St. Louis Symphony Orchestra Music Director Stéphane Denève wished St. Louis a belated Happy New Year on Friday, January 17 – it was his first time to strike up the band this year – at the Touhill Performing Arts Center. There was nothing new about this program; all four selections, all by Maurice Ravel, are firmly in repertoire, and Denève himself conducted the most recent performance of the two of them. But, happy? That would be a vast understatement.
Program notes for the opener, Mother Goose Suite, tend to dwell on the narratives that underly the musical miniatures, and a concertgoer susceptible to suggestion might get lost trying to follow along. That would be doing it wrong. Fully orchestrated as SLSO is performing it this weekend, Mother Goose Suite is an immersive listening experience. Though written for children – two children; four piano hands – this is not child’s play. You could assign it as an audition piece for nearly every instrument, it has such exquisite writing across the orchestra, very much including percussion, and in the interplay between instruments and sections. Let’s just say SLSO passed the audition on Friday.
Principal cello Danny Lee was among the first of many individual musicians Denève recognized after the performance before asking the ensemble to stand, and Lee was a sight to behold as well as joy to the ears. Ever the low rider, this man played the cello practically lying on his back. Danny Lee becomes first cellist to solo on Ravel while successfully doing the Limbo.
Concertmaster David Halen showed why he makes the big bucks and strikes the keynote. In one brief flash of a feature, his tonality was startlingly responsive to Ravel’s melody. To further share the principal chair love, first viola Beth Guterman Chu looked at one point like she was going to saw through her viola strings – albeit very tunefully.
I know the working musician’s sour take on conductors, that they are the worst musician in the orchestra and more a front-office fetish than an actual director of anything, but Denève conducting these miniatures gave the lie to that gimlet eye. Denève appeared to direct the music even with the motions of his face. He looked more like a theater director demonstrating the action with his entire body and face than a guy waving a wand. At one point he cued the band to fade by slowly clenching his first, and really it was like the sound disappeared into the palm of his hand at the pace of his fingers closing.
Come to think of it, Mother Goose Suite could audition composers, too. Think of the basket challenge that fancy restaurant owners give to prospective chefs: make something delicious out of these random foodstuffs. You could tell a composer to make something new using only motifs and ideas from this endlessly inventive yet tuneful set of five miniatures. The composer Christopher Stark told me he adores Ravel and wanted to see this show. Like many contemporary composers, Stark likes to deconstruct and reconfigure music. I can see why a composer like that would love Ravel, for to deconstruct music with vision and style, you first have to understand how it’s constructed, and Ravel has the master plans.
Those five miniatures wiped me out emotionally, but we still had to get through Ravel’s Piano Concerto in G before intermission. SLSO started off the new year, without Denève, playing a program that ended with the Dvorak symphony subtitled “From the New World” but that does not actually sound distinctly American. Piano Concerto in G may not have been written from a chair seated in the new world, like Dvorak’s ninth symphony, but Ravel added brilliant flashes of jazz to this concerto. It reminds us that Duke Ellington was breaking out with “Mood Indigo” when this concerto was premiered in 1932 – in Paris, where Ellington would not first set foot until the following year.
Denève, in his customarily adorable prefatory remarks, said the concerto has the Spanish influence of the Basque region Ravel called home. That makes the concerto, among other things, a landmark of Latin jazz. It also set the bar for a genre many may not know existed – blues bassoon – not equaled until Carl Marsh scored and played bassoon on Big Star’s classic “Blue Moon” (1978).
Piano Concerto in G also set the bar for orchestrating in counterpoint to a soloist. The interplay between the orchestra and soloist Kirill Gerstein at the Touhill was thrilling. The energy set some musicians in motion who seldom emote physically. Danny Lee doing the Limbo with his cello began to look humdrum as I could imagine the concerto throwing the entire orchestra into a dance routine, synchronized swimming with instruments kind of thing. Like I said, this was way more than happy. Ravel manages to be festive without pandering. In the opening Allegramente, he and the SLSO partied smart.
Ravel opens the following Adagio Assai with a solo piano part that, unless I am missing something, may be the greatest melody with familiar intervals in the classical canon that has not been transposed into a popular ballad. I can hear Roberta Flack or the late St. Louis genius Donnie Hathaway taking this melody and flying with it. Piano Concerto in G has entered the public domain in Canada, so I guess I am looking at you, Canadian popsmiths.
In the concluding Presto, Ravel turns to crackle and flash as the jazz gets hot. At the Touhill, we heard freakouts – carefully modulated freakouts – from clarinet, trumpet and trombone. Then the concerto turns into what sounds like the most happening road movie ever – an ambulatory, swinging spirit that Ravel had first captured literally one week before (you have to cross-check the dates a few times before you believe your eyes) in the unique Piano Concerto for the Left Hand, with which SLSO opened side two of this all-Ravel program.
In a different way than Mother Goose Suite, Piano Concerto for the Left Hand has a story that can overwhelm the music if you go down its rabbit hole – or foxhole, since Ravel wrote it for a World War I veteran who had his right arm amputated after he got shot in battle. That war veteran, Paul Wittgenstein, happened to be brothers with the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, who was inventing language games lecturing in Cambridge while his brother was learning and performing this concerto written for his left hand. You can see how the story runs away with you.
The visual spectacle also compelled attention away from the music, in particular during piano solos. There was just something so strange about watching an entire – large – orchestra, with a whole gang of percussionists clustered in the back, silently watch one man (Kirill Gerstein, again, in a rare featured solost two-for) play piano with one hand. “Five fingers, by the way,” Denève quipped, “though it sounds like there are more than one hand.”
A virtuosic one-hand lead piano part would have made this concerto an irresistible novelty tune, but it is so much more than that. Early in the opening Lento, the basses burst with this low rumble that provided my first purely acoustic experience of hip-hop bass loops throbbing from backseat subwoofers. The SLSO low strings were the envy of the young brothers on my block for a minute there.
The violins and violas came alive as percussive instruments, with bows bouncing on strings to a martial beat laid down by the timpani and picked out on a wood block during the road movie part of this concerto. The entire string section at one point made a sound I had never heard before. It made me think of something Ludwig Wittgenstein lectured in 1932, the year his brother premiered this concerto: “It is imaginable, for example, that by stirring nuts and raisins in a tank of chocolate they become unshuffled. But it is not a matter of experience that equal distributions of nuts and raisins must occur when they are swished about. There is no experience of something necessarily happening.” No, actually, it didn’t make me think of that, but the sound was every bit as tasty, strange and cool.
They closed with Bolero (1928), but I skipped out first. I don’t really want to talk about why. In my first SLSO concert of the year, I wished I had walked out on the overplayed Dvorak’s ninth symphony. The dog-eared Bolero could only have spoiled the magic. That, in fact, sounds more like what this was: not a happy but a magic new year.
SLSO performs this concert again 3 p.m. Sunday. Visit slso.org.