The St. Louis Symphony Orchestra’s Live at the Pulitzer series is an ongoing exploration of creative cultural dialogue. The curator – now in his second season, the composer Christopher Stark – programs contemporary classical chamber music that speaks to the current exhibition at the Pulitzer Arts Foundation – at this moment, Scott Burton: Shape Shift. The music is performed by hand-picked musicians from the orchestra.
On hand at the Pulitzer on Tuesday, November 12 were percussionist Kevin Ritenauer, who opened the show playing solo; a string quartet comprised of Celeste Golden Andrews and Nathan Lowry (violins), Bjorn Ranheim (cello) and Chris Tantillo (viola), who performed a middle piece; then Ritenauer augmented the quartet to close the program.
Live at the Pulitzer is a kind of conceptual art experiment – let’s evoke the music in visual art – so I let go of my musical grievances and enjoyed the aural conceptual art in that contemplative space.
The composer of the closing number, Samuel Adams (born in 1985), joined the curator (also his friend) in St. Louis to enjoy a sparkling performance of Sundial. Adams’ own notes on Sundial (2021) aptly describe the SLSO musicians’ performance of it at the Pulitzer on Tuesday.
“In many passages, the strings elongate the percussion sounds and vice versa, so much so that the instruments on stage might sound like one polyphonic organism arranged not in a hierarchy but in a symbiotic web in which the roles of the instruments are balanced and consistently in flux,” Adams wrote.
“The form possesses a shape similar to its namesake: the five musicians project a series of musical shadows that, unbroken, reveal the passage of time in the shape of an inverted arc. The work is made of two distinct types of music: rocking music—fast, pulsing dual harmonies that sway back and forth—and cyclic music—slightly off-kilter contrapuntal figurations that blossom over long stretches of time.”
A performance that reenacts the composer’s own notes should be considered definitive.
It was thrilling to watch too. The string players all delivered full-body performances. In the intimate performing space, I could see the individual fingerings, and Andrews made some wild splits with her left hand. Lowry, new to SLSO, has struck me with his physical exuberance playing in the orchestra’s second violins, but he lay back and blissed out in this small group. Ranheim and Tantillo, who have emerged as workhorses in SLSO’s burgeoning chamber offerings, provided an emphatic and supple backbone.
Symphony percussionists don’t have the same theatrical scope as, say, rock drummers; theirs is more an art of control than of abandon. Ritenauer really had his hands full simultaneously playing both the vibraphone and a set of big, glorified cowbells. I missed the Steve Pick of the old KDHX before the purge of the dissident DJs: “More cowbell!” This was way more cowbell.
Ritenauer opened the show solo playing a piece that posed a totally different set of challenges. Rather than playing vibraphone and cowbells for four hands tight with a rocking ensemble, Six Japanese Gardens (1994) by Kaija Saariaho calls for playing mostly simple parts on a large constellation of percussion instruments often one instrument at a time. As the composer wrote of this piece, “The selection of instruments played by the percussionist is voluntarily reduced to give space for the perception of rhythmic evolutions.”
Though alone on stage, Ritenauer performed with field recordings (bugs, chants) and electronics programmed by the composer but triggered by the percussionist. The overall effect was more environmental than musical, but that effect was itself carefully orchestrated. This piece perfectly introduced Stark’s theme for the program of bringing the outside world into the concert space. “That sounded like music from another time,” Stark said right after the performance, “like something that has been on Earth longer than we have.”
This performance of Six Japanese Gardens could not be considered definitive due only to choices made about volume of sound. Saariaho (1952-2023) noted that her piece should be presented “rather loud, but not painfully so.” The volume of this performance was not very loud at all. Someone descended the Pulitzer’s stairs during a quiet passage, and the patron’s heels rang out rather louder than the percussive strikes onstage.
In the middle of the program, the string quartet performed the first and last movements of The Wind in High Places (2011) by John Luther Adams (born in 1953). The title sums up the composition, a quartet for eerie wind songs, a medley of wind chimes and whines, all played with natural harmonics and open strings. That isn’t exactly playing stringed instruments without the benefits of stringed instruments, but it leans hard that way.
William H. Gass once said you can make anything into an art form but that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s worth doing. Music that withholds many of the elements and pleasures of music does not seem worth all the trouble to me, but Live at the Pulitzer is a kind of conceptual art experiment – let’s evoke the music in visual art – so I let go of my musical grievances and enjoyed the aural conceptual art in that contemplative space.
As for the visual art behind this music, Scott Burton: Shape Shift, I still need to study the show and did not have time to do so before the concert. The space certainly felt good with all these sculptures that look like furniture. As I was leaving, a woman suddenly crossed into a gallery rather than moving toward the exit. “I need to say goodbye to this piece,” she said to her companion.
Note to self: Go back to the Pulitzer and see this show. Admission is always free, which is an incredibly cool thing about that space and this town.
Live at the Pulitzer returns January 28 and April 8. Visit slso.org.
This review greatly diminishes and undervalues the performers’ efforts and the amount of work that it went into performing the program. This only shows how little Chris King knows about music. What a shame.