Four musicians from the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra and the orchestra’s creative partner, Tim Munro, delighted and awed a capacity crowd at the Pulitzer Arts Foundation on Wednesday, October 11 – an audience that included the orchestra’s president and its music director, who looked as dazzled and awestruck as everyone else.
As for Munro, though one fears being struck dead for thinking the thought, he makes the loss of former music director David Robertson less bitter.
In a master stroke of programming by Munro, the concert opened with three string players playing unfamiliar instruments on David Lang’s “Little Eye” (1999). Celeste Golden and Janet Carpenter, who make their living playing violin, and Chris Tantillo, much better known on viola, joined Munro on various percussive instruments (Munro, a flautist, also was playing outside his comfort zone). Only cellist Elizabeth Chung played her home instrument, providing a dark drone that was pierced by what Munro expertly described as “a constellation of percussion stars.”
Everyone played their accustomed stringed instrument on Danny Clay’s “Humming Song” (2022), but they had company from the crowd, where various patrons had been handed a small music box made by the composer himself from tiny piano rolls he punched. The stringed players dropped out one by one, finally leaving the childlike voices of the music boxes chiming alone. The effect was uncanny.
Tantillo was left alone in the performance space at the base of the Pulitzer’s stairs with his viola for Joan Tower’s “Simply Purple” (20028), a musical miniature perfectly sequenced after the music box coda. Tantillo’s ethereal, slow bowing of the viola was a technical challenge totally unlike but equivalent in difficulty to some frenzied fugue.
Everyone was back playing together on their instruments of choice for Angelica Negron’s “Marejada,” composed in the pandemic-rattled year of 2020, Munro said, with the jittery timing of Zoom conversations in mind. This effect was intensified by inviting the entire audience to join the performance by streaming a pre-recorded soundtrack off the internet, cued by a nod from Golden (in) and by Golden turning off the light on her music stand (out). In another winsome coda, the musicians shifted at the end to their own oddball percussion instruments with personal significance to them. Chung’s may have been a cat toy – Tantillo’s was a rain stick.
In Christopher Cerrone’s “Can’t and Won’t” (2017), these master musicians were tasked to play their instruments in a wide range of unusual voicings, from fluttery staccato, to the urgent strum of punk rock, to harmonics, to what sounded exactly like crackling static. “Can’t and Won’t” is an evocative title, but precisely the opposite must be said of Chung, Golden, Carpenter and Tantillo: everything asked of them by this demanding program, they could and did.
As for Munro, though one fears being struck dead for thinking the thought, he makes the loss of former music director David Robertson less bitter. This concert is the sort of inventive contemporary music that Robertson programmed for the Pulitzer and Powell Hall, introduced with a simple eloquence, similar to how Robertson speaks of complex music. “I think of how to use this space,” Munro said of the Pulitzer: “it’s a chamber venue but also a giant, beautiful cathedral.” Yes, yes, yes, yes.