The St. Louis Symphony Orchestra’s new Live at The Sheldon series features SLSO musicians curating programs and picking their fellow musicians to accompany them. Part of the symphony’s workaround for a season when Powell Hall is under the jackhammer, the series is a stroke of genius and becoming one of the town’s hottest tickets, as a jammed Sheldon evidenced on Wednesday, February 7, when two of the orchestra’s most central musicians – concertmaster David Halen and principal second violin Alison Harney – presented a concert pairing two new works with two more familiar ones.
The program opened with a new (at least to SLSO) piece of music by long-neglected African-American composer Florence Price (1887-1953). Halen and Harney rounded out a string quartet with principal viola Beth Guterman Chu and associate principal cello Melissa Brooks to perform “Andante Cantabile” from Price’s String Quartet No. 2 in A minor (1935). This sedate (andante means “moderately slow”) movement is dominated by a simple melody that sounds at times Southern and at times Western. In mood as well as performance, it eased us into the program.
Halen and Harney’s string quartet then pivoted from unjustly neglected woman composer from the past to a young woman composer of the future being celebrated even before her prime: Robyne Sieh (born in 2002), a Fort Zumwalt North High graduate studying at the University of Missouri whose composition The Art of Dreaming (2023) was selected for performance by the New Music Initiative at Mizzou. Pairing the SLSO’s partnership with the New Music Initiative with these Live at The Sheldon performances was part of the programming genius of this new series. Like Price, Sieh writes in a contemplative mood that is easy on the ears. A pianist herself, Sieh wrote some distinctive viola parts and must have been overjoyed to hear them performed by Chu, one of the best in the business.
The SLSO’s support of the Florence Price revival and of new composers is to be applauded and was heartily applauded by a packed Sheldon, but the musicians became increasingly alive as they moved into more familiar (and more challenging) music. The first half of the program closed with Maurice Ravel’s String Quartet in F major, which he wrote in 1903 when he was not much older (28) than the student composer whose work preceded him.
Ravel’s quartet compels more virtuosic playing from all the players than the works by Price or Sieh – in particular, there was much more for the cellist to do (most memorable walking cello line ever). The writing for viola here is off the chart, and Chu just shredded and shredded. Halen, warming up to the material, pivoted more toward the audience and performed to us more directly. Ravel plays around with plucking throughout this string quartet, which was a delight to hear in such an intimate space; some of Halen’s violin plucking was so bright it sounded like an index finger popped out of the side of a mouth. The audience erupted in spontaneous applause between each movement, which the musicians took as an opportunity to check tuning after all that plucking.
After intermission, principal keyboard Peter Henderson joined the quartet on piano for Antonin Dvořák’s Piano Quintet in A major (1887), at which point everyone onstage came much, much more alive. Live at The Sheldon has been a joy to experience for the close look at the intimate camaraderie between symphony musicians we are accustomed to seeing perform relatively faceless in a large group. In the first half of the program, only Chu performed as anything other than impassive and faceless, though she showed enough eye contact and joyful smiling for an entire string quartet. Even seated with the entire orchestra, she performs in this way. Henderson also played piano with the physicality he typically shows as a member of the orchestra.
The intense rhythmic spirit of the Dvořák provided a window into other physical performance tics of the players. Brooks kept time with her right toe and her right heel, which you don’t see every day. Chu dug in her left heel and pointed her left toe upward, which made me think The Sheldon might want to have a carpenter look at the stage’s flooring.
Only on the Dvořák did the co-curators finally unwind, or at least Harney did; Haley did not take as much advantage of this intimate setting as one might have hoped from the concertmaster. Harney started to perform with her entire body, and one of her feet left the floor for the first time as she rocked back in the spirit of the folk dances Dvořák poured into this thrilling piece of music. Though Haley stayed mostly self-possessed, Dvořák wrote intense duet parts for the two violins, and hearing these two key figures from the orchestra play those violin parts side by side with only three other instruments onstage was something to cherish.
Live at The Sheldon continues with Percussion Spotlight on March 6 and Horn Calls on April 7. Visit SLSO.org.
