The St. Louis Symphony Orchestra opens this weekend’s program with the St. Louis premiere of a piece that deserves a place in the regular repertory wherever it is performed. To say Agnegram by Michael Tilson Thomas comes with all the bells and whistles of contemporary classical music would be to undercount its surface charms. It comes with all the bells, whistles, thrills, giggles and whatever that instrument is called where you crank your hand in a circle and it makes a sort of stick-in-the-spokes sound.
To say Agnegram has surface charms does not discount its substance. The composition honors symphony patron Agnes Albert, a premise that likely appeals to orchestras increasingly dependent on a shrinking pool of major supporters. Thomas played musical games with the name “Agnes,” choosing keys and emphasizing notes that correspond with the letters in her name.
As a march, Agnegram has that uptempo overture vibe audiences love to hear at the beginning of a program. In the pastiche of quotes from music cherished by Albert, Thomas included the 1812 Overture, perhaps the most recognizable fanfare in the tradition, composed by Pyotr Tchaikovsky, the Russian genius whose Sixth Symphony loomed at the end of the concert.
Apparently, Albert also enjoyed the kinds of classical music first heard by most contemporary audiences: our starter kit of cartoons and film scores. Agnegram sounded like our collective unconscious of classical music.
SLSO music director Stéphane Denève likes to chat with audiences and has charm. His comments about Thomas and their friendship touched deeper than most of his witty banter. This composer meant something to him, and presenting the work in the year of his friend’s death, Thomas died April 22 at age 81, was clearly meaningful.
On Friday night, Denève appeared deeply animated by his love for music and musicians and perhaps a renewed awareness that these things do not last forever. At the end of the premiere, the conductor twisted so far to his left that I thought he might lunge into the lap of concertmaster David Halen as if he needed to hug a musician.
Joined by guest soloist Daniil Trifonov, the orchestra moved on to Sergei Rachmaninoff’s First Piano Concerto. There tend to be unspoken issues around how a conductor relates to a guest soloist chosen for a program because they know the material better than anyone else onstage, including the person holding the baton. Denève put no distance between his soloist and the rest of the orchestra, or between the soloist and himself. The conductor and pianist were in almost constant rapport about where the orchestra had progressed in the concerto and what the piano would do next.
First, Rachmaninoff and Trifonov treated the piano like a parlor trick. Speaking of cartoons, we could almost see the thought bubble: Look what I can make a piano do! Then, when the concerto stripped itself down, Rachmaninoff and Trifonov held onto the piano as if it were the last slender lifeline to the future of music, the final defense against silence. While it is definitively virtuosic to perform a fast, intricate passage at full speed and complexity, try playing the piano when timing and tone seem in danger of disappearing.
Trifonov expanded that survivalist approach to the piano in his encore. He played Valsa da dor by Heitor Villa-Lobos in a way that achieved something rare: a deconstruction that was not pretentious. He was not taking apart the music to show off a sophisticated awareness that everything is a trick a fellow magician can debunk. He took apart the music to discover what was most elemental there, then put it back together with something like the joy of original creation.
Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 6 was a masterful way to conclude a concert that began with the premiere of Thomas’s pastiche and passed through Rachmaninoff’s plunge into the core of music and its structures.
Tchaikovsky opened the symphony as if he were discovering music one instrument at a time, like a creation myth unfolding in real time. First the bassoon (Andrew Cuneo), then the flute (guest musician Calvin Mayman), then the oboe (Xiomara Mas) were introduced into a large orchestral performance as if each, in turn, were the only instrument on Earth.
Then Tchaikovsky wrote the orchestra out from under each of them, one at a time, much as Rachmaninoff did with the piano in the concerto. I almost gasped when the oboe was left alone with its small voice. Every musician onstage, every person in Powell Hall, waited on one person’s pair of lungs and her ability to turn breath into the music Tchaikovsky heard in his head.
I had never noticed how many times Tchaikovsky ended his Sixth Symphony. The intense engagement of Denève and the orchestra with the material made the shape of the work unusually legible and vivid. The first time the entire orchestra came crashing down in a series of crescendos, the hour-long symphony was only half over. Tchaikovsky then spent the second half exploring what it means to end something and what an ending says about everything that came before it.
Tchaikovsky’s Sixth felt like a story about the part of us that thinks the journey is over simply because something sounds final. Life means surviving all that drama and continuing on with an open spirit after it feels as though the curtain has already fallen. This is music about survival and reinvention.
What a profound way to end a concert that opened with the premiere of music composed by a friend Denève expected to have alive and in the hall, ready to be welcomed to the stage. It became a concert about accepting what remains when the people we expect to share a moment with are no longer there. The music still has to be played. The moment still arrives. All that remains is to embrace it while it is here.
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