It was the best of chamber music concerts, and it was not the best of chamber music concerts.
Orli Shaham stayed over in St. Louis after a weekend of concerts where she took two solo piano turns at each concert under the baton of her husband, beloved former music director of the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra, David Robertson. The symphony was keeping her for a Sunday afternoon chamber concert that she curated with handpicked musicians from an orchestra she knows and loves.
She curated three lengthy pieces of music, with a Mozart trio and a Schubert quintet that the musicians know well sandwiching the St. Louis premiere of a sextet she had commissioned from a living composer, Avner Dorman.
To play Mozart’s Trio in E-flat major with her, she chose Scott Andrews on clarinet and Shannon Farrell Williams on viola. I was puzzled as I settled into my seat to see two music stands set out in front of the piano, but no chairs. One gets so accustomed to watching orchestra musicians play clarinet and viola sitting down. I know you can play a clarinet standing up (cf. Benny Goodman), but for some reason I thought a viola was too bulky for that, more like a cello. When I saw Williams walk out carrying her viola in one hand and then stand there and play it gracefully, I thought, of course. The viola is closer to a violin than to a cello, which is why it’s called a “viola” not something like a “celliola.”
Listening to these ace musicians knock out a Mozart trio with a couple mates on a Sunday afternoon, I continued to dwell on the viola and how much it is overshadowed by the superstar violin, my personal favorite cello, and even the booming, growling, moody double bass. This performance served as a kind of master class on the expressiveness and tonality of the viola, which had never imprinted itself upon my ears quite this deeply before. In the Mozaet trio it’s more a supporting instrument to the soloist clarinet and the ever-present architecture of the piano, but still it stood out in a way it never does in an orchestra. This is why we love and need chamber concerts.
Chamber concerts also allow musicians to stand and kind of dance with their instruments as they play them. They allow a naturally gregarious musician like Shaham to scoot around on her piano bench and look aggressively at her fellow musicians – as she was inclined to do with the orchestra earlier in the weekend, but restrained herself relative to this more intimate gathering. Here, she played more as if at home, which is, after all, where chamber music gets its name. This is music as played in private chambers.
The other musicians were seated along with the pianist leader for the other two pieces. We never saw Andrews again, but Williams, having shown us exactly what a viola can do, came back out for the other two compositions.
For the Dorman premiere, Shaham and Williams were joined by some well-known musicians from the orchestra – Erin Schreiber on violin, Melissa Brooks on cello, and Erik Harris on double bass, along with a less-familiar face (whom even Shaham described as a new friend), George Goad on trumpet. Shaham played the sextet white hot, squeezing out sparks on the keyboard as if excited to show old and new friends this daring new piece of music.
In the spare setting of a chamber concert, I could see the musicians visibly fumbling with the score a little bit, coming to grasp with unfamiliar music, even in the form of the physical object on which it was printed. That was just a visual element; they played the music as if they knew what they were doing. Yet there was a kind of workshop feeling, expert musicians working out a new piece, which I found exciting in a way distinct from hearing musicians find new nuggets in yet another sift of Mozart or Schubert.
In particular, I felt I was hearing Erik Harris unleashed. The double bass is almost a paradigmatic supporting instrument in an orchestra, but here I could hear its guttural voice. I enjoyed watching Harris’s hands and hearing every single thing he did with them, which is not possible when a double bass is surrounded by five or six other double basses and buried under an orchestra of 60 or 80 instruments.
Like Andrews after the Mozart, Goad was done for the day after the sextet, leaving the core quintet for Schubert’s Piano quintet in A-major. They were all five all in from the first note. They played this beautiful piece of music as if it were an essential element of nature, something that has always been here and will outlive us. I confess at this particular time in the history of our nation that I needed to hear and feel some permanency. Though it was a gorgeous Sunday afternoon in St. Louis, a contender for the best weather of the year that may not be matched again, one need not look far outside Powell Hall to find a dangerous and transient reality. All that was hard to remember for 40 minutes of melody, harmony and rhythm.
Shaham was thoroughly at home by now, playing piano with all her body and waving her arms almost theatrically. She extended an especially warm welcome to Melissa Brooks, whose chair was backed up almost against the piano as if she couldn’t get close enough to her friend. Brooks faced the audience head on, so her work was particularly evident. As I had with Harris on the Dorman piece, I found myself watching her left hand and enjoyed seeing the physical shape of the beautiful music she made with such precise effort and intent. This was a performance of this Schubert quintet, and of chamber music generally, that could be included in a moonshot. This was the actual artifact, the real deal.
So what was not to like about that?
Powell Hall is really not a very good place to listen to chamber music. The stage is too large. It dwarfed the musicians. They were positioned in the middle of this mammoth stage, presumably to manage the acoustics, but it just seemed silly to see this giant stage and the tiny musicians so far away from us, not even near the front of the stage.
The gorgeous weather was not conducive to coaxing people inside in the middle of the afternoon, and a sparse crowd has an effect on how one hears and feels music. Had this been staged in the Sheldon, where SLSO has been playing chamber concerts for several years now, it would have felt like a good room. The energy of the music would have circulated better and generated more energy from the audience.
I hate to say it, but even sitting there in the concert hall it was like watching chamber music on a little screen, almost as if on YouTube or something. I know the symphony has bills to pay from the necessary expansion of its home at Powell Hall, but I suggest they eat whatever expense it costs them to use the Sheldon and schedule their chamber concerts in a hall where chamber music actually feels at home.
I don’t want to end my reflections on Shaham’s visit to St. Louis on a downer note. So: I was thrilled to hear both she and David Robertson perform and talk about how at home they feel in St. Louis and with this orchestra, which appears to be their favorite orchestra (and between them they have just about every other orchestra from which to draw comparisons). I am sure that I speak for St. Louis and the SLSO faithful when I tell them to come back sooner than last time and stay with us longer next time. We love you, too.
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