It was the quietest I have ever heard the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra open a concert, and the loudest I have ever heard them close one. In between, guest tenor Michael Spyres sang poetry for nearly an hour – now in Rimbaud’s French, now in a composer’s own German – while the orchestra shifted shapes around him.
The quietest opening: Claude Debussy’s Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun (1894). On Friday night, SLSO Music Director Stéphane Denève rode the crowd at the Touhill Performing Arts Center extra hard to silence their gizmos before he struck up the band because, he said, “the music starts from silence.” This music never departed very far from silence. The orchestra was small, with no low brass and only one quiet percussionist hitting tasty notes on chimes. The biggest thing about the band was doubling up on harps, one of the orchestra’s most subtle instruments. “Languid” was the word.
Longtime former first chair on flute Mark Sparks (one of the greatest musician names, ever) came back for this concert to perform the featured flute part associated with the namesake faun. Sparks was appointed by Hans Vonk in 2000 and retired under Denève in 2021 (putting in 13 years, most of his tenure, under David Robertson, in between). Denève was so happy to have Sparks back and in such fine form that Sparks was the first musician the conductor cued to take a bow – and then also the second musician.
In the middle of the program, guest tenor Michael Spyres – an Ozarks boy who trained at Opera Theatre St. Louis and now commands the most coveted stages on the planet – sang two very different song cycles, in two different languages, not backed by but rather enmeshed in two very different formulations of this chimerical orchestra.
Benjamin Britten’s Les Illuminations (1940) is basically a duet for voice and strings section. That was the entire orchestra onstage: strings, no chaser. Of those strings, Britten wrote the weightiest parts for the less-uplayed stringed instruments. Denève’s cue call for first chairs to bow after this thrilling cycle was concluded went viola (Beth Guterman Chu), cello (Danny Lee), double bass (Erik Harris), and only then the concertmaster playing the typically marquee violin, David Halen. In these nine songs spanning some 25 minutes of varied and intense singing, Britten and the orchestra modulated those four instruments in nearly every mood and combination imaginable.
Spyres’ unpretentiously emotive voice put the melody in the middle of the band like a fifth instrument. I thought of the Michael Stipe of R.E.M.’s Murmur (1983). Indeed, I wished Stipe (who moved to Athens, Georgia from Granite City, Illinois) had been thrown in front of an orchestra when he was young, still had flowing curly hair like Spyres, and still was discovering his voice. Spyres’ sang the French of Arthur Rimbaud, who was something of the disruptive punk of modern French poetry (and, later, a gun runner in Africa). Even if I could make out the words in art singing, which I can’t, I probably know more about gun running in Africa than the French tongue, so it was all as unintelligible and purely musical as whatever Stipe mumbled so beautifully on Murmur.
After the intermission, Spyres came back and sang – this began to inspire awe – about another 20 minutes of art song, this time Gustav Mahler’s own German texts in his Songs of a Wayfarer (1896). In a night of fresh music (nothing had been performed by SLSO within a decade), Songs of a Wayfarer was the throwback gem that should send people to the Touhill on Sunday to hear it while they can. SLSO last performed this unique and exciting composition in 1978, when Leonard Slatkin was music director and Denève was six years old.
Gone was Britten’s resonant focus on strings. In came the woodwinds (including Mark Sparks back on flute), just one harp, and a robust percussion section (including timpani, bass, snare). I associate Mahler with sturm, drang and bombast, but these songs were nimble, nuanced, complex and mostly light in heart. Given that these are Songs of a Wayfarer, this was a road trip I want to go on. I saw more daylight around the bend, felt through the bright bending of a harp’s strings, than gathering clouds, which is something a thinking and feeling American needs here in March 2025.
Not that bro can’t sturm and drang in these streets. Mahler at time called for furious playing, especially from the strings. He rolled in the trombone growls and timpani rolls. I swear at one time the double basses rumbled like subwoofers in the throbbing cars that pass not far from the Touhill (but not close enough to clutch your pearls or wallet).
More characteristic, however, was Mahler and the orchestra’s alchemical blending of disparate instruments, including Spyre’s voice, to create sounds that were gone before you could figure out the orchestration that created them. I think that sound was flute, clarinet, voice and – something else I could not place before Mahler and the band had traveled onto totally different sounds. Like Britten, Mahler also understood the power of spare. Spyres sang duets with a series of single instruments, most memorably the harp, which evoked the harp-thrumming troubadours of yore.
At one point, Denève sculpted the air with his left hand in front of Spyres’s face as he sang. I thought of someone playing with the smoke in front of the face of a smoking person who has exhaled. Perhaps that was because during intermission, I saw a woman take off her shoes on the sidewalk outside the concert hall and smoke a cigarette. I am picky about whose bare feet I see, I would prefer to opt in, and I dislike tobacco smoke, yet I liked that incongruous image on a warm night in the earliest Spring.
Spyres then finally got a breather, and without him they closed with Franz Liszt’s Les préludes (1854), which I now rate as the mother of all classical concert closers. They piled an even bigger band on the stage, throwing on a tuba with the other low brass players, even more robust percussion, and a violin section the size of a rugby scrum. Liszt and the orchestra dashed through these 15 minutes with serial inventiveness, squeezing off sparks like they just invented fire. The violin parts were so athletic that the rugby scrum metaphor kind of came to life. Across the conductor’s inner circle, Danny Lee played his cello like he was murdering someone.
For that explosive closer, all four percussionists stood up at once, from their seats at the back of the stage, and approached their instruments, which is to say, us. They all were men wearing concert blacks. Seeing four men in black move toward us in unison, I helplessly thought of the state-sponsored abductions now happening in our country. These were classical musicians, not masked federal agents. They picked up their mallets, not handcuffs, and soon the joint was rocking. The house was shaking. This was the big music, the biggest music I have ever heard.
Then, with one slash and one crash, it was over.
SLSO performs this program again 3 p.m. Sunday. Visit slso.org.