St. Louis Symphony Orchestra Music Director Stéphane Denève set high expectations for Powell Hall audiences this past weekend. In the first half of the concert, he programmed not one, not two, but three pieces that start very slow and quiet. The third of these, “Tzigane” by Maurice Revel (1924), opens with some three minutes of unaccompanied violin. A crowded Powell Hall audience sat quietly with the entire orchestra and watched guest soloist Tessa Lark bow her fiddle.
Denève, who had planned this experiment in patience, bowed his head and clasped his hands behind his back. He knew how this all would end: not quietly.
There was poetry in a program that started so quietly only to end with a dance orchestra at the end of time, and Denève may have needed some less athletic pieces on the program to save his energy for the dance party he threw on the conductor’s stand at the end.
The program also opened with the orchestra and Denève watching a guest soloist: bagpiper Chris Apps, who played the Scottish source for Claude Debussy’s “Marche ecossaise sur un theme populaire” (1908). Apps then stayed seated on the stage to enjoy the show. The fingers on his right hand at times miming the tune’s notes on his pipes’ chanter.
“The Scottish March” builds slowly into sounding like a march at all, with the eight double basses becoming the first to bow patterns that sounded like we were going somewhere. Then the flutes picked up the beat, then the trumpets, until the snare led the orchestra through a brass fanfare and the timpani rolled us out.
Lark first took the stage to play “Poeme,” op. 25, by Ernest Chausson (1896). She held her violin and slowly swayed to the cellos and horns easing in the theme and the flutes gliding over. Her first violin solo sounded like a folk song, then the string section embellished the melody. The solo then moved to a virtuosic but still quite simple melody before pitching into a frenzy punctuated by strings, woodwinds, then horns. After one flourish of pyrotechnics, Lark sawed off the fiddle almost violently and stalked around in front of the orchestra in her floor-length floral gown.
Then, “Tzigane” and that seemingly endless opening violin solo, though Lark evoked orchestral depths from her four bare strings. Ravel brought a sense of play to his homage to gypsy music. He got rhythmic grooves out of instruments you don’t get to hear as part of a rhythm section every concert, handed the soloist what sounds like a nursery rhyme for the middle solo, and wrote a screeching skid for the entire string section, which opened up space for the final solo, a real burner that Lark whipped to a close.
Denève went back to his teasing ways by opening the second half with Debussy’s “Iberia” from Images(1905), which started with a jolt, but did not stay upbeat. After Debussy led a masterclass in counterpoising and blending instruments – there were so many different instruments onstage, you could never figure out where any sound was coming from – the piece hushed to a lull. The gongs and snare built back up the band, and daring percussive episodes ended with timpani flourishing to a dead stop.
That was all in the way of warming up for Ravel’s “La Valse” (1919), which this entire program had been setting up.
As a final programming wink at the trio of pieces played in the first half, “La Valse” opens quiet and slow, with deep pulses from the double basses (John Williams may have borrowed the “Jaws” theme song from this source). Then, it got crazy.
The flutes played what sounded like a clown’s song. Timpani, trumpets and trombones reached a paroxysm that gave way to a herky-jerky passage that had the cello section dancing with their instruments in unison. Then the most guttural harumph from a tuba in all of the orchestral literature. The strings rose, fluttered, fell. The conductor looked like he was dancing at a Dead show as he coaxed the orchestra to the outer limits of possible sound before a whip-saw percussive closing that felt like a football game where the lead changes three times in the final two minutes.
Denève’s chest was heaving and he looked like a man possessed as he recognized the entire orchestra, asking everybody to stand, all at once. Then he did something remarkable. Knowing what he had just put us through, he recognized us, gestured to the audience, a packed Powell Hall that was on its feet. Then the conductor staggered offstage in a daze.
Chris King covers classical music for The St. Louis American.
