Featured conductor Stephanie Childress opened up this weekend’s St. Louis Symphony Orchestra program with “Gia Dinh” by Oswald Huynh, which SLSO workshopped under her direction in 2020. In 10 minutes, its three movements gave a new meaning to world music in an orchestral context. St. Louis heard the world premiere of this major, innovative new composition on Friday, March 3 at Powell Hall.
It’s my understanding that SLSO records its concerts. The recording of this performance should be reviewed for possible release, and if it fails to muster, “Gia Dinh” should be re-recorded by Childress and SLSO soon.
Huynh imagined the instruments in an orchestra to get new sounds and sounds in new ways. Especially the woodwinds, but any instrument with a mouthpiece got used for mouth music with wind directed at the aperture for percussive effects. The upper registers of especially the violins, but really any instrument, were reimagined as drones, bells and even a rain stick. Pings, dings and plucks came from anywhere and everywhere, disruptive until you learned how to listen to them.
“Gia Dinh” means “family” in Vietnamese, and Huynh brought the symphony orchestra into the Vietnamese family, but his virtuosic use of instruments in innovative ways did not stop there. Somehow – the episode came and went too fast to see who played what – he made the orchestra sound for a moment like a hip-hop deconstruction of itself.
The upper registers of so many instruments sang in so many ways that it was possible to imagine species who communicate differently than we do tuning in and grooving. This was the symphony orchestra as, not only world music, but planetary music, as in all of the planet was singing, the bats and the cicadas too. The final movement, “Blood is thicker than water,” was as dense as the primeval forest. Huynh gave voice and rhythm to everybody and everything (even, briefly, the silence of the plants).
I heard some of my favorite jams in there, like Charles Mingus and Fred Ho. Huynh did flex from time to time, dropping some blues like Mingus or departing into robust melodic interludes much more familiar to symphony orchestra audiences. As a very young composer – he was born in 1997 and came to work with Childress and SLSO through a partnership with Mizzou, where he recently graduated – Huynh showed that his innovative use of orchestral instruments and their tonal potential was a choice made by a composer with the soul to sing the blues and the craft to write more mainstream orchestral repertory.
It’s my understanding that SLSO records its concerts. The recording of this performance should be reviewed for possible release, and if it fails to muster, “Gia Dinh” should be re-recorded by Childress and SLSO soon. It’s difficult to conceive who could conduct or perform a more definitive rendition.
Childress – who also is in her early twenties and from the Vietnamese diaspora – then pivoted from the very new to the very familiar, yet still essential. Local fan favorite Peter Henderson took the stage for the piano soloist part on Franz Joseph Haydn’s “Keyboard Concerto No. 11 in D major,” published 213 years before Huynh’s birth. It provided a wonderful contrast to the world premiere that preceded it.
Whereas “Gia Dinh” featured four percussionists and a highly percussive celesta part and treated the woodwinds, at times, as a percussion section, Haydn wrote for no percussion but with melody to burn. If Huynh invited us to hear the symphony orchestra in new ways, Haydn helped to teach us the old ways. Along with his friend Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Haydn taught us how to feel and think when listening to and looking at these particular instruments.
There was a code-switching corollary on the conductor’s stand to Huynh busting out snatches of gut-busting blues and bars of Western symphonic harmony. After Childress directed a world premiere of daring new and innovative music that she workshopped herself, she finger-painted the orchestra on the Haydn concerto. Her precision in moving around the various sections of the orchestra’s response to the call of the lead piano was pure visual poetry.
Peter Henderson played the piano lead with a joy that grinned and exploded from the piano bench. After leading a world premiere for a young, unknown mentee, Childress introduced the veteran Henderson as “one of the most honest, intelligent and giving musicians I have ever worked with.” Henderson proved worthy of that high praise in giving us a new sense of wonder about a concerto whose every change (almost) now feels inevitable (if only because it helped teach us what to expect). If Huynh and Childress explored the complexity of the unexplored planet, Haydn and Henderson revealed the wonders of the known world.
Childress programmed this show with SLSO’s artistic team. Clearly, she shares with SLSO music director Stéphane Denève the gift of wearing out the audience in the first half, leaving us to wonder (and discuss over intermission) how we can go on from here. Childress next led us to Robert Schumann’s “Symphony No. 3 in E-flat major” (1850).
With Schumann, on this symphony, everybody was all in. As in, at all times. The so-called “Rhenish” symphony started as if in media res, in the middle of a really good party where everybody is in the middle of a spirited conversation, and good luck for any player in the pit catching a break long enough to turn a page on a score. This was the perfect place to land us after Huynh reimagined all of the instruments in the orchestra and Haydn wrote a lead piano with only strings and woodwinds responding.
With the Schumann, Childress stretched out a very talented and spry orchestra, bringing out the depth and textures within sections and through their interplay. In Childress’ opening remarks, she asked us to listen to the levity in Schumann, a composer typed for other, darker moods. She and SLSO showed us the thrills in Schumann’s heavy heart and what a madcap adventure in melody and rhythm he gave us.
Thinking back on the global family story of the program, Schumann grounded us. Huynh wrote for all of the planet, starting in Vietnam, trending to the tangled jungle and upper limits of experience. Haydn hummed the wonders of the world on a day in spring far from the primeval forest and its eerie cacophony. Schumann wrote earth music, not so much world or planet music. He wrote with the heaviness of soil.
And he wrote it for all of the orchestra all of the time, so it was fitting that Childress asked the entire ensemble to stand up together at the end of their performance. I would like to think that Oswald Huynh – who attended his world premiere on Friday – stood up with them, wherever he was sitting in Powell Hall. I wish Frank Haydn, Bob Schumann, Charles Mingus and Fred Ho had been there to stand up with us. It was a family thing.
For more information, visit slso.org.