Some startling and fresh music is on offer at Powell Hall this weekend, where on Friday the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra (SLSO) gave its first performance of a Sibelius tone poem, the U.S. premiere of a violin concerto, and the orchestra’s first performance of Beethoven’s 4th symphony since the first year of President Obama’s second term.
Jean Sibelius’ “Night Ride and Sunrise” is so cinematic that Tim Munro, in his witty and wise program notes, describes it in narrative terms even after poking fun at the composer for concocting so many varying stories about what inspired the piece. Under the probing direction of guest conductor John Storgards, a countryman of the Finnish composer trained at an academy named after him, the SLSO revealed the 1908 tone poem as a master class in the deployment of an orchestra by section.
At first, the string section carried the pulsing repeating figure that evokes the night ride of the title – Philip Glass must have a much-thumbed copy of this score – with the woodwinds introducing a theme. Then the woodwinds picked up the repetitive pattern, in what looked like a mouth workout, as the strings soared off into melody. The drone dropped out, leaving lush strings that fell almost silent before flutes trilled the first blush of the sunrise of the title. Then the strings and winds played genuinely together for the first time in the composition, broken by the longest trumpet note I have ever heard, which was the first indication that this thrilling journey would end in a swell of warm brass.
Meanwhile, the direction and performance were so intense and focussed that I often marveled at how many individual instruments I could distinctly hear at the same time. At times, I would have swore I could hear numerous individual strings.
Helen Grime’s 2016 “Violin Concerto,” which received its U.S. premiere on Friday with Leila Josefowicz in the starring role, was an altogether different animal. The soloist almost never rested and almost always played at a feverish pitch. Grime wrote only scraps of melody for the other instruments; the brass section played such short lines it was almost used for percussion, and when anyone other than the soloist played as many as 12 notes in a line, it felt like an event.
Grime’s countryman George Orwell compared writing a novel to a long struggle with a horrible illness. Performing this soloist part must feel like that, though the music is not ugly, only edgy, unsettled, and unsettling. Josefowicz looked like she could have thrown out her shoulder by how violently she whipped pages forward in her copy of the score. The concerto ended on a gorgeous note of discord.
The longest piece on the program, Beethoven’s “Symphony No. 4,” employed the smallest band – Munro notes that it’s Beethoven’s smallest orchestra, with only 12 musicians outside of the string section. Composed almost exactly a century before the tone poem that opened the program, the 4th showed one place where Sibelius may have learned how to orchestrate the interplay of different sections and instruments. The score calls for four bass players and four brass players (two horns, two trumpets), and I kept trying to hear only those eight instruments, plus the lone percussionist, whose timpani subtly rounded down the lowest notes of the melodies.
Whereas Grime gives eloquent voice to distress, Beethoven beams with well-being. I thought of how John Updike described Ernest Hemingway: “complicated, as sanity must be.” The SLSO displayed the intricacies of sounding good together while moving as if effortlessly through the complexity.
Storgards showed a uniquely piercing way of looking directly at a dozen different musicians throughout the course of a performance. In the first movement of the 4th, he appeared to float around the conductor’s stand as he swept in a half circle to engage the various stringed instrumentalists in a cascade. He must be a pleasure to perform for. At one point, the violinist with the most direct, clear view of the conductor broke out in a wide smile.Â
That first movement of the 4th ended with so much drama and verve that the audience spontaneously broke out in the applause that we knew we were supposed to withhold until the end of the symphony, but our joy and gratitude could not be stopped. It was that kind of a concert.Â
They perform it again 8 p.m. Saturday. See slso.org.
Chris King covers classical music for The St. Louis American.
