I have seen fire and I have seen ice – lately. I have been watching Los Angeles burn to the ground while ice and snow piled up around us in St. Louis. The streets somewhat navigable again and no towering infernos to be seen, Saturday was a good night to go to the Touhill Performing arts center and see the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra’s first concert program of the new year.
Samuel Barber’s School for Scandal Overture (written in 1931, premiered in 1933) rang in the new year nicely. Not performed by SLSO for nearly 15 years, the Overture takes an expansive orchestra (special shout out to the low brass) through a clever arrangement of themes and changes. Fitting for a statement about a piece of theater, the sly interplay of instruments and sections (under the direction of guest conductor Daniela Candillari) felt conversational. The melodic shapes had a warmth that hearkened back to the holiday season we have left behind for a more pitiless stretch of winter.
In the intricate, repetitive writing for strings, I heard acoustic intimations of pop music forty years in the future from when the Overture was written. I feel confident that transposing this string writing into synthy keyboard parts would produce something like Orchestral Maneuvers in the Dark tunes. At the same time, Barber’s writing for the grains of the strings was so tangible and tied to the physicality of the instrument that no synthesizer could touch it.
Nothing in a concert hall could be newer than a world premiere, and the Barber Overture was an apt opener for the world premiere of Nina Shekhar’s Accordion Concerto, which SLSO commissioned along with Young Concert Artists. This experienced occasioned a number of firsts for me. I had never seen an accordion onstage with an orchestra, let alone as the solo instrument in a piece of orchestral music. And Shekhar wrote the longest, slowest, most eerie cold open – first announced with a fingertip circling the lip of a wine glass – I have ever heard from this orchestra.
Accordion Concerto spotlit the beautifully strange voices of the accordion, especially in the hands of soloist Hanzhi Wang. I would later exit the concert hall behind two young men who said that the accordion had been overwhelmed by the orchestra, but I heard the opposite. I heard the accordion inhabit the orchestra – I heard the orchestra essentially transformed into an accordion. Most obviously, other instruments, especially the second violins, picked up drone parts first voiced on the accordion, but this effect also was uncanny, difficult to place or describe.
Shekhar conjured a wall of sound, a kind of collective statement of texture. Emotionally, the orchestra often sounded like a chorus of demonic angels – there was a shimmer that had a dark beauty but also overtones of war birds, alarms and ambulances. At times, it could be a concerto for a bombing raid. If so, a spirit of play animated the time waiting out the bombs. At one point, the woodwinds sounded like a video arcade.
Having so many instruments so often blending sounds called for virtuosity throughout the orchestra to keep the piece from devolving into a goop of noise. I was reminded of the Bob Dylan line that “to live outside the law you must be honest.” To play at the edges of a tonal center you really have to be tonally centered. The orchestra was thrillingly equal to this challenge.
Though I heard the accordion inhabiting the orchestra, rather than being overwhelmed by it, Wang did step forward, at times (so to speak; physically, she stayed seated in a chair just to the left of the conductor’s platform). Hearing an accordion solo out in front of a symphony orchestra had a powerful emotional effect, given the instrument’s strong association with street singers and raconteurs. The concert hall echoed with the ghosts of every voice every projected above a wheezing accordion on a street corner. Wang also can flat out jam. She left no doubt that she could drive a conjunto band until it wore out a floor of fancy dancers.
Not that Shekhar’s Accordion Concerto should be construed as festive. My guest at the concert said the piece left her feeling unnerved and uneasy; I assured her that meant she had been paying attention. At a moment when people are increasingly using the term “apocalyptic” without irony, this sounded like a concerto for our time.
SLSO concluded its first concert program of the new year with Antonín Dvořák’s Symphony No. 9, “From the New World” (1893), which amounted to another famous first for me. I had never before found fault in a programming choice by SLSO, been tempted to walk out on a performance, or identified any particular symphony as one I never need to hear again. After the cleverness of Barber and the original verve of Shekhar, Dvořák sounded trite, corny, overplayed, unconvincing.
I had an unprecedented feeling during an SLSO performance. I got bored. But, as I contemplated what interesting times we are living through, and how apocalyptic is feeling realistic these days, I realized what a luxury it is to be bored.
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