Talk about new.
In the second program of the new season, the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra introduced a new guest conductor, a new soloist playing an instrument never heard before in Powell Hall, and locally premiered four new pieces of music — one of them an improvisation that will only ever have existed in that moment.
The new guest conductor: Dalia Stasevska. The new guest soloist: Aphrodite Patoulidou. Her instrument never heard in Powell Hall before: the nyckelharpa.
The four St. Louis premieres? Let me tell you about them.
Stasevska opened the show with Anna Meredith’s Nautilus, leading a lean orchestra with more horns than any other instrument that was not stringed. (It would be a horn‑heavy evening.) The brass and low strings bashed out a groove topped with high strings in a repetitive shimmer that called Philip Glass to mind.
Then the bass drum and timpani pounded out some WE WILL, WE WILL, ROCK YOU! stuff that astonished me — and second fiddler Nathan Lowry, one of those rare orchestra musicians who lets himself openly enjoy the music happening around him onstage.
Stasevska next led the SLSO through its premiere of Jean Sibelius’ Scene with Cranes. The score calls for two clarinets, timpani, strings, and that’s it. (A first responder’s siren passing on North Grand Boulevard sounded orchestrated but was not.) The band looked like a small orchestra or a very large chamber ensemble. All of the new music Stasevska brought to St. Louis showed the verve — the nerve — of tighter orchestrations. With fewer musicians onstage, every line was exposed, every gesture carried weight. One gift of that sparseness: it centered the harp, played by newly appointed principal Grace Roepke.
Born in Ukraine and raised in Sibelius’ Finland, Stasevska conducted the orchestra with an unaffected physicality. Wearing a duster over slacks with a bolt of ponytail, she had an Earth‑sister vibe I have never seen on a conductor’s stand before.
While we are reporting on the hair onstage, second violinist Shawn Weil looked tightly barbered. The other men of the SLSO are growing more beards than usual. The United States’ touchy secretary of war (he has earned that title he demands; national defense is not his priority) said he has purged the military of “beardos and weirdos.” SLSO offers sanctuary to souls such as those.
Guest soprano Aphrodite Patoulidou first came out singing Luciano Berio’s Folk Songs — that is, 11 folk songs in 22 minutes. Here, Stasevska’s nerve to work with such a small orchestra was matched by the daredevil swagger of the miniature. If you are going to break the silence for only two minutes before a crowded concert hall, then you had better have something to say and be able to say it in two minutes. Berio, Stasevska, Patoulidou and a spare SLSO had 11 things to say in two minutes each and sang and played those things so expressively.
The harp — lush, complex, too often reduced to texture — finally had room to speak. In this neo‑chamber setting, Roepke’s harp at times sang duet with Patoulidou. (Berio gave most of the instruments — the one bassoon, the one trumpet, the one trombone — its own slow dance with the singer.) In my head, Patoulidou and Roepke briefly became a two‑body Joanna Newsom — voice and harp sharing one imagination.
The singer’s point of view in Berio’s Folk Songs is strongly that of a woman picking apart a man and men. Behold the female gaze as she subjectifies her man’s every feature and foible. The audience chuckled — torch songs with chuckles! — when the overhead signage spelled out the lyrics about the most fortunate woman being the one who has no husband.
The soprano commanded the stage with raven hair and a red gown that dropped to her heels. In passionate moments she appeared to go up on one leg, though her gown masked that. She radiated the energy of someone about to break out into folk‑dance moves at any time.
What happened next will never happen exactly that way again. Patoulidou (now changed into an off‑grey gown) came out with a Finnish instrument called the nyckelharpa (that is both keyed and stringed) and improvised some music on it. She improvised over the same traditional Finnish material that Sibelius investigated in Luonnotar. Without pause for applause, Stasevska then brought another spare ensemble of the SLSO into the Luonnotar.
While the orchestra has performed this Sibelius piece before, it was only in a flurry of four concerts in March and April of 2009, with David Robertson conducting and Karita Mattila as soloist. Since the concerts this weekend are the first in St. Louis to include Patoulidou’s improvised prelude on the nyckelharpa, on my scorecard Stasevska delivered two local premieres of Sibelius in one show — an Olympian feat. She conducted the Luonnotar with what first seemed like bursts of emotion, but they were so sustained that they should be classed as a torrent.
From that point, Stasevska came down to Earth and did what normal guest conductors do: she led an unfamiliar orchestra through some beautiful music the orchestra and audience already know and love. The SLSO performed Claude Debussy’s La Mer just two years ago under the baton of music director Stéphane Denève (at the Stifel Theatre, in the symphony’s vagabond phase while Powell Hall was under the hammer and chisel). Indeed, SLSO has been performing La Mer for more than a century, since January 23, 1913, the day the Young Turks toppled the Ottoman Empire.
Though Debussy seated a larger orchestra than Sibelius (or Berio or Meredith), La Mer is a poised and restrained piece of music, with typically no more instruments sounding at any one time than in the more elemental orchestrations that came before it on this program. Like the sea in its title, this music surged with immense, deep, quiet power.
The orchestra sounded like the moonshot version of classical music — precise, daring, built to travel. If you launched this performance into orbit, it would carry the art form safely for whatever ears might be listening out there.
As for the guest conductor, Dalia Stasevska, she embodied the music she coaxed from the orchestra — swirling like the sea as she cued the musicians, eddying like the sea, a dancing sister of the sea.
Visit slso.org. https://www.daliastasevska.com https://aphroditepi.com