Think of the tens of thousands of Black folks in St. Louis who dress sharp on Sunday mornings and attend churches, houses of worship that also are houses of song. They cherish live music and love to fellowship with others. Think of how few of them savor the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra at Powell Hall on Saturday evenings. This Saturday night, February 7, SLSO performed a concerto that could bridge the Black church and the classical concert hall.
Guest conductor Xian Zhang led the orchestra through an SLSO premiere of Diaspora – Saxophone Concerto by Billy Childs, featuring guest soloist Steven Banks on alto and tenor saxophones. It would be difficult to imagine a more accessible and engaging piece of symphonic music. The composer has performed as a pianist with Chick Corea, and I heard the likes of Corea and Weather Report blended into a world-class symphony orchestra.
Banks, who performed the Diaspora premiere in 2023, was a sight to see soloing through a 20-plus minute concerto when he was spotlit pretty much the entire time (unless he was switching saxophones). He performed with consummate clarity and coherence – you always knew where he stood, musically. He stood tall, physically, and swayed his upper body, with a positive vibe of Black pride. He wore a black tunic emblazoned with an African design in gold.
The brass players were emboldened to support a soloist, for once, who did not play something made of wood. Childs is a composer a percussion section should love. He made a fascinating and counter-intuitive decision in how to frame a saxophone concerto. I would have expected the saxophone to bring the grit, the funk, the danger. In Diaspora, the saxophone delivered ear candy while the orchestra, especially the brass and percussive elements, added the edge.
A large, majority-white Powell Hall crowd loved the concerto as much as I imagine many Black listeners would love it. Banks was compelled to give us an encore. What he gave us, no one I talked to at the concert hall had ever experienced before. Banks performed a song he had just composed less than a week ago.
His friend who takes care of Banks’ saxophones was with his wife when she delivered a baby who was born not breathing. When Banks left his friend after visiting the family shortly thereafter, he knew he could not sleep without making music. He dedicated the song he wrote, named “Willow” after the baby who survived, to the doctors and nurses of the NICU. The song has one simple idea, repeated with small variations, but marked by its dedication to that one single idea: breathe. Banks basically performed mouth-to-mouth resuscitation with his horn: Breathe!
Once I came to that understanding of what Banks was doing with his saxophone, it made a uniquely powerful experience of hearing him holding his last note as long as he could. He made us experience the air leaving his lungs, the sound leaving his saxophone, mindful that breath is life and we can lose it before we ever even had it. We experienced live music as a matter of life or death.
The Childs concerto followed another SLSO premiere, RE/Member by Reena Esmail. The guest conductor Xian Zhang had conducted its 2021 world premiere with the Seattle Symphony. That is a stylish contribution from a guest conductor, to take on the road a past world premiere. I was struck by the vastness of the orchestra required to perform this seven-minute tone poem. For all the traffic jam onstage, the featured musician was an oboe player, Jelena Dirks, set up with a microphone on the Lower Balcony.
Make that another unique feature of this program: I never saw an oboe player open and close a piece performing from the stands.
The show closed with Sergei Prokofiev’s Symphony No. 5 in B flat major. Though Zhang brought the other two pieces to St. Louis for their premieres here, the Prokofiev seemed to bring even more energy out of her. Not the tallest maestro – the conductor’s stand had raised her slightly above eye-to-eye with the guest saxophonist – she was reaching for the roof of Powell Hall, as she conducted the Prokofiev, pointing up, up, up! She stood on tippy toe. At one point, she went airborne, though less to get a better vantage point than to ventilate the abundant emotion we all were feeling.
Prokofiev’s Symphony No. 5 is a daredevil of a symphony that asks many difficult things of many different instruments. If it puts the listener on edge, that is because it puts the orchestra on edge. I found myself peering at individual musicians through my opera glasses, and no one sat idle for long. Anyone could be called to action at any time. Zhang and SLSO evidently adored the challenge of Prokofiev’s relentless working through the options of pairing disparate instruments and blending orchestra sections. I kept imagining a visualization of this performance; what a shifting tumult of color that would be.
After the final madcap run – a breathtaking jumble dominated by piano and percussion, woodblocks and triangle, I think someone was even banging on the proverbial kitchen sink – a woman from the upper balcony cried out, spontaneous and raw, “Yeah!!!” My sentiments exactly.
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