Powell Hall looked sold out for the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra’s concert on Saturday, November 22 branded around The Firebird, Igor Stravinsky’s 1910 composition for ballet, and it was a deep pleasure to see Stravinsky and SLSO put so many butts in seats, yet The Firebird was not nearly the most thrilling piece on this program.
That distinction would go to Aram Khachaturian’s Piano Concerto featuring Jean-Yves Thibaudet on piano and Robert Froehner on musical saw – yes, as in a handsaw plied with a violin bow. There were stage-setting visual effects before music director Stéphane Denève cued the orchestra. Thibaudet dashed onstage wearing a sparkly jacket with shiny buckles on his shoes, looking more Vegas than Moscow, where Khachaturian premiered the concerto in 1937. As for Froehner, he took the stage quietly with the rest of the musicians, but unlike the other musicians, he was sitting there with a handsaw in his lap.
The concerto opened with tuneful bombast that took shape around Thibaudet’s eminently percussive attack on the piano. It was perhaps the fullest I have ever heard a piano sound in Powell Hall. Thibaudet’s left hand made more sound than I have ever heard produced from the left side of a set of piano keys. In the barrelhouse opening movement, I thought of Scott Joplin, who once lived nine blocks west from Powell Hall on what is now Delmar Boulevard.
Then Khachaturian and Thibaudet took a ruminative turn into a ballad embedded in the concerto. Beth Guterman Chu, first viola, had a clear, close view of the soloist as he sang this song with his hands, and she abandoned the orchestra musician norm of the guarded, non-specific stare when not playing – she hugged her viola and openly enjoyed some beautiful and nuanced piano playing right in front of her. William James, principal percussion, next joined Thibaudet for a harrowing piano/snare run that raised the hairs on the back of my neck.
For their next act, Khachaturian, Thibaudet and SLSO played a more repetitive, if not obsessive, set piece embedded in the concerto that looked toward the future of more popular music. I heard John Lewis of the Modern Jazz Quartet, twenty years in the future from 1937, and Brian Eno, forty years in the future. With a sense of timing and possibility that the rest of us can only dream about, this set up the first song of the musical saw.
The idea of writing a musical saw into an orchestra is so brilliant that I had a difficult time focusing on the content, Froehner performing the musical saw with the SLSO, I was so fixated on the brilliance of the idea. As the performance began to penetrate my consciousness, I thought the musical saw sounded like a violin from outer space. I had the grandiose vision of every orchestra adding a musical saw chair: first violins, second violins, and then outer space violin, just one, one musical saw on the second violins’ outer orbit.
When Froehner took five, he resorted to the standard non-playing orchestra musician posture, head slightly downturned, serious face, non-specific gaze. It turns out that hit different when the musician assuming this somber posture had a handsaw in his lap. Given the eeriness of the music the musical sawyer had just made and the dense darkness of the composition, it was hard to shake the feeling that this guy had just sawed somebody into pieces. I add – without comment or prejudice – that, from the lower balcony, the musical sawyer looked like Dick Cheney, recently deceased, and (according to his many critics) a dead man with blood on his hands.
As Denève drove the orchestra to a thrilling close, I noticed that Thibaudet, somewhat unusually for a star guest soloist, looked searchingly into the orchestra as he performed the final episodes of the concerto. His best view was of the cello section, especially Danny Lee, principal, Melissa Brooks and Bjorn Ranheim. If I only focused on the four of them, they looked like a four-piece band, and this world-traveled soloist was just jamming away as one of the band.
The program opened with what was itself a tough act to follow, Maslenitsa by Guillaume Connesson, a living French composer. In this sparkling performance – which had Denève conducting with both arms, looking more like a swimmer against a fierce tide than the conductor of an orchestra – Connesson displayed an uncanny talent for spotlighting every section, every instrument, almost every musician in the orchestra. It refreshes the ear, to hear each instrument speak in its own voice then subside back into the mix. I often take a combat veteran, USMC Gunnery Sergeant Sean Jackson (ret.), as my plus-one to symphony concerts. He says it is good for his hearing, which was badly damaged by artillery and rifle fire and other random explosions, to concentrate on listening to complex live music. I wished he had been available to hear this performance – it would have helped a deafened Marine to hear.
As for The Firebird, I don’t want to say, “It was The Firebird,” because it was actually more but also consequently less. The SLSO performed the piece in front of a screen that displayed scenic imagery and text suggestive of the ballet Stravinsky scored. The imagery was beautiful, but static, which is just the opposite of a ballet. The text at first provided evocative connections between the story arc of the ballet and what the orchestra was playing, but the musicology dropped out early on and we were left with just plot summary. The plot of this fantasy – that culminates in a wizard battle and a monster death dance – is vastly less interesting than the interplay of the musicians in this deeply talented orchestra playing this vital music, but I found myself looking stupidly at the goofy plot summary on the screen and more or less missing the intimacy of the actual musical performance.
To get to my car, I walked a few blocks west on Delmar Boulevard, toward Scott Joplin’s old pad (now the Scott Joplin House). I watched fellow concert-goers wearing high heels run intelligence for each other, mapping the terrain to help keep each other from stumbling over the cracks in the concrete – or, rather, the concrete between the cracks – and destroying some expensive dental work. Obviously, this should not be a priority for a cash-strapped, struggling city government, but maybe the SLSO should ask its big donors to dig a little deeper into their deep pockets to fix some sidewalks leading to and from the refurbished concert hall. Ravaged sidewalks along Delmar leading away from Powell Hall are not a significant aspect of the Delmar Divide, but they might be the only one that would be easy to fix.
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