The name for chamber music comes from music being performed in private chambers or at home. St. Louis Symphony Orchestra violinist Celeste Golden Andrews and cellist Melissa Brooks seized on this etymology in co-curating their Live at the Sheldon concert on Thursday, March 6, which they titled “Echoes of Home.”
They opened the program performing a piece of music Brooks said forms part of her musical home, given that she first performed it at age 18 as a student in the pre-college division of the Juilliard School. Johan Halverson composed Passacaglia for Violin and Cello in 1894 by excerpting a theme from George Frideric Handel’s Harpsichord Suite in G minor (1720) and wringing variations from it.
Andrews and Brooks just burned through this virtuosic duet locked in a blistering dual solo. Rock is my musical home, and I was reminded of the intricate dueling guitar work on the Afghan Whigs’ debut album on Sub Pop Records, Up In It (1990), when Rick McCollum was still in the band and Greg Dulli was still playing his guitar rather than just barring chords and dancing with it.
While Brooks and Andrews were taking turns at the microphone following that first smoking piece, a neighbor in the audience said, “These are fun to come to. I love this venue.” The casually intimate sprit of those remarks perfectly captured this concert and the audience’s rapturous response to it.
Andrews introduced the second piece, The Lark Ascending (1914) by Ralph Vaughan Williams as arranged for string quartet by Martin Gerigk in 2008, calling attention to the namesake bird as a reminder of “our earthly home and its finite nature.”
When Kristin Ahlstrom (violin) and Alejandro Valdepenas (viola) joined the co-curators onstage, I was reminded how the string quartet is another deeply comfortable musical home. Gerigk’s arrangement of Vaughan Williams’ pastoral theme, as performed by these four master musicians, struck me as a Platonic ideal of the string quartet.
Square in the middle of this complex and ambitious program they performed the world premiere of a student work, Paradigm Shift for string quartet by Henry Rusten, a student composer at Mizzou. The Sinquefield Charitable Foundation funds a number of creative musical initiatives at Mizzou, as well as the Live at the Sheldon series – the confluence of those two forces in these world premieres for Mizzou students performed by SLSO musicians is another reason why St. Louis is such a nourishing musical home.
Paradigm Shift continued the theme-and-variation pattern of the program, and the student composer held his own with some heavies. Rusten wrote some tuneful musical interplay for four of the best musicians who probably will ever play one of his compositions, veering between rhapsodic and eerie in tone.
The co-curators kept the string quarter together to close the first half of the program with Middleground (2015) by Shelley Washington. Andrews teared up reading the poem that Washington wrote for this piece’s program note, a hymn to the “home of the heart, heart of the home.”
Washington is a Black multi-instrumentalist from Kansas City who now is based in Brooklyn, but Middleground breathed with what sounded to me like mountain fiddle music. Ahlstrom became particularly animated performing her violin lines. Middleground also emerged as a viola showpiece, with Valdepenas delivering a performance with brooding intensity.
In the silence following that piece’s final crash to a close, a police siren sang down Grand Boulevard. That, too, is an unmistakable sound of this home.
David DeRiso joined the band onstage for the closing number, Antonin Dvorak’s String Quintet in G Major (1875). Breathing new life into words and music in the public domain is one of my creative homes, so I got lost in imagining other possibilities for the melodies and riffs that came bursting out of this composer.
The feisty interplay of the now five musicians kept evoking spontaneous applause from the audience between its four movements. This string quintet was composed 40 years before anything recognized as jazz was published, but I heard these five symphony musicians swing. The performance closed with a frenetic pattern of riffs crashing to collective stops that called to mind early Uncle Tupelo when they were just a country punk trio playing for their lives.
“Echoes of Home” was performed at a moment when our national home was disrupted and rather full of dread. Brooks appeared to address that chaos obliquely in the co-curators’ final remarks from the stage. She said, “The unity, respect and collaboration you see on the stage shows how we can coexist when we act from a place of truth and love.”
The second season of Live at the Sheldon concludes Thursday, April 24 with Wind and Water, co-curated by Jelena Dirks (oboe) and Peter Henderson (piano). Visit SLSO.org.