The St. Louis Symphony Orchestra, led by Music Director Stéphane Denève, performed an incredibly fresh program of music this weekend at the Touhill Performing Arts Center. Three of the four pieces were performed in St. Louis for the first time. One of those, Guillaume Connesson’s Lost Horizons Violin Concerto (2018), received its U.S. premiere (Denève also conducted the world premiere of Lost Horizons).
A conversation about Connesson’s violin concerto, which deserves to become a repertory piece, has to start with the lead violin part, brilliantly performed at the Touhill by Akiko Suwanai. Though marked by passages, such as the conclusion of almost inhumanly possible virtuosity, the violin pulsed within a dynamic, at times frenetic, ensemble. Connesson also wrote beautifully lyric violin lines, typically shadowed and shaded by woodwinds.
Hailstork’s port of call is Norfolk, Virginia … The low brass thrills on long melodic lines, plungered trumpet cackles, and klezmer dances across the woodwinds conjured the unique mood of a last night in a port of call, the last chance to see this city from the shore and perhaps to spend the night with a new friend you will lose forever in the morning.
The ensemble writing by Connesson and performance by SLSO were endlessly inventive and satisfying. Every instrument in a large percussion section stepped into the spotlight. Gongs set a somber mood. Cymbals crashed us out of that. The marimba took a walk down from one musical episode to another. I have never heard the humble woodblock integrated into an orchestra in a more illustrative way.
In other sections, the clarinets provided frequent compelling counterpoint to the soloist, and the trumpets just blazed. The writing and interplay between sections were thrilling. I could see the orchestra as a complex engine with all these different components firing away in different directions to make the whole move as one.
Connesson was generous with melody and coherent structure in writing this concerto. It made me reflect that frustrating traditional musical expectations like melody and coherent form is no longer anything new. Whether a composer offers or withholds ear candy, either way they are working in a well-established tradition. I welcome a composer like Connesson who seems to have decided guys like Debussy and Stravinsky did not leave us enough of their music so let’s keep innovating along those tuneful lines.
The Connesson concerto closed a satisfying first half of the concert opened with John Williams’ Theme from Seven Years in Tibet (1997) – somewhat surprisingly, given how beloved Williams is here, a St. Louis premiere. The featured cello part originated by Yo-Yo Ma in the film soundtrack was entrusted to in-house talent, Yin Xiong. Denève, seldom short on exuberance, was visibly overjoyed by her performance, as she modulated between plaintive, grainy, and acrobatic.
The orchestra performed like they wanted to play this piece again or maybe to audition for Williams’ next original soundtrack recording. Timpani rumbled. Flutes trilled. A big brass section blasted away. The harp swept along. The xylophone and gongs and other percussion pieces were always just where they were needed at just the proper level. It felt like nine minutes of the most vivid dream, one you try to keep with you as waking life starts to claim you.
The other St. Louis premiere was of Adolphus Hailstork’s An American Port of Call (1985), paired in the program’s second half with another portrait of a port, Leonard Bernstein’s Symphonic Suite from On the Waterfront (1955). These composers present very different ways to cover the waterfront.
Hailstork’s port of call is Norfolk, Virginia, his home base as a composer. As the title of his musical portrait indicates, it is a sailor’s city. Though Norfolk has provided a home address for countless sailors who lived and worked far away on ships, Hailstork presents it with the bustle and jazz of a port call. The low brass thrills on long melodic lines, plungered trumpet cackles, and klezmer dances across the woodwinds conjured the unique mood of a last night in a port of call, the last chance to see this city from the shore and perhaps to spend the night with a new friend you will lose forever in the morning.
Hailstork’s respect for the sailor’s point of view is such that he wrote the turbulence of the ocean into his portrait of the port. That was the burden of the SLSO violins, who conjured dark, howling storms with percussive flourishes, especially gongs.
By contrast, Bernstein’s Symphonic Suite from On the Waterfront is just a bone crusher. The counterpoint to the port is not the drama and adventure of sailing to sea but rather the homicidal thugs who control the longshoreman’s union. I often have heard and wrote that this orchestra “crashed” together in punctuation or to close, but playing this Bernstein suite SLSO really did sound at times like a bone-rattling car crash.
Or like a stool pigeon’s bones breaking apart on the pavement after mob goons pitched him off the roof, as we saw in Elia Kazan’s 1954 labor drama starring the young Marlon Brando, which we were compelled to watch after the concert. This unglamorous portrayal of strong-man politics hit a little different in March 2025. It comes down to doing what is right by standing up to the strong man and telling the truth, knowing he will break your face if you do, or standing down to protect yourself and yourself only. It would appear that decision stands before us again today.