The St. Louis Symphony Orchestra’s smashingly successful new Live at the Sheldon chamber music series concluded on April 7 with yet another unique program presented by SLSO musicians: “Horn Calls,” curated by Roger Kaza (principal horn) and Julie Thayer (fourth horn).
The program opened and closed with crowd pleasers (Mozart and Beethoven) where the horn players were joined by a string quartet, making for musical structures and tonic blends more familiar to symphony-goers than just horns. Hearing Mozart’s March in F major (1776 – a fine year) and Beethoven’s Sextet in E-flat major (1795) played by these skillful hands in this intimate space helped me hear the differences between Mozart and Beethoven. Mozart’s March moves with his complex optimism (or optimistic complexity), which Beethoven’s Sextet shares, though it’s edged with a deeper awareness of grief and pain.
Between Mozart and Beethoven, Kaza and Thayer presented a lively and diverse range of material. They curated two pieces originally written for voice – Jean Sibelius’ “Solitude” from Belshazzar’s Feast (arranged by Danielle Kuhlmann, from a suite first performed in 1907) and Caroline Shaw’s Its Motion Keeps (2019, arranged by John Glover). Turning human voices into horns showed off the horn as a more nuanced and expressive instrument than it typically sounds in an orchestra surrounded by many more pliable tools. Kaza also surprised this confessed under-estimator of the horn by telling us that horns were included in the first orchestras, having “somehow snuck in” from “the hunting fields of France.”
Kaza and Thayer included two pieces by living composers, one a world premiere. Caroline Shaw, who won the 2013 Pulitzer Prize in Music, is very much still alive and composing (like, with and for just about everybody). The world premiere – part of SLSO’s commendable partnership with the Mizzou New Music Initiative – was Cor for Four Horns (2024) by J.T. Wolfe. This young man, a student composer at Mizzou, showed a swagger that was inadvertently comical when he took the stage to say he had been a little worried for the musicians – some of the best horn players on the planet – because he “wrote such a hard piece.” The comic impression was strengthened by his appearance, that of a 15-year-old with his first full moustache.
The kid can write, though, or I wouldn’t be so cruel as to crack wise about his swagger or stache. His Cor (French for “horn”) pulls a lot of new-music hijinks with the physicality of the instrument – such as pulling off the mouthpiece and playing it as a kazoo (Tod Bowermaster had special fun clowning on that bit) – yet does bring some dynamic rhythm and melody. At times, Wolfe has four sneaky, snaky horn melodies, going all at once, all on the edge of tonality. Four horns playing Caroline Shaw melodies called to mind the World Saxophone Quartet. Wolfe’s disruptive, at times vituperative, antics evoked the Art Ensemble of Chicago.
The co-curators took the student composer to school by programming – before the world premiere of his disruptive horn quartet – Paul Hindemith’s Sonata for Four Horns, composed in 1952, exactly a half-century before Wolfe’s birth. Though Hindemith does not fuss much with playing parts of the instrument in unintended ways, he wrote the book on writing for four horns playing all at once yet not exactly together, all horns playing dynamic melodies at the same time, hitting unusual intervals with their juxtaposed notes, with no one necessarily holding down a rhythm. Hindemith’s Sonata is a darkly joyous brassy film noir soundtrack, playful and surprising but still tuneful, still a toe tapper. You know, them kids today, I tell ya, they just forget to give you something to tap your toe to.
The student composer’s performative moustache was not the only visual amusement on the Sheldon stage. The reflective stars on co-curator Julie Thayer’s jacket glinted throughout the performance as they caught the stage lights. Tod Bowermaster’s blindingly pink shirt was unencumbered by some dark jacket in this concert where fellow musicians were calling the shots. Thomas Jöstlein, associate principal horn, donned a Swiss-made embroidered shirt typical of Swiss folk costumes to match the Swiss alphorn he played on his own original work, “Alpine Eclipse II.” Jöstlein wrote this piece for three alphorns – incredibly long horns that are the coolest instruments you will ever see on a concert stage – and two French horns. The guttural alphorn being joined by horns with smaller, brighter voices nicely set up the sonics for a solar eclipse tone poem; a solar eclipse would follow in just two days.
Another visual element merits notice because it was just so unusual. When do you ever see a bare foot on a symphony stage? With mild spring weather, co-curator Thayer wore open-toed footwear and Victoria Knudtson (who played the concert’s most spirited solos) performed in open-ankle shoes. Knudtson’s fashion choices had the effect of showcasing a tattoo on her lower left leg. Though I couldn’t decipher the image, this was the first tattoo I have seen on a symphony musician in concert, and I enjoyed the vivid departure from the drab norms of orchestral costuming. In Thayer’s case, open-toed shoes showcased her foot taps, which would have been no big deal had she not, at times, tapped only one toe, her left big toe. I have never seen any musician keep time on stage by tapping only one toe. Small rooms like the Sheldon Concert Hall humanize music in unexpected ways.
That brings us to the ungainly elephant in the room, which is that the horn is one of the more awkward instruments to keep clean and properly operable. Enmeshed in an orchestra on a distant stage, musicians who perform through their lungs can keep their instruments clean more or less unnoticed, but when most or all the musicians on a small stage are playing horn, their necessary maintenance becomes part of the show. The cellist in the string quartet, Alvin McCall, pulled a sight gag as the string quartet waited for the horn players to prep for three movements of Beethoven. McCall took off the end pin of his cello and shook out his instrument, as if it, too, had spit to shed.
About that string quartet: McCall was joined by violist Andrew François, who performed with a keen interest in and eye contact with his fellow players, and Jessica Cheng Hellwege and Asako Kuboki on violins, who were both expressive and strong. Throughout the Mozart and Beethoven, the string playing was dynamic, rhythmic, and lyrical as needed, always in festive interplay with one another and the horns. All those strings and horns sounded so deeply reverberant inside the homy confines of the Sheldon.
One last thing about Live at the Sheldon – a series introduced this season, as part of the scheduling workaround for the Powell Hall renovation, and returning next season, which is something to celebrate: You can hear the musicians’ individual breaths between notes. You just can’t get any more human than that.
