Patrick Summers, leader of the Houston Grand Opera, guest conducting the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra – joined by the St. Louis Symphony Chorus, performing for the first time in two years (masked) – led the orchestra, chorus and audience for one minute of silence in memory of those in Ukraine who have already lost their lives “and our artistic brothers and sisters in Ukraine” before they performed “Mozart’s Requiem” on Friday night.
It was the stillest moment I have ever heard at Powell Hall. Not one cough. Not one whisper of cough drop wrapper.Â
Then the orchestra and chorus performed the Requiem like their lives depended upon it, like they were musicians in Ukraine playing far underground in subway tunnels while Putin’s bombs explode overhead.
Putin’s bombs had kept Dmitry Sinkovsky – who had been scheduled to conduct the orchestra, perform on violin, and sing in his SLSO debut – behind in Moscow. Apparently he was unable to find anything smoking out of Moscow that wasn’t loaded with bombs to drop on Ukraine.
Summers – the Indiana native trained in the stellar music school at Indiana University – instead got to enjoy his SLSO debut. In place of the first half of works by J.C. Bach, Antonio Vivaldi, and G.F. Handel that had been programmed to feature Sinkovsky, Summers conducted three light, bright Mozart compositions: the Overture and “Non più di Fiori” from the opera “La Clemenza di Tito” and “Horn Concerto No. 2.”
The fact that this conductor was booked, program assembled and orchestra rehearsed overnight was literally unbelievable. Not only did Summers command that minute of silence before the “Requiem,” he spoke between songs about the orchestra with a plural “we” as if he owned it, and he directed it that way. For all the commercial and gimmicky reasons that orchestra companies select guest conductors, Summers reminded us the one and only thing that needs to be true of the person with the baton: they must know the music more intimately than anyone else on the stage. As he directed the musicians, all ten of his fingers appeared to move at different tempos and in different directions, cueing and coaching different sections and soloists with an effortless mastery.
I have exactly one critical note to make about a concert that I hope to see and hear in my dreams and daydreams until I am laid to rest. The horn concerto was sequenced after “Non più di Fiori,” making Principal Horn Roger Kaza take the symphony’s solo voice immediately after mezzo-soprano Jennifer Johnson Cano. Both accepted these solo assignments on incredibly short notice and rose to the occasion, but the horn’s range – in any player’s hands and mouth – just does not have the emotional range to sustain the energy established by a human voice singing a Mozart song leading into the vocal thunder and weeping of the “Requiem.”
Watching the overhead translation as the chorus and guests sang together, I was reminded that “requiem” is Latin for “rest.” Transported by song and orchestra and human connectedness, I am left thinking of Ukraine and wondering when its beautiful people will once again and truly rest.
Summers leads SLSO and the chorus in the same program at Powell Hall 8 p.m. Saturday and 3 p.m. Sunday. Visit slso.org.
Former managing editor Chris King is now The American’s classical music reporter.
