Having a guest soloist of the caliber of Augustin Hadelich stay over to lead a Sunday afternoon of chamber music after a weekend of orchestral concerts was a musical coup for the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra. Though the visiting talent did anything but disappoint on unaccompanied violin and jamming in an octet, the opening act that did not even include Hadelich would have been well worth leaving the house for on a cold, drizzly Sunday.
A quintet of SLSO musicians performed String Circle for string quintet by Kenji Bunch. This opened with Appalachian mountain music gently deconstructed before busting into Western swing – above all, Celeste Golden Andrews (violin) swung. Then, something you don’t hear every day on a symphony stage, an elegy for Johnny Cash – Bjorn Ranheim (cello) traded country death licks with Michael Casimir (viola). Then, a tribute to pioneering plucked instruments like the banjo, where all members of the quintet – the others were Alison Harney (violin) and Alejandro Valdepenas (viola) – plucked a melody sequentially, sounding like an mbira. Andrews did some speed-picking worthy of Yngwie Malmsteen.
After all that, the guest soloist Augustin Hadelich walked out on the Powell Hall stage facing a large concert hall alone, holding nothing but a couple sticks of wood, strung with synthetic fibers and horsehair. He performed Blue/s Forms for unaccompanied violin by Coleridge-Taylor Perkinson. This piece starts so simply and develops so deliberately, it made for a spectacle for one man to be standing on that big stage offering only this simple music to this large concert hall. I loved it. Minimalism on a rainy Sunday – fine by me.
That slow slide through the movements “Plain Blue/s” and “Just Blue/s” got burnt and blistered in the smoking-hot “Jettin’ Blue/s” that concluded the piece. Hadelich sawed and fingered with bravura technique to burn, filling the grand old hall with all that a fiddle can do. I heard a through-line from Kenji Bunch to here – there was a mountain fiddle in overdrive vibe – but then I also heard wild Transylvanian stompers. These blues had jets.
Hadelich then melted into an octet with SLSO musicians – Kristen Ahlstrom (violin) and Yin Xiong (cello) rounded out the eight – to perform Octet in E-flat major for strings by Felix Mendelssohn. This was the 16-year-old Felix Mendelssohn, who somehow already knew how to write thirty minutes of music for eight musicians that made a listener want to look at eight different people at the same time – for all 30-plus minutes.
Hadelich pulled off massive skyscraper melodic lines, of course, but that was in his job description as soloist. What was new, here, was seeing his sly, strong support for the other musicians. At one point he almost took to a knee to bow out a long, slow, supportive stroke on the violin while someone else was telling their story.
Music is always manual labor, but this octet was intense in that regard. Hadelich and Andrews swayed – is there a way to say “sway” that implies great speed without implying spasm? – in tandem, working out these complex, interwoven melodic lines. Ahlstrom actually went airborne. You do not see this every day in a seated concert performance, but the energy she was shedding through her fiddle made her rise up for just a second.
I confess I had brought opera glasses, these mini-binoculars. This gave me such clear views of the musicians that I felt like I was invading their privacy. Casimir smiled as he played viola and had this open, welcoming gaze, just loving to play music and connect with musicians. You knew he would be a cool dude to play music with. I saw, as if under a microscope, Hadelich’s fingertips as he finessed a note slowly down to zero. I could see Andrews watching him as she readied her violin to jump back in, and I saw one pro seeing another pro work the job and thinking that was a pretty good finesse of a note slowly down to zero.
Even at 16, Felix Mendelssohn was not playing. Late in the octet, all bets were suddenly off, and it was a situation of grab a partner and dance to the death. Violins went with violins, viola with viola, cello with cello. Probably this was a temptation of writing an octet, which gives you four pairs of two, which starts to look like a playoff bracket, or a dance-off bracket. A thrash dance that included our guest soloist in a mosh pit with SLSO musicians was not on my rainy Sunday afternoon at the symphony Bingo card, either, but this symphony is always full of surprises.
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