Leonard Slatkin, conductor laureate of the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra (SLSO), is enjoying a very fond farewell to what will soon be the old Powell Hall by leading Saturday morning and Sunday afternoon concerts there.
Slatkin programmed this show with adventurous ears in mind, offering a St. Louis premiere, of Mason Bates’ Anthology of Fantastic Zoology (2015), and two quirky pieces the SLSO has not performed since 2015, back when David Robertson was music director and Barack Obama was the president of the United States: Emmanuel Chabrier’s Espana (1883) and Richard Strauss’ Don Quixote (Fantastic Variations on a Theme of Knightly Character) (1897).
“Fantastic Variations” is the concept that connects the Bates and Strauss compositions, which are both inventive and episodic. Both counterpoise unexpected blends of instruments and notes to create strange, new sounds. Strauss, in particular, makes a brass section – no small thanks to his secret weapon, the tenor tuba – sound discordant yet fanciful in how he stacks the notes and layers the textures. Both Bates and Strauss compose vacillating patterns of calls and response where riffs and themes begin and are continued with varying tonal centers at different points around the orchestra: it’s like hearing and even seeing a melody get up and move.
Speaking of movement, Bates’ Anthology tested the physical capacity of a large orchestra (on a stage that admittedly would benefit from the expansion now underway). Peter Henderson, doing double duty on piano and celeste, bounced from bench to bench, craning his neck when at the celeste to follow his score unfolded back at the piano. The percussion corps looked like a relay team as they raced from instrument to instrument or dashed across the stage to grab the right mallet just in time to strike something with it on cue.
Both Anthology of Fantastic Zoology and Don Quixote are sprawling (maybe just slightly too long?) and unpredictable from start to finish; both appear to be ending several times before they do, and both end when they do not appear to be over. This left a feeling, both at the end of the first half of the concert with Bates and at the end of the concert with Strauss, that the music – the parade of imaginary animals, the crazy knight’s imaginary adventures – just goes on and on.
That was a most welcome feeling for Slatkin to leave us, especially after what he described as the “oddly bittersweet” awareness that he was trodding the boards of this particular Powell Hall for the last time after 55 years.
Slatkin – who stepped down as SLSO music director in 1994, when Bill Clinton was the new U.S. president – opened the program with what appeared to be a limited range of cervical motion. Never a showboat on the conductor’s stand, he showed just how little gesture is necessary to command an orchestra when you know everything they are doing. During the Bates piece, he pulled off a magic act in cueing in and then out the wind machine with the tiniest motions of his left hand. It was like seeing a man summon the wind and then calm it to silence the way the rest of us turn on and off a water faucet.
By the time he was leading Don Quixote on his fanciful steed, Slatkin had limbered up and was moving more freely from both ends of his spine. Whenever Strauss hit a more conventional patch of lush orchestration, Slatkin’s hand and body motions became slow, gentle and flowing. Though, when Strauss sent the strings on a daredevil mission that descended on guest cello soloist Joshua Roman before collapsing all around him, with rumbling timpani and stormy brass, leaving only the briefest daylight for a miniature cello solo, Slatkin was right there, and the orchestra and soloist were exactly where he had led them.
Roman kept a respectful eye on Concertmaster David Halen from his guest artist chair. When congratulatory love was being distributed throughout the orchestra after Don Quixote’s odd, slow, quiet conclusion, Roman kept pushing the love toward his fellow guest soloist, SLSO’s own principal violist Beth Guterman Chu, who deserved it. Her performance throughout the piece was virtuosic and passionate, several orders of heat hotter than Roman’s silky cello playing. When David Robertson programmed Don Quixote in 2015, he also had Chu solo on viola but chose SLSO’s own principal cellist Danny Lee for the featured cello part. Lee must have needed a straightjacket to hold himself back in the ensemble whenever those juicy cello lines opened up Saturday morning.
The Saturday morning show was a coffee concert, with free coffee and donuts, and a full house of the faithful came out for a final cup of coffee with Leonard Slatkin at what will soon be the old Powell Hall. Thanks for another wild ride, maestro. See you later on down the road.
For more information and tickets, visit slso.org.
Chris King reviews classical music for The St. Louis American.