This weekend, the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra is performing a Sibelius doubleheader (a chamber piece and Symphony No. 7) with a Beethoven piano concerto (No. 2) and the St. Louis premiere of a tone poem by another Nordic composer, this one living. It’s a bright, joyous program – led by John Storgårds, chief conductor of the BBC Philharmonic Orchestra (who is Finnish, like Sibelius) – at the Touhill Performing Arts Center that deserves to be heard.
The heart of the program is Sibelius 7. In a truly ensemble composition, the timpani and trombones shine in particular – Sibelius 7 is (prove me wrong) the literature’s greatest symphony for trombonists. Not that the strings and winds do not get their physical workouts and emotional acrobatics as well. The winds are used for decisive accents from very early in the symphony through to the end, often paired with that consummate timpani part. The strings go through one of the great, long, ululating swoons in the history of music – now, I realize where all those composers for cartoons learned how to dramatize heaving lungs and throbbing hearts.
Before Storgårds struck up the orchestra for Sibelius 7 on Friday, April 19, I was joined on the balcony by an SLSO horn player, Thomas Jöstlein, who had worked earlier in the program, but stuck around to hear Sibelius 7 (something you don’t always see when a musician finishes playing before the program is over) and had to scavenge for an empty seat. After the show, Jöstlein was joined by a horn player friend who drew drove five hours to see the concert. This is truly a working musicians’ symphony.
Sibelius 7 was evidently a thrill to play, with expressive physicality rippling throughout the orchestra. Jöstlein, admiring his colleagues now that he was off duty, whispered to me of Storgårds that “he trusts us,” he trusts the musicians. That, too, must have been an ingredient in all that physical expressiveness. If you’re not always anxious to side-eye the conductor for cues, you are left with more of your own head space, which, for a performing musician, is also more body space. We were seeing an orchestra fully inhabiting their bodies as their bodies fully inhabited the music.
Storgårds came alive himself in conducting Sibelius 7. He had conducted the other three pieces without a baton, moving his hands mostly in synch like two rigid blocks. He picked up a baton with his right hand and pointed it for Sibelius 7 while often using his left index finger to point at someone else – the first evidence in the concert that any of the conductor’s fingers could move independently of the others. Storgårds gestured with so much passion and force that his face visibly reddened throughout the performance of Sibelius 7.
In the three earlier pieces, Storgårds looked less like a conductor and more like a football coach. His blockish hands suggested the gestures of someone communicating with linebackers, not bassoon players. When he swept one blockish hand right in a moments of unusual expressiveness, he had the energy of an offensive coordinator sweeping a wide receiver to a wider spot on the line because the coach saw something in the downfield coverage pattern that the wideout himself had not observed. These are not criticisms. Rather, Storgårds looked so supremely aware of the music and confident in the musicians that he really did not have much work to do up there, except to keep time and enjoy the show.
That all got knocked to hell during Sibelius 7, when at times the conductor (who plays violin) looked like he wanted to grab a bow out of somebody’s hand and saw on their instrument for them.
The program opened with a Sibelius chamber piece, Rakastava (The Lover), which paired perfectly with the SLSO premiere of Per Nørgård’s Lysning (Glade) that opened the second half the program (and immediately preceded Sibelius 7). On a day of perfect weather in St. Louis, these brief, bright pieces set the mood and stage for the program’s longer, more intricate, yet ultimately also vibrant and joyous compositions.
The Sibelius chamber piece set up Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 2 with guest soloist Marie-Ange Nguci. This is Beethoven at his most Mozartian, with a heavier left hand on the piano and darker motives in the strings as his main differentiators from the earlier-born Mozart who inspired him so much – Beethoven is Mozart with darker tugs on the heart. Nguci is not the most stagey of performers at the piano – she hit all the notes and then some, but she didn’t dramatize herself or her instrument.
Nguci was set up completely behind the conductor’s platform at Storgårds’ back. Conductors and soloists have one of two basic ways to situate themselves in relation to one another. Sometimes they stage the soloist at the left fingertips of the conductor, and they remain in constant interplay, rather like two partners new to one another who can’t keep their eyes off one other. The alternative is to situate the soloist out of sight of the conductor, not because they have nothing to say to one another, but rather because they don’t need to say anything to one another. The analogy, here, is to two long-time, deeply committed partners and coparents, who complete each other’s sentences and complement each other’s schedules and tag-team the needs of a family so effortlessly it’s possible to believe they are one person split between two distinct and separate bodies.
Indeed, Storgårds’ restraint in conducting during the earlier pieces became even lighter still with Nguci behind him helping him lead the orchestra on piano. Not only did the conductor leave the orchestra space to do their thing, he also left his soloist room to help guide and cue the supporting musicians.
Speaking of the musicians, it is a continuing pleasure to watch the orchestra in full dress alongside now two sidebar chamber series, the 20-year-old Live at the Pulitzer and the brand-spanking-new Live at the Sheldon. I took great joy in scanning the orchestra and recognizing musicians I had seen in smaller groupings on more intimate stages, feeling that much more drawn into their reality and the music they made.
There was Alvin McCall, making playing cello look like the easiest thing in the world to do. He had played the clown at the recent Live at the Sheldon horn concert by mimicking pouring nonexistent spit out of his cello, just like the horn players who dominated that group continually had to clean out their instruments. There was Victoria Knudtson, who played the most thrilling solos at that horn concert, now wearing shoes and slacks to obscure the tattoo on her lower left leg we had glimpsed on the Sheldon stage.
Best dressed onstage at the Touhill on Friday was violist Xi Zhang, whose black concert dress had a gorgeous shimmering texture and lace sleeves that dramatized the athletic demands placed upon a working viola player.
The most consistently expressive and creative musician onstage, not unusually, was Daniel Lee, principal cello. Danny Lee is having a good hair life and somehow manages to make ordinary concert blacks look stylish. He typically plays cello in a low-rider stance, but he also bolts upright – he did this repeatedly on Friday – to suddenly handle his cello as if with a full-body massage. I am here for more alternative branding of Danny Lee – I think we need a comic book and, I hate to go there, but I think the market would support a reality TV show about this guy.
The conductor and musicians faced unfair obstacles on Friday. We were a terribly noisy audience. Someone’s watch beeped way more times than a watch should be allowed to beep during a concert. And, though I don’t want to live in a world where unwell and often elderly people are ejected from their seats because they can’t stop coughing, there were at least two people who could not stop coughing. One person had what almost sounded like a death rattle. There also were some other noises in the audience that kind of sounded like somebody cleaning out their garage. Storgårds – who never once addressed the audience – and the musicians toughed through it with no harm to their performances that I could hear.
Putting those nuisances aside, this was a concert in early spring, which meant unusually boisterous and colorful fun. Beautifully sprinkled throughout the mostly older crowd were youth and children. There were girls in their spring dresses, the first time off the hanger for the season, and they were boys on the donut highs of their young lives, since this was a Coffee Concert. The way the musicians looked to be performing another bar of Sibelius 7 was the way those boys, those wild-eyed boys, looked as they stuffed – it seemed obviously unbelievable to them that this was happening – yet another free donut into their laughing mouths.
SLSO performs this program again Saturday evening and Sunday afternoon. Visit slso.org.
