Symphony goes (mostly) Italian in spirited, thrilling program

This weekend the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra is playing a program of mostly Italian music led by a guest conductor from China, though the first half concludes with a rhapsody by a Russian composer meditating on an Italian theme, played by a solo pianist who chose for his encore a German composer meditating on an ancient Greek myth from an opera with an Italian libretto. 

So, it was all mixed up – in the very best of ways. 

Xian Zhang, who was trained at the Central Conservatory of Music in Beijing, now leads the New Jersey Symphony Orchestra, though she spent seven formative years leading an orchestra in Milan, which helps to explain the Italian thematic. She opened the program on a light but exciting note – Gioacchino Rossini’s Overture to “L’Italiana in Algeria” (1813). That opera premiered three years before his “Barber of Seville,” which was spoofed unforgettably in “The Rabbit of Seville” (1950) starring Bugs Bunny. Looney Tunes is a good reference point for this spirited and clever composition. The woodwinds were the stars on Friday night’s performance at Powell Hall, with Zhang calling three players from that section to stand for individual honors.  

George Li was the star of a thrilling performance of Sergei Rachmaninoff’s “Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini,” which Rachmaninoff premiered in 1934 taking the solo piano part into his own hands. The piece calls upon the pianist to use every inch of the keyboard as the orchestra busts through 24 variations on Paganini’s 24th caprice for solo violin.  

The piano was placed behind the conductor, jammed up right against both the conductor’s stand and concertmaster David Halen, who appeared to be sharing the piano bench with Li from the perspective of the dress circle. Zhang never set eye or waved baton at the soloist, leaving him alone in his own world, where he at points heaved and slightly slumped in between mini-frenzies at the keyboard. In one moment when the voice of the piano was left alone after a violin was the last instrument in the ensemble to fade, Li hit the most precise and decisive single stroke on a piano I have ever heard. 

An adoring audience called Li out for an encore, which he devoted to “Melodie” from the opera “Orfeo ed Euridice” (1762) by Willibald Gluck. Gluck may have been from Bavaria, but it was part of the Holy Roman Empire at the time, and his librettist, Ranieri de’ Calzabigi, was from Livorno and wrote in Italian (not that his Italian words were sung at Powell Hall).

The second half of the program was devoted to two symphonic poems for orchestra by Ottorino Resphigi: “Fontane di Roma” (1915) and “Pini di Roma” (1923). The orchestra, which performed of one mind on these textured and dynamic compositions, was so huge for the first piece that Zhang had to squeeze past Halen and a player in the seventh row of violins to exit the stage afterwards. For the finale, the orchestra became even more huge, with four trumpet players and two trombonists being staged in the wings of the dress circle.

Before that finale, Zhang asked the entire orchestra to stand. That was both a recognition of the emotionally charged and nuanced playing she had been getting out of the entire orchestra up until that point and a way of telling the audience to pay attention to what each and every one of these musicians was about to play.  

Interestingly, in 1974, one year after Zhang was born in northeastern China, the newspaper of China’s Communist Party singled out “Pini di Roma” for attack as a corrupting foreign influence aftee it was performed in Peking. “It is not difficult for us to perceive behind the weird and bizarre melodies the nasty, rotten life and decadent sentiments that these works reflect,” the critic wrote of Resphigi’s symphonic poems. I can accept “weird and bizarre” if we understand them to be virtues, but the underlying sentiments sounded to me like joy in collaboration and leaving space for other voices, no matter how many. Even the humble triangle rang out in Powell Hall through, among many other instruments, the tympani, tuba, celesta, piano, harp and enough woodwind players to field a football team.

Beautiful sound came from every corner of the stage – and, for those of us seated on the dress circle, from both sides of our heads, with four trumpet players staged in the north wings and two trombonists in the south. More than would otherwise be possible, we literally were surrounded by the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra. When Zhang whipped around to wave her baton to cue the trumpet players and then the trombonists on the dress circle, those were our neighbors. We felt seen by the conductor as we were surrounded by weird, bizarre, beautiful, inspired sounds.

The orchestra will perform this program again 3 p.m. Sunday, November 27. See slso.org. 

Chris King covers classical music for The St. Louis American.