The St. Louis Symphony Orchestra opened its 145th season on Friday, September 27 at the Stifel Theatre with Hector Berlioz’s “Rákóczi March” (1846). With its roots in a Hungarian song a century older than that, this music dates from a time when horses, not automobiles, were the primary mode of personal transportation other than the human body itself. Perhaps that is why in the thrilling dramatics of the orchestra, under the musical direction of Stéphane Denève, I heard the intricate prancing of show horses give way to the thundering blaze to the finish of thoroughbred race horses. This was music that repeatedly felt as if it were being ripped out of the musicians’ chests.
Now that we were all wide awake, Denève moved the orchestra on to three of his 21 Hungarian Dances that Johannes Brahms orchestrated himself, Nos. 1, 3, and 10 (1874). This was pleasure music of the dance, of the body. The chest did not explode with the violent expulsion of music but rather glanced rhythmically against the chest of one’s partner in the dance. The musicians, who struggled with their instruments getting the “Rákóczi March” out of their systems, now danced with the pieces of wood they were making sing to us. Especially the frolicking “Hungarian Dance No. 3” and the carnivalesque “Hungarian Dance No. 10,” both in F major, brought badly needed light to an audience who had not seen the sun in several days of hurricane castoff rain.
The thrilling first half of this program concluded with the St. Louis premiere of Nomad Concerto by Mason Bates, which was first performed for the first time just eight months before by the composer’s hometown Philadelphia Orchestra with Gil Shaham as soloist. Bates – who was born in 1977, a century after the premieres of the music we had just heard, was in the audience, looking boyish as an intern usher. Shaham, for whom the concerto was commissioned, was on the stage. And he was dancing.
Freed from a chair unlike the other string players, Shaham was not miming dance movements from a seated position. He really was dancing with his instrument (which is more than 300 years old and worth more than a prizewinning race horse). The first row of chairs for the violins seemed to be arranged on the stage somewhat creatively to give the soloist more floor room to ramble and slide.
You can certainly file this adventurous piece of music under “concerto,” but I heard a tone poem in four parts. All four movements share the motive of moving around tonal, emotional and rhythmic centers, appropriately enough for a nomad study. They also share the deployment of an orchestra to make big chords and new sounds together more than to develop melodies that move against each other.
In “Song of the Balloon Man,” the first movement, Bates and the orchestra established the harp (played by Grace Browning) as the primary partner to the solo violin. The virtuosic writing for violin hits fast and hard, and absorbing Gil Shaham’s technique and voicing while still appreciating everything else going on around him – the gorgeous, not brooding, low strings; the trombone drama; the violin cascades from the soloist’s lines – became a challenge; one fleeting listen to this piece was not enough, but I will offer some preliminary observations of the four movements.
“Song of the Balloon Man”: Bates’ use of what could be called homespun instruments (in a concerto he knew would be performed with one of the most valuable violins on the planet) brought an uncanny reminder of the mundane to music writing that aspires to the magical. We heard a simple rhythm egg – a symphony musician playing an instrument like what you could make from a plastic egg shell and a handful of dry rice. We heard a woodblock – not to knock what must be some stylish orchestra-grade woodblocks, but this is basically hitting a stick against a piece of wood. In the woodblock we hear the simian prehistory of the symphony musician.
“Magician at the bazaar”: In brief but informative remarks from the stage, Denève prepared us for the magic writing in this movement, when the violin cascades from Shaham’s lead lines send ripples of sound through the violin section like smoke curling from a magic lamp. The conductor helped us to see that sound. In this very brief composition, Bates also set himself a formidable technical challenge: to write in very brief melodic and rhythmic periods without sounding choppy. He and the orchestra turned these tiny bits of music into little twirls of sound with a spirit of joy (ever fleeting) and play (so quickly abandoned by the child).
“Desert vision: oasis”: Two brilliantly performed parts dominated this movement of shimmering sound shapes. Ebonee Thomas’ flute evoked a didgeridoo (not in a gimmicky way) and the quintessential desert flute of desolate spaces. Grace Browning’s harp (at times seconded by Peter Henderson’s piano) strummed through a folk tale that called to mind and memory a child’s music box playing a communally beloved lullaby. This was one moment when Nomad Concerto really did pick me up and move me to some other place and time.
“Le jazz manouche”: Bates brings the genius of Django Reinhardt and Parisian hothouse jazz into the idiom of a symphony orchestra augmented by a trap set. He and the orchestra offered a Cubist version of this folk/jazz fusion, where all the old folk Romani spirit and melody were abstracted into wild mountain fiddle, while the band swung pretty straight. It was fascinating to hear the orchestra swing – and then swing in and out of swinging. They then offered a roving history of jazz styles: hothouse, cabaret, swing, stride, Glen Miller Orchestral fanfares, plus folk dances, a dirge borne by the strings, and even schmaltzy show tunes. Denève promised us magic tricks!
After all that, Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique (1830) sounded to me like Dad’s magic act, Dad’s acid trips. That’s not an insult – Dad was cool; he was a magician and a freak – but Berlioz provided the background, the base, for what Bates and countless other latter-day tripsters have given us, without the morbid narrative that preoccupied Berlioz (which, sorry, I still have not had enough sunlight to take on his death trip). The musicians clearly enjoyed playing this old saw – one of the second violinists, Nathan Lowry, looked like he might put out the right eye of a neighbor (Shawn Weill) with his bow.
After performing something as fresh and daring as Nomad Concerto, an orchestra that had been playing the edges of sound from note one that night were dashed by Denève through the helter-skelter dynamics of Symphonie fantastique. They so deftly delivered the many swirls in volume, all the way down to the scarcely audible then all the way up to scoring an imaginary decapitation, and the swirls in tempo, getting faster and faster and faster up to a hard stop of blade into block.
For all his morbid violence, Berlioz was a lover, and he loved writing for violins. The symphony opened with a violins-only keening. In the many times the orchestra stilled to a whisper, Berlioz and Denève once left a few clustered violins piercing the silence like a solitary star on a clouded night. At times they drafts the flutes into the violin section, flutes now doubling violins. Famously, the violins become a kind of puppet show, with a slapping of bows on strings and wood to evoke dancing skeletons.
Visually, the orchestra offered a beautiful spectacle that made it possible to leave behind Berlioz’s gloom and the hurricane’s castoff storms. The orchestral norm where men wear concert blacks onstage, whereas most women dress with color, aligned well with the violin section having more women than the other sections of the orchestra. At the Stifel Theatre, this placed almost all the color to stage right – the reds, pinks, purples, oranges, greens, shimmering whites – seen against a uniform black. As the violinists Berlioz loved so much danced with their wooden instruments, bringing them to life in their hands, the colors in their costumes looked like butterflies in the night.
The St. Louis Symphony Orchestra performs this program again 3 p.m. Sunday. Visit slso.org.
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