The St. Louis Symphony Orchestra closed out their season of Live at the Pulitzer at the Pulitzer Arts Foundation on Tuesday, April 8 with a program titled Come Closer, curated by composer Christopher Stark. Stark thus completed his second season of programming contemporary classical chamber music with SLSO musicians in response to the museum’s current exhibition. The evocative concert title, borrowed from the final piece of the program and for the season, was bittersweet. Come Closer, you say, when you are going away for now.
Stark was working with the exhibition Unruly Objects by Veronica Ryan. He said he opened the program with Dervish (2001) by Errollyn Wallen in response to the concentric circles in the visual artist’s work. Wallen’s trance-inducing use of repetitious musical form, as performed with riveting intensity by Jennifer Humphreys on cello and Peter Henderson on piano, evoked that aspect of the visual art.
Humphreys was a sight to behold, seated with her cello, as she conjured the sacred dancer. Her performance was both taut and free, precise and risky. In such an intimate space, with just two of the symphony’s musicians talking to us with their instruments, you can key into their physical forms. Humphreys played with economy of movement in her torso but banged her head when the music called for it. At exactly one point she tapped the floor with the toe of her right pump. Most unforgettably, she slid her left, chording hand down the neck of her instrument as she bowed the notes. You have heard of slide guitar – this was slide cello!
Next, Peter Henderson was left alone on piano to perform Rates of Extinction (2017) by Wang Lu. Stark spoke to the audience without notes in an unpretentious tone to set up our experience of the performance. He said Lu wrote the five miniatures of this piano suite based on the pulses of five species that went extinct around 2015 while she was writing the music. That kind of stopped the heart.
As Henderson worked through a bravura performance of thirteen minutes of this beautiful and exquisite pain, you gradually came to accept that we were in for five extinctions, five fades to the ultimate black. Since even the most joyous music at some point must end and musicians have to figure out how, Lu’s concept added a new fascination and depth to that inevitable waiting for the last note.
Stark did not say and I have not found where Lu identified which five species inspired her, which is acceptable to me – playing the “name the death rattle of that extinct species game” seems profoundly sad.
Once the concept of this piece was established, it played out like piano for the field biology of disappearing species. Henderson conveyed the decisions of the composer based on how living things move – and stop moving – more than how we expect music to happen. Given that any animal in motion has the capacity to surprise and fascinate, Lu and Henderson had many dynamic models to draw upon.
Then, you know, each one, in its own way, will die. All music fades to silence, but in context, an entire species died five times in five different ways on that piano.
Something should be said about Peter Henderson, the piano man for any challenge. In addition to co-curating a Live at the Sheldon program this season and playing piano and celesta with the orchestra whenever the bell rang, he took on some harrowing chamber parts at Live at the Pulitzer this season. He was physically and emotionally equal to the extreme demands in finesse and intensity of Extinction of Species. At those moments between miniatures, between extinctions, when Henderson paused with both arms at a dead hang, that was not theater. That was survival.
Stark then took us, not from extinction to renewal, but from the mania of high concept to the pleasures of simple song. In No-Man’s-Land Lullaby (1996), composer Eleanor Alberga sings on violin the space between soldiers enlisted to kill each other, so we still had death, but less apocalyptic field biology, more simple lullaby. Andrea Jarrett shredded this expressive and edgy violin lullaby, with Henderson somehow still drawing enough breath to come back out and keep up with her.
I missed a lot of this performance, at least consciously. Encountering a lullaby on violin, even one tinged with death like any good lullaby, offered so much release after experiencing a piano killing five species five ways, that I got lost in my own thoughts and body. When live music returns you to yourself when you need to be there, is there a greater gift a musician can bring?
Stark closed the show with the concert’s title track, Come Closer (2011), a John Fitz Rogers quartet for bassoons yet for only one bassoonist, Andrew Cuneo. Cuneo performed bassoon live, playing against three bassoon lines he previously had recorded being broadcast by three speakers. The composition and performance were repetitive and haunting, recalling the opening dervish dance, but Rogers and Cuneo took us to many new places.
Rogers and Cuneo delivered so many repeating sounds and forms, evocative of everything from the iconic “Popcorn” (1969) by Gershon Kingsley, to Don Cherry playing goofy against Herbie Hancock, to the splashy shimmer of electronic games of chance, to the music of automation going on forever without us after we are gone. Then, unexpectedly, Rogers called for a simple and expressive melody, just like we used to play in the old days before the extinction of species and of us, and Cuneo sang to us searchingly with his bassoon.
That melody was so fluent, so familiar, so human, so expressive, so helpful in my wanting to better understand everything that was going on, but before I could Come Closer, this music was over for the season.