The St. Louis Symphony Orchestra’s Live at the Pulitzer series features modern chamber music curated in response to the current exhibition at the Pulitzer Arts Foundation. The current exhibition, Dialogues & Conversations, organized by Pulitzer Founder and Board Chair Emily Rauh Pulitzer, is a kind of retrospective exploring the art that shaped Pulitzer and the museum she founded. The Live at the Pulitzer concert performed on Tuesday, April 7, curated in dialogue with the exhibition, was a retrospective of past concerts in the series, which remains one of the hottest tickets and most sublime experiences in this town.
Ritenauer performed what could only be described as timpani whispers and wood block kisses. At moments, the piece could have been mistaken for the incidental live sounds of a music store as disconnected people tried out unrelated riffs on disparate instruments shelved in remote corners of the shop. If that sounds like an insult, then you don’t like contemporary chamber music as much as Christopher Stark and I do.
The concert opened with Erin Schreiber on solo violin performing Mystery Sonatas: Before Glory by David Lang. This was a piece only a contemporary composer could rock out on with steady head bops, as did Live at the Pulitzer curator Christopher Stark, a modern composer and professor at WashU, who rocked along from his front-step seat. (The Pulitzer’s sweeping concrete stairway to the lower level forms the most choice seating for the series.) Before Glory was music of private intensity, performed with private intensity, which seems like a perfect musical equivalent for the mystery Lang was probing.
Then Schreiber was joined by Sean Weil, also on violin, Shannon Farrell Williams on viola, and Yin Xiong on cello to perform Three Pieces for String Quartet by Igor Stravinsky. This seldom-performed trio of miniatures by an essential modern composer would have been good enough reason to get out on a beautiful Tuesday night in St. Louis. Like the Lang, the Stravinsky had a primitive, archaic quality that really opened up the imagination. The third of the three pieces in particular had this slow collective sway where the wood in the instruments was laid bare to the ear. It sounded like the soundtrack of a silent film about the doldrums while stranded at sea in a small boat on a dark night.
The Stravinsky was followed by Vermont Counterpoint for flute and tape by Steve Reich, one of Stravinsky’s many acolytes. This was the only piece on the program that had not been previously performed at Live at the Pulitzer, but by the end of this layered and pointedly repetitive piece, it certainly felt like it had been performed there before, possibly continually, and it would be possible to believe that it is still somehow being performed. Jennifer Nitchman switched between three instruments (piccolo, flute, and alto flute) in performing to the composer’s layered and fluctuating taped music in ways that defied reason and time.
It was a canny transition from the busy, if not bewildering, Reich to Morton Feldman’s The Viola in my Life (1), a piece so spare the musicians at times had just about as many pages to turn as notes to play. All the musicians who had performed thus far came back out, other than Weil, one of the hardest-working violinists in show business, who must have been amazed to get a breather. They were joined by Kevin Ritenauer on percussion and Johanna Ballou on keyboard (giving the ubiquitous Peter Henderson an equally unusual break).
Feldman’s spare score spotlit the elemental sounds of the instruments and their individual strings and membranes. Ritenauer performed what could only be described as timpani whispers and wood block kisses. At moments, the piece could have been mistaken for the incidental live sounds of a music store as disconnected people tried out unrelated riffs on disparate instruments shelved in remote corners of the shop. If that sounds like an insult, then you don’t like contemporary chamber music as much as Christopher Stark and I do. I did not want the piece to end. As I continue to hear unexpected sounds emerge from the quiet in the world around me, I wonder if it has ended.
This delightful and meditative concert ended with what could be considered a crowd pleaser in this niche universe of music, Philip Glass’ String Quartet No. 3, “Mishima,” performed by the same string quartet who took on the Stravinsky (workhorse Weil’s breather, as always, proved short-lived). It opened with that surging, pulsing, obsessive ensemble playing of Philip Glass in one of his most characteristic modes. This music sounded so familiar and comforting that I walked away from the musicians to look at the startling work on the walls of the Pulitzer, which any lover of modern art must see before this show closes on August 9. If you never get past the front room with the works on paper by Willem de Kooning, Cy Twombly, and Mark Rothko, you will have seen enough.
Glass wrote String Quartet No. 3 in six movements. The fifth of these, “Blood Oath,” struck me as one of the most tuneful and emotionally resonant pieces of music in the contemporary chamber repertoire. It actually plugged at the heartstrings, rather than prodded the coils of the inner ear or lit up the splaying nerves in the brain. I could even hear the melody of a rock song that could be written to Glass’ melody, and yes, there was a discernible melody one could hum, and “Blood Oath” would be a damn good name for a rock song. Then “Blood Oath” took a jaunty turn that sounded like a long journey by caravan for string quartet. In a night of private intensity, of yearning mystery, of pointed reflection, of puzzles meant to be left unsolved, this was music that made me want to get up and go places and do things. I am now going to go to new places and do new things because I went to Live at the Pulitzer, because I listened to this profound music in this beautiful place.