St. Louis Symphony Orchestra audiences spoiled by the inventiveness of musical director Stéphane Denève’s programming – the thrilling interplay of selections, typically two shorter pieces followed by a longer symphony after the intermission – had to settle for one long single piece of music for the end of this subscription season.
SLSO had not performed Hector Berlioz’s The Damnation of Faust (1845) since 2009, and it’s not difficult to see why it’s not a perennial selection. Running nearly two and a half hours, it has to be programmed alone. The title, perhaps the greatest spoiler in the history of titles, tells the audience that we’re in, literally, for hell, which might seem a bit much for a Saturday night. An oratorio in form, it offers not enough theater for opera lovers and too much opera for symphony lovers (like me) with no ear for the artifices of operatic vocal.
A full stage was more important than a full house on this night, and those in the audience with the patience to listen through a challenging, mixed-genre composition were amply rewarded.
The SLSO concert on Saturday at Powell Hall confirmed that this piece is not a box office favorite. Even with a large orchestra joined by the St. Louis Symphony Chorus and the St. Louis Children’s Choirs – dozens and dozens of adult and children choristers with hundreds and hundreds of family and friends to invite – even for the last subscription concert in what will soon be the old Powell Hall – there were more empty seats than we’ve come to expect in the golden post-COVID Stéphane Denève era.
SLSO administration used sex to sell the show, with large posters featuring sultry-posed soprano Isabel Leonard (taken from her Columbia Artists’ head and shoulders shot), but this was tenor Michael Spyres’ show. A native of Mansfield, Missouri – a town whose entire population would barely fill half of Powell Hall and is considerably smaller than Saturday’s audience – Spyres sang the title role with less drastic artifice than most opera singers. Not required to do any ham-handed operatic acting, he was a pleasure to watch. Between his solo vocal parts, he turned away from the house to admire the chorus and orchestra; when seated, he swayed to the music and craned back his head in apparent ecstasy.
Even more fun to watch was Patrick Guetti in the bit bass part of Brander, a student who sings a funny song about a rat in a tavern. With no staging, Guetti brought brilliant physical comedy to this small role, most memorably turning to mock-direct the chorus alongside Denève. Lest this should be mistaken as an unexpected attempt to upstage the conductor, Denève welcomed Guetti onto the conductor’s stand during the warm ovation at the end of Part II, which was used to break for intermission. Again not upstaging anyone, Guetti quickly leapt off the stand.
Rounding out the lead vocal roles was bass John Relyea as the bad guy, Mephistopheles. Relyea seems to enjoy a bromance with Denève, judging by all the bear hugs at ovation times. Relyea grew a beard to play the devil and Spyres shaved one off to play the naïve scholar who gets suckered in by evil, which was playing into old stereotypes, like how some male conductors still shake the hands of male musicians yet kiss the hands of women musicians after performances.
An English translation of Berlioz’s text (drawn from a French translation of Goethe’s classic 1808 German dramatic poem) was broadcast as a superscript above the stage. The poetry is poignant when it’s not hilarious or horrific, and the superscript helped those of us with no ear for art song to find a feel for the art singing. Some of the stage directions were broadcast, too, providing a paint-by-numbers template for anyone unfamiliar with picking out themes in an orchestral performance. There was a music appreciation lesson in being told in words that an army was approaching just before – on cue – the double basses created an approaching army out of thin air.
Between and around the high drama of the solo vocals and the informative distraction of the broadcast text, the symphony, chorus (and, later, children’s choirs) made intricate, beautiful music out of a long, demanding work first performed the year that the rubber band was patented and Edgar Allan Poe published “The Raven.”
In the pastoral scenes, the strings swirled tranquil and transcendent. The heavy artillery of the percussion pounded tunefully brutal in battle. The ensemble struck wild bird shrieks that might suggest why Alfred Hitchcock commissioned no musical score for “The Birds” – because Berlioz had scorched that part of the musical Earth. Cally Banham’s oboe kept piping tender rays of hope on the descent to damnation. The collision of orchestra and chorus on the various iterations of “Ha! Ha! Ha!” alone made this concert worth experiencing and should be sampled in new music not yet composed.
In fact, an archive of elemental sounds of every section – indeed, every instrument – could have been sampled from this one performance. At the end of Part II, at intermission, when I was thinking just that, Denève swept the entire orchestra and chorus onto their feet all together as an ensemble. Apparently the conductor had heard that too.
When the St. Louis Children’s Choirs joined the orchestra and chorus at the end of the performance like angels singing Faust’s doomed love object up to heaven, it began to make sense why this long, unwieldy, not especially popular composition was programmed for the soon-to-be-old Powell Hall’s last show. Everybody was up there, on or around that stage: the orchestra, the chorus, the children’s choirs and their conductors. A full stage was more important than a full house on this night, and those in the audience with the patience to listen through a challenging, mixed-genre composition were amply rewarded.
In the lobby afterwards, waiting with friends to meet a guest tuba player who had performed, we were blessed to see a child chorister running out of the concert hall to be greeted by her grandfather. They disappeared into each other in a long, fierce hug, then pulled away, both weeping. Seeing someone with a musical instrument, a tuba, slung over his shoulders, the grandfather tried to say something in thanks through his high emotions and heavy tears. What I heard was, “I will always remember this.”
Soon-to-be-old Powell Hall: I will always remember this, these many nights. See you in a bit.
Chris King covers classical music for The St. Louis American.