Conductor Laureate Leonard Slatkin is leading the St. Louis Symphony orchestra through two one-off concerts this weekend at the Touhill Performing Arts Center that celebrate the music of George Gershwin. The program on Friday, January 12 was all about endings and beginnings – it ended with an orchestral arrangement of Gershwin’s last work and Duke Ellington’s final piece and opened with a world premiere and a St. Louis premiere.
The world premiere was a treat even by the rarified standards of world premieres. Jeff Beal – better known as an Emmy Award-winning composer for quality TV shows like House of Cards – dedicated Body in Motion for violin and orchestra to Slatkin and the soloist Kelly Hall-Tompkins who joined SLSO in premiering this edgy, challenging piece. Though Beal grew up playing jazz trumpet and specializes in making music for moving pictures, Body in Motion did not sound especially jazzy or cinematic. As Slatkin said in his introduction, this violin concerto is “more abstract – there is no story.”
It calls for virtuoso violin playing. Though Body in Motion does lack a set of themes in dramatic interplay and in that sense tells “no story,” its violin solos explore the history of music, and Hall-Tompkins proved a masterful teller of those stories. “She is an intense, passionate performer,” the composer writes of his soloist and dedicatee, “who seems to never wish to sit still artistically, nor shy away from intense effort.” Indeed, she premiered the concerto with dynamic intensity in her SLSO debut.
It was Slatkin who sat – or, rather, stood – still. I can’t remember ever seeing a more composed conductor. He stood flat-footed for long stretches of performance, delivering slow, steady motions with the baton and spare hand signals. Had he been an actor playing a conductor, he would have been told to do more, he didn’t even look like he was conducting an orchestra. In fact, he held the musicians in his steady hands. What a gift it was to see Leonard Slatkin, at 79, leading this talented orchestra that he helped to put on the map in the nearly 30 years (1979-1996) he served as music director.
The St. Louis premiere on the program was the 1955 version of A Jazz Symphony by George Antheil, a piece first performed in a different version by W.C. Handy leading an orchestra of African-American musicians in 1927. Peter Henderson, SLSO’s new principal keyboardist, took the featured piano part Antheil wrote for himself. Slatkin and Henderson drove a small orchestra – almost a large chamber group – through a thrilling performance of this charming, carnivalesque number. The trumpet parts call for ample use of the plunger, which spread smiles around the musicians clearly enjoying this spirited addition to their repertoire.
That voicing of the trumpet was almost as fun as the banjo whose rustic tones animate Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess: A Symphonic Picture, as arranged by Robert Russell Bennett after the composer’s death in 1939 based on Gershwin’s folk opera. A Slatkin favorite, Porgy and Bess was last performed by SLSO under his leadership in 2016. This symphonic portrait is so warm and accessible that this performance felt like a night at the pops.
That was even more true for the performance that preceded it: The Three Black Kings (Ballet for Orchestra), a rarely performed Duke Ellington piece written in 1974, the final year of his life, and completed by Ellington’s son, Mercer Ellington. It was composed in honor of Martin Luther King Jr., who is the last of the composition’s three namesake kings (the others are the biblical King of the Magi and King Solomon). Ellington had told the story of Dr. King the civil rights warrior in his song-and-dance revue My People (1963); a mutual friend remembered King weeping when she introduced the two great men and Ellington had Billy Strayhorn play King a selection from that earlier piece on piano.
The Martin Luther King celebrated in The Three Black Kings has burst free from struggle. This dramatic, melodic celebration of the human spirit had me literally wanting to dance in the aisles. Seriously, this might be the greatest first dance song for a wedding ever. How brilliant of Slatkin and SLSO to quietly work this timely celebration of MLK in on the eve of the national holiday in his honor, sandwiched between a world and local premiere on a program themed after Gershwin.
Slatkin and SLSO’s celebration of Gershwin continues January 13 with An American in Paris and concludes January 21 with Rhapsody in Blue. Visit slso.org. Also, as Slatkin noted from the conductor’s stand, ArkivMusic has in print the 1974 recording of Slatkin leading SLSO on Gershwin: Works for Orchestra (https://arkivmusic.com). Add to the many things to cherish about this remarkable program that we are celebrating the 50th anniversary of those recordings – with Slatkin in St. Louis.
