People who program orchestras were fretting this time last year about how they would open the first concerts following the first day of Spring (March 20) and, related, St. Louis Cardinals Opening Day (March 26) in 2026. The St. Louis Symphony Orchestra hit upon a bright idea: Ludwig van Beethoven’s The Consecration of the House Overture, which opened the SLSO program this weekend that I saw Saturday night in an agreeably crowded Powell Hall.
While also continuing the SLSO celebration of reopening its refurbished concert hall, the orchestra’s home, the Beethoven overture offered the bright vigor of Spring without being a cliched musical choice for it. It also had the mature, complex virtues of anything Beethoven touched. This music reminds us that the renewal of Spring brings new conflicts. We are leaving behind the season when death comes in droves but that means we have lost people. We are moving lighter because we are less. We have less burden but also less support. With the lightness of Spring comes the giddy, insubstantial feelings of having only memories where once had been human substance.
I love the idea of closing a show with Beethoven that you opened with Beethoven, and his Piano Concerto No. 5 in E-flat major (the so-called Emperor Concerto) was a brilliant way to send an audience home on an early Spring night. SLSO Music Director Stéphane Denève invited onstage to take the solo part Víkingur Ólafsson, who was a delight to hear and a sight to behold.
Ólafsson has emerged as one of those legendary creatures you can’t take your eyes off of: the acknowledged and owning-it rock-star classical concert pianist. Once you have ascended to this rarified and envied air, you are now a showman – there now must always be a show. Ólafsson had a show. He had this concert-pianist version of jazz hands he threw up and wavered with parallel trembling whenever he dramatically unhanded the piano, which is to say, whenever he unhanded the piano.
Yet you must not let your showmanship get in the way of what got you on the concert stage under those bright lights in the first place. You must penetrate the dark, vital heart of Beethoven in the way you move your fingers across the surfaces and into the depths of the piano. Ólafsson checked that box essential to his eminent position – but he also did something more that you don’t always see and that he really didn’t have to do: he played tight rhythm piano right in the dead center of the orchestra during all the ensemble passages. Not every rock-star classical concert pianist rolls up their sleeves for bars at a time to remind the other musicians where the 1-count is.
I could see why Vikingur – I address him as one of us, now, with his suitably iconic given name – would want a seat in this working band. The SLSO treated their special guest and the rest of us to that deeply settled ensemble interplay – playing so closely together in harmony when called for, playing so sharply apart in counterpoint when called for, always poised just as needed in pitch and tempo – that just makes you fall in love with every instrument in the orchestra all over again.
I couldn’t help but notice the seating of the musicians on the stage gave the orchestra the most welcoming of shapes when viewed from the lower balcony. The higher strings tapering left to a single chair and the lower strings tapering right to a single chair gave the appearance of the so-called oral commissures, the human lips’ cute little side points that make dimples possible. The orchestra looked like nothing more than a smiling human mouth, making Vikingur and his piano its bright, white, shining teeth. And he really did have a way of making the piano speak with his long, white, bony, Nordic hands and fingers.
Something must be said about how tightly Denève drew the musicians around their guest, himself, and one another. I am wary of wearing out superlatives here, but I have never seen an orchestra clustered more tightly on the concert stage, like campers around a warm fire on a cold night – not for want of physical space, but rather in a passion for physical proximity and emotional connection.
To start with the guest and the conductor, Denève pulled his guest’s piano so tight he could have leaned back from his podium and rested against the piano’s opened top board. Vikingur was drawn so completely into the orchestra I’m not sure concertmaster David Halen didn’t have his right ham on the left end of the piano bench. Certainly, soloist and concertmaster could have twisted to high-five at any point in the performance were that sort of thing done.
The tiny inner circle of principals and assistants was pulled closer together and to the conductor than I have ever seen. They were playing inside each other’s pockets. Denève could have reached out his baton and tapped a rhythm on the viola of principal Beth Guterman Chu. He could have chorded the neck of Halen’s violin. The conductor could have flailed just a little wider in this dervish thing Beethoven had him doing and thrummed a string on every instrument in his inner circle.
With the exception of one – principal cello Daniel Lee. This was not so much because the historically low-riding cellist pulled his instrument out of reach but rather because he was seated that way. Lee was positioned at the nose of Vikingur’s piano like a cellist statue carved into the prow of a Viking ship.
Between Beethoven and Beethoven, SLSO performed works by two living composers who both were in the house, which always feels good.
First we were treated to a St. Louis premiere of the sound of where i came from by Moni (Jasmine) Guo, who was born the day before yesterday (technically, in 1993). This musical dialogue between the composer and her grandmother is itself nearly newborn, having received its world premiere a little more than four months ago. Guo did some deeply resonant writing across a wide bed of strings, keeping the flutes especially busy in a sonorous winds section, with certain bright melodic ornaments throughout the orchestra and mallets striking woodblocks serving to invoke her home China sounds. This SLSO premiere closed with one of the slowest, steadiest fades I have ever heard from an orchestra. A man behind me gasped, as if unconsciously, “Wow,” which seconded my emotion.
Then SLSO delivered its second-ever performance of Concerto for Orchestra by St. Louis-born composer Kevin Puts. I love the cleverness of the title and the idea behind it: not a symphony for an orchestra, but a concerto – a relatively small statement for a really big band. Further, Puts told us he worked with simple melodies to make it easier for audiences to hear how we plays with the piece’s elements as it progresses over six movements.
He simplified the rhythms right along with the melodies. His score calls for two stand-up drummers hammering elements of a trap set – so did the Butthole Surfers, but they achieved more rhythmic variation and urgency than this concerto does. For most of the piece, I felt unwelcome constraints placed on the orchestra the composer claimed to honor. I could not shake the analogy of painting by numbers. I would use this piece in youth symphony orchestra programming, where it has significant pedagogical value, but let’s reserve subscription series spots for music where you need an orchestra of this caliber.
So says the spoiled music critic who gets to see all these beautiful concerts for free and paid a fee shekels for trying to invoke them in words. When you write music for a wider public, as Puts did, guess what? More people understand and appreciate your music. Concerto for Orchestra was very enthusiastically received by the hometown crowd. As I walked out for intermission, I heard various people exclaim, “Love it!” “Fabulous!” “Fun!” “Wonderful!”
Then there were the men in the couple sitting next to me, whose every whispered comment throughout and between the performances convinced me they knew this tradition and probably have performed, composed or conducted within it. I had never seen either person before and kept wanting to talk my way into hearing more of their thoughts, but they understandably were more interested in each other than in me.
After the Puts, the most blunt of the two men muttered, “Watered-down John Williams.”
After that and an intermission, we set to sea with Vikingur and Beethoven, and all such petty thoughts were deader than winter. I walked out into a cool Spring night in St. Louis thinking how tonight’s performance taught me something. Beethoven writes music that sounds like how I think on a good moment of a good day, like when listening to Beethoven performed live by this orchestra. So, listening to Beethoven becomes strangely thoughtless. It’s like I forget that I am listening to music or thinking about anything. Sound becomes thought, thought becomes sound. Like the Earth in Spring, I am just suddenly more alive.