Stéphane Denève, music director of the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra, has proven himself a genius at programming concerts, with a winning mix of fan favorites, somewhat lesser-known canonical works, and premieres. He is proving that again with this weekend’s program at Powell Hall, but on Saturday night he also showed an amazing knack for timing.
The showpiece for the program, as one would expect, is the fan favorite, Igor Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring (1911-1913). This SLSO performance of the definitive musical rendering of the miracle of Spring fell on a miraculous Spring day in St. Louis, that rare kind of day that reminds us why our life form evolved on this planet. The day compelled us to be outside moving among other living beings, and for most of the day the human being would have felt perfectly comfortable out of doors wearing no more clothing than a robin, or an elm, or a tarantula.
SLSO opens this program with a St. Louis premiere [Tone Poem for Orchestra (2017) by Gabriela Lena Frankwhich] which is so crucial to the health of an orchestra, the education of its audience and the cultivation of living composers.
Denève turned around on the conductor stand to address a packed Powell Hall audience about the second half of the program first. “You are in for such a ride,” he said, having led the orchestra’s rehearsals of TheRite of Spring – but the program’s first half also showed a knack for timing. The first half closes with Bela Bartok’s Piano Concerto No. 3 (1945), a somewhat lesser-known canonical work, featuring Piotr Anderszewski on solo piano. Twenty years ago to that day, Denève told us, he conducted SLSO for the first time as a guest, and the guest soloist for that program also was Anderszewski.
SLSO opens this program with a St. Louis premiere, which is so crucial to the health of an orchestra, the education of its audience and the cultivation of living composers. Apu: Tone Poem for Orchestra (2017) by Gabriela Lena Frank has the edgy and unpredictable energy of Spring and introduces many musical motifs – such as the central role of woodwinds – that characterize the Bartok and Stravinsky. Frank – a California-born composer of Peruvian, Chinese, Jewish, and Lithuanian heritage – clearly has taken these two composers to heart. She also takes them – and us – to new and exciting places.
When a conductor guides the audience expertly before a performance talking from the stand, it only makes sense to quote him. Denève said that Frank’s piece speaks to a “mischievous spirit” from Peru, “a funny one with a watchful eye for travelers in the mountains.” That sounded exactly right as this nimble orchestra unfolded a tone poem dominated by flutes, piccolo, marimba (at times played by four hands), xylophone, violins drummed on by fingertips, a pair of trumpets and trombones climbing steep mountains of notes together, and timpani that responded to some of the conductor’s most definitive left index finger pokes. Apu ends on three isolated mallet strikes on the xylophone, a stunning act of understatement. The orchestra’s percussionists shared mad grins when this one was over, relishing the challenges they had mastered. Denève has brought an inventive and dynamic new tone poem into the SLSO repertoire. Let’s hear it again.
One can only imagine what decades of collaboration between Denève and guest solo pianist Piotr Anderszewski brought to this SLSO performance of Bartok’s Piano Concerto No. 3. To borrow from the conductor in talking about the end before the beginning, as the crowd erupted in applause Denève grasped Anderszewski in a hug, and the pianist held back for a moment, looking caught off-guard and ethereal, not yet fully back in his body. Anderszewski also was so transported by the music he had inhabited that he clipped a violinist’s chair when walking off the stage. When he came back onstage to rejoin the orchestra before an audience standing in ovation, the pianist reached out to clasp the conductor’s hand. This appeared to be a make-good and all’s-cool for his having been so lost in the Bartok that he was a bit of a no-show in his old friend and colleague’s impromptu bear hug.
Denève included the guest soloist Anderszewski in all of his conducting, from first cue to closing flourish, which is not always the case when a major guest soloist is playing a signature piece from memory. The connection between conductor and soloist was primary and intense. It was interesting to see Denève – whose sweet spot with his left hand is toward Principal Second Violinist Alison Harney or deeper into the strings past her – work even farther to his left. That challenge led him to invent new fingerings with his left hand that looked, at times, like the proprietary signs of street gangs. Those are signs of loyalty and a complexity of collective engagement. It was as if the conductor never wanted to leave his conversation with the soloist, but their intensity only kept him more engaged with the rest of the orchestra, which responded as a multi-dimensional ensemble contextualizing and challenging one of the most dynamic moving piano lines in the literature.
