Opening a concert with a premiere is powerful: the first music heard in the hall that night marks the first time that music was ever heard in that hall. This weekend, guest conductor Anna Sułkowska-Migoń opened the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra’s program at Powell Hall with the St. Louis premiere of Grażyna Bacewicz’s “Overture.” A Polish woman guest conductor curating the SLSO premiere of a rousing overture by an overlooked Polish woman composer is exactly why orchestras invite guests. It enlarges repertoire and makes new energy flow.
Everyone performed like a famished person finally presented with food. Sitting onstage mostly watching Josefowicz work wonders on Berg had left everyone absolutely dying to play some music.
Judging by the name of the guest soloist who next joined the orchestra onstage, Leila Josefowicz, I thought the Polish connection was continuing, but only her father is from Poland. She was born in Canada and raised in Los Angeles and wherever else her prodigious talent dragged her supportive parents.
Josefowicz gave a sparkling introduction to Alban Berg’s Violin Concerto; she has a second career as a music critic if she wants one. She described how the concerto is a requiem for a young woman (Alma Mahler’s daughter) who died at 18, yet served as the Viennese composer’s own requiem as well since he died shortly after composing it (at age 50 from an infected insect bite, of all things).
Josefowicz played her violin wearing a motley gown with a dominant patch of red consistent with her approach to performing a requiem: fiery and fierce. She looked possessed as she performed this daunting, 28-minute, 12-tone concerto from memory. She adopted a pugilist stance. She danced like a dervish with her ponytail kiting above her head. She arched back to look at the concert hall’s distant, domed ceiling and the gray heavens beyond.
This impassioned guest ventilated all this energy and emotion without missing a note, and it seemed like Berg had her soloing on every bar. I have never heard an ensemble composition more dominated by one instrument. I have never seen so many musicians spend so much time on stage silently listening.
Though Berg may have picked his moments to deploy the other instruments, he made choice, strategic use of them all. This concerto has my favorite parts in the classical tradition for instruments as disparate as gong and saxophone. Berg somehow wrote a combination of clarinet parts to evoke the sound of a church organ in an episode when a Bach chorale gets the 12-tone treatment. At one point the lead violin part achieved this high, keening, weeping tone previously heard only from a cicada.
During intermission, I noticed Daniel Lee, principal cello, came out on stage and took his seat early. The parts he kept playing did not look so difficult that a master musician would need to practice them before the performance. When the rest of the orchestra came out and busted into Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherazade–Symphonic Suite, I understood what was going on. Everyone performed like a famished person finally presented with food. Sitting onstage mostly watching Josefowicz work wonders on Berg had left everyone absolutely dying to play some music.
Rimsky-Korsakov was a brilliant choice to follow the Berg concerto for that reason. The Russian composer wrote for all the instruments, often all at the same time. He had a special gift for orchestrating by section. Scheherazade has some complex melodic lines written to be performed simultaneously by an entire section, like some kind of dazzling synchronized swimming for orchestra.
I had to think this symphonic suite was sequenced after the one-woman show of Josefowicz soloing throughout the Berg concerto out of respect for concertmaster David Halen. After all, he had the best view of the guest soloist as she wrung all that magic out of the same instrument that was sitting mostly silent in the concertmaster’s lap. Rimsky-Korsakov put everyone to work, often on variations of the same themes, but Halen got the first taste of a feature in the suite, and the ensemble kept coming back to him.
This was fun to watch and hear. It was like a musical version of throwing a baseball around the horn, with the orchestra’s principal instrumentalists zipping the same melody back and forth with variations: at one point, Roger Kaza, principal horn, to Halen; then Halen to Lee, playing one of the parts he had practiced during intermission, like a benched slugger taking batting practice, itching to get back in the game; then Lee back to Halen.
As a passionately animated Sułkowska-Migoń led this brilliantly talented orchestra through one of the most thrilling climaxes in all of music, the burden kept coming back to Halen. Almost as an echo of Berg making Josefowicz’s fiddle sing like a cicada, Rimsky-Korsakov had Halen climbing down the neck of his violin to hit those glass-shattering notes. Then the band was back to the manic starts and stops, the raves and crashes that make this mad Russian an avatar of punk rock. There was no word for what Halen was doing but wailing: David “Wailing” Halen – spell that in icing on his next birthday cake.
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