makes four compositions by three living composers, a rare abundance of living, breathing live music. That served as a bracing reminder of life with David Robertson, who has brought St. Louis so much new music by living composers who came to Powell Hall to listen with us.
Robertson invited Mackey onstage before the orchestra played a note of his piece Turn the Key. The composer described that he wrote the piece for his wife, Snider, who was also in the house, based on two awkward rhythms: a goofy in-joke dance he does for his wife and the stilted clapping one does to test the acoustics of an unfamiliar performance space.
Mackey modeled his combination of these two rhythms then got us to clap along. At that point two men who appeared to be ushers stood and joined in the clapping while pacing in front of the stage. That seemed agreeably funky. When these two clapping men climbed on stage, it seemed provocatively transgressive. When they crossed the stage and melted into the percussion section, I recognized them as SLSO percussionists William James and Alan Stewart. That was one show-stopping way to start a show.
Not surprisingly, percussion went on to dominate the performance of Turn the Key. I counted five percussionists, including four men hammering keys with mallets, plus piano and celesta. (More fun with doubles: celesta appeared on two pieces of this program performed by two different musicians, Matthew Mazzoni here and Peter Henderson on Snider’s Something for the Dark, on which Henderson also doubled on pianoforte.) By the end of the performance, all musician hands on deck were banging out the rhythm until one percussionist dropped his mallets and reverted to the primitive opening handclap.
It was a gift to see Shaham perform the St. Louis premiere of Light forming, a piano concerto Robertson composed for her, conducted by her husband composer. It opened with an echo of Mackey clapping his hands to hear the sound of the room: Shaham tapping the piano tentatively with one finger, the way one taps to check what is supposed to be a live mic.
It was striking how often the composer wrote the piano part of a piano concerto for one hand. Playing piano as if with one hand tied behind your back is an apt image for a piece of music that bristled with restraint. Mackey, not Robertson, got into the game as a rocker first, but I thought of the Grant Hart line from the Husker Du punk rock song, “Terms of Psychic Warfare”: “Having to hold back taught me a lot about control.”
The partner dynamic in Light forming and this performance of it, however, was just the opposite of psychic warfare. Given that conductors sometimes do cue esteemed soloists and sometimes do not, I was curious what approach a husband would take toward the wife soloist he wrote the concerto for. Robertson did cue Shaham, with the gentle intensity that defines the piece. When he turned to embrace her at concerto’s end, we were privileged to share a moment of almost unimaginable public intimacy.
The second half of the program opened with Snider’s Something for the Dark, which I would classify as a tone poem for its relative lack of movement. It makes sense, then, that she took her title from the last line of a Philip Levine poem (about his wife, of course, on a program clustered with husbands and wives). The title also befits this piece of thrilling, dark music. I saw the thrills registered in second violinist Nathan Lowry, one of the orchestra’s most expressive musicians (after first viola Beth Gutterman Chu, who had the night off). This performance of Something for the Dark had an ending that didn’t feel like an ending. Rather than a mistake, however, it felt like a night (or a love, a marriage) you don’t want to end.
When Shaham came back out for the Bernstein symphony, I tried to remember ever hearing a guest soloist play two major pieces on one orchestral program. I came up blank. Now I understood why she didn’t give us an encore at the end of the first half: she was going to play an entire (expletive) symphony for her encore!
Bernstein’s second symphony is titled The Age of Anxiety, and I wondered if the masterfully clever David Robertson were not embedding a pun here. Harold Bloom minted the phrase “anxiety of influence,” and I could hear how much Bernstein’s piece influenced the compositions of the fellow conductor-composer conducting it, but there was no anxiety on display. Indeed, Robertson – who had appeared constrained on the podium, up until now, a little robotic, slightly toy soldierly – opened up and came alive physically while conducting the Bernstein.
The soloist on piano, the love of the conductor’s life, had the same hot take. Shaham kept leaning to her left and peering into the orchestra to enjoy the show and feel part of the band whenever she had light duty on piano. With a mammoth orchestra onstage, she was seated almost on top of concertmaster David Halen, and I could see her deliberately leaning to see around him and absorb more of her fellow musicians.
I could see and hear why. There was a moment in the first movement when the violin section leaned into their parts so hard and sweet at the same time it was like experiencing the Platonic ideal of a violin section. I heard the grain of 28 violins, of 28 violin bows, in one second of sound.
As a coda, Robertson sprang on us the U.S. premiere of a second composition of his. Before reading the program, I noted this sounded like an ode to joy, then was gratified to learn he had titled it “…A Joyful Noise…” Robertson gave a moving introduction to the piece, saying, “I probably had more joy on this stage with these musicians and traveling around with them than any others.” What a joy it is and has been to hear them.
Visit slso.org.