As the soloist moved right on the keyboard, up in key, evolving sections of the orchestra responded by coming under him in tonal register. When the soloist worked the middle of the keyboard, the ensemble rumbled low and sparkled high. At the piano’s most isolated and broken moments, the violin section lent deep shade, a kind of melodic cover. The Piano Concerto No. 3 is one of Bartok’s claims for shaping jazz as it evolved from melodic big-band crowd pleasers to broken small-band excursions that make as many enemies as friends. SLSO kept bringing Bartok and the piano soloist back to melody and form, back from stopping making sense to Spring is coming.
Anderszewski rang this intricate piano part with intensity and truth. It did not appear that he had enough fingers to make the sounds that were coming from the piano. At times he threatened to punch holes in the keyboard. He used so many kinds of fingerings that it sounded like he had not only more fingers than the rest of us, but also more parts of his fingers and more ways to move all of the parts of all his fingers. As a pianist, he is like one of those people we all know who seem to get more hours out of each day. This guy gets more fingers out of his fingers, more piano out of the piano.
After all that, still Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring! It’s difficult to imagine a greater challenge to the virtuosity and inventiveness of a symphony orchestra than this monster. Not only is it wildly inventive and surprising, it has somehow become canonical. How can you refresh a primal musical statement of refreshment that symphony audiences have heard many times? Denève and SLSO had a good solution: play the piece perfectly within an inch of its life like you have never heard it – like Spring has never woke you up – before.
First, a note of housekeeping. This was a really full Powell Hall. A capacity audience needed to use the intermission in various ways, and SLSO leadership is accurate in its assessment that we are outgrowing this beautiful concert hall with its limited amenities. There also was the perfect timing of Spring thing that had people wanting another drink and to make new friends and deepen old friendships. It was a good problem to have, but the conductor had to turn around before striking up the band and all but scold his adoring audience to sit down and listen.
Rite of Spring was first performed in 1913, a watershed year in the evolution of film. For anyone whose emotional expectations were shaped by watching movies, pretty much every movie soundtrack motive is in here somewhere. Without this piece of music, the world would sound differently and human beings would feel differently. Like the human ritual engagement with the miracle of Spring, ongoing this weekend, this music is a part of us, and an orchestra who performs it is taking on the centuries.
TheRite of Spring calls for simultaneous virtuosic performances across the orchestra that stop on a dime and then pivot – on one single beat – to other simultaneous virtuosic performances across other parts of the orchestra. How do you accomplish that without sounding like cacophony or mud? Practice, practice, practice; rehearsal, rehearsal, rehearsal; and genius helps. Denève praised and praised the world-class calibre of this orchestra from the conductor’s stand, and it was not perfunctory; it was gratitude.
If SLSO performs the Rite again with Denève on the conductor’s stand, they should dress him in a suit with motion sensors that capture his movements in three dimensions. I have been watching people conduct symphony orchestras for more than 30 years. I can’t think of a move I have seen before that Denève did not make, in some form, while conducting this masterful orchestra through the Rite – and he showed me some new ones on Saturday night. There was this thing where he uplifted his left arm and spun his fingertips around in a circle to tell the four trumpet players something that they clearly understood, because they got right on it. Then at times he let his left arm droop as a sort of restorative yoga posture healing a hard-working conductor going for broke for 33 minutes straight.
Spring breaks in fury. Stravinsky taught us that. The Rite is a brutal piece of music. (It has the hardest hammering of bass drums I have ever heard in a symphony concert hall.) After such a gorgeous day, what’s up with that, Igor? Why all the noise and uneasiness, Stefane? Why can’t we have everything nice?
After howling and applauding this enormously powerful performance, we walked out of Powell Hall into another Spring. This was not the warm sun and cool breezes of the day. A hard wind and cold rain lashed our faces. Spring is also hard and cold. Igor told us that. Stefane heard him. Stefane’s timing was perfect on this night.
SLSO performs this program again 3 p.m. Sunday. Visit slso.org.
