People walked out of the Sheldon Concert Hall into its bar at intermission of the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra’s Live at the Sheldon show on Thursday, February 5, buzzing about what they had just heard.
A woman was talking about the depth of emotion in the music, the turbulence of emotion in the music. A string quartet assembled by co-curators Michael Casimir (viola) and Yin Xiong (cello) had just walked the tightrope highwire of Home by St. Louis composer Kevin Puts. In Home, the cello and viola ground a thrilling violin duet of Xiaoxio Qiang and Siyu Zhang. Home calls for such tight ensemble playing that – despite the pyrotechnic flights of the violins – the musicians sounded like a composite quartet. Four musicians playing their four-stringed instruments sounded like four strings played on one instrument.
This woman was stirred by how Casimir introduced the piece. He asked the audience to think about what inspired Home, written in 2019: the Syrian refugee crisis. Casimir did not say a word about the United States of 2026, but I thought about how we are now living in and funding a refugee-producing nation. “I’m not telling you what to think,” Casimir said, which encouraged us to think.
A man raved about what generous curators Casimir and Xiong showed themselves to be. Live at the Sheldon (ingeniously) invites two SLSO musicians to collaborate in programming a chamber concert and booking the musicians to play it with them. Cellists and violists pretty much make a living playing second fiddle to the violins, yet, in their moment to shine, a cellist and viola player invited two violinists to shine even brighter.
The co-curators did open the show with a viola-cello duet, American Haiku by Paul Wiancko. Casimir said the composer is his cellist buddy who wrote the piece on commission from his wife, a violist. This introduction set the stage for Casimir and Xiong – who must by now, after producing this complex and emotionally probing program, be a work husband and work wife – to perform this taut duet born from partnership and intimacy.
Between American Haiku and Home, the Live at the Sheldon faithful were given a rare and simple gift, the world premiere of Equinox Serenade by Trent Fitzsimmons, born in 2006 – yes, you read that right, 2006. At intermission, the talkative man was raving about how “they don’t write them like that anymore” – how contemporary composers have every right and reason to do things their own way, to disrupt and break forms, but how a simple melodic throwback can be so welcome. Play the form, deliver some melody without irony, entertain the people, try to meet them in the belly, not the head.
The man was carrying on about how this kid Fitzsimmons could write for the movies: he can tell the simple stories that people always want and need to hear. To that end, the composer (not yet old enough to buy an adult beverage at the Sheldon’s tastefully stocked bar) looked like an affable high-school senior when he spoke to the crowd. The green Fitzsimmons, a child on Earth, told the mature Sheldon audience that his composition was about nostalgia, of all things, about yearning for what you have lost, yet he meant to offer hope that it gets better.
However transcendent the first half of the show might have been, there could have been no preparing us for what followed. People were saying afterwards that they had just seen and heard something that had never happened before and would never happen again.
Casimir and Xiong closed the show with Johannes Brahms’ Piano Quartet in G minor. For the quartet of musicians who would perform this creation story and amusement park of a composition, Siyu Zhang took a seat in the audience, with the string trio of Casimir, Xiong and Qiang being joined by Peter Henderson, the hardest-working and luckiest piano player alive.
They wove a spell in the intimate, resonant, woody space of the Sheldon Concert Hall. The intensity of the ensemble performance created a musical equivalent of weightlessness. This music took away the weight of the world. I thought about the parts of sleep when you don’t dream. I thought of the eyeless fish at the bottom of the ocean. Xiong’s almost otherworldly glee as she leaned toward us into the cello assured me that I wasn’t making all this up, that we really were having an almost paranormal collective experience of this music.
Then, something happened. Interpretations, among Live at the Sheldon loyalists, differed as to why. Some say it was a work-around for a technical glitch, when a musician reading the score from an electronic gizmo lost power to his gizmo. Some say it was a deliberate opening up of the form. Here is what I saw.
Casimir was sawing his viola, looking at his music stand like the other string players, when he looked to his right at his co-curator (and work wife) Xiong. She gave the approving nod. Then Casimir broke form in the most shocking way – he stood up, walked over to the piano, leaned to the left of Henderson, and continued to play viola. This may not seem like a big deal, but think about it for a moment. If a viola player got up in an orchestra concert and walked over to jam with the pianist, there would be an opening in the viola department the next day. Even in chamber music settings, seated musicians do not get up and go on walkabouts to jam with their mates.
It felt like a genius move to further open up Brahms’ Piano Quartet in G minor, which already had literally sent me into outer space, into the musical equivalent of weightlessness. Standing up opened up Casimir’s body. That opened up his playing. Standing around a piano player makes a string player play more in tandem with the piano, the percussion – that’s why fiddlers do it at pubs.
I suddenly wanted to hear Michael Casimir jam on Irish jigs and reels, I wanted to hear him fiddle in a Creole band. I was hearing a masterful and nuanced performance of Brahms’ Piano Quartet in G minor and I was hearing slip jigs and reels, a fiddler sawing off the side of an accordion. I was hearing a hoedown. You could hear and see these talented, meticulously prepared musicians abandon themselves to this uninhibited energy, playing with this loose, free, joyful spirit.
A Brahms hoedown was not on my 2026 Bingo card. The musical experience of weightlessness was not on it either. Just like the wise boy composer too young to buy a bottle of beer at the bar told us, it gets better.
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