Symphony Review: Denève, Lewis offer Orphic Hymns with SLSO

[Find out more about the music with the KDHX symphony preview.]

In his sixth (really?) season with the Saint Louis Symphony, Stéphane Denève continues to construct clever programs even with canonical repertory. The last weekend of 2023 daylight saving time brought to UMSL’s Touhill Performing Arts Center the expansively sensitive British pianist Paul Lewis, to collaborate with our hometown band in a slate of four Classical and Neoclassical works concerned with music itself. Pairing two Classical works by Gluck and Beethoven with two Neoclassical ones by Ravel and Prokofiev, the program traced a graceful arc from the eighteenth to twentieth centuries in this loosely-defined “Classical” art form curated by Orpheus’ spiritual heirs.

Alas, Saint Louis recently exited the top twenty largest US metropolitan areas; but, for our size, we are blessed with a range of exceptional venues for music. Displaced from their usual digs at Powell Hall, the SLSO has set up shop in the Kiel Opera House (Stifel Theatre), in the jewel that is The Sheldon, on Art Hill, and in their usual visits to schools and churches. But the best sound I’ve ever heard this orchestra produce embraced me in box seats at the Anheuser-Busch Performance Hall at UMSL. At intermission, inarticulately, I excitedly put it to friends, “it sounds like a Deutsche Gramophone recording, but, like, live!” I struggle to transmit what I meant by that, but the strings sounded—felt—like an intense golden haze, medium-dark hue, perfectly calibrated such that the light issuing from the gold warmed the body but did not tax the eyes. A gold like that in the fantasy world in Guillermo Del Toro’s “Pan’s Labyrinth.” Chuck Lavazzi praised the acoustics of the Kiel at opening night, both singly, and compared to Powell. The AB excels that, and if the Powell renovation results in acoustics even close to either of these venues, we’re sitting pretty for years to come. It’s worth noting too that the AB seats 1600, not ~2700 like Powell or ~3100 like Kiel. The folks who built all those 1500-2000 capacity theaters in old Europe were onto something.

Denève greeted the audience (who performed better than usual at call-responsing his bon soir), giving an overview and wishing us “a very good Neoclassical evening.”  He turned to lead strings and a few choice winds in “Dance of the Blessed Spirits” from Gluck’s landmark not-baroque-anymore opera for Vienna, “Orfeo ed Euridice” (1762). Saint Louis audiences were treated to it with Opera Theatre’s 2018 staging, starring Jennifer Johnson Cano as Orfeo. Among other then-novel engagements with form, the opera through-composes dance, spanning the work. It also refocuses musically, away from athletic vocalism of the baroque period towards a directer conversational mode, nowadays seeming more contemporary than the operas of subsequent composers of the next several decades, Mozart, Beethoven, and bel canto folks. From the opera, Gluck excerpted this dance and expanded it with a delightful flute concertino. Principal flautist Matthew Roitstein, playing the part of Orpheus, made the most of his star turn, his sound temperate love wafting into Hades. The strings’ texture supported him and the delicate close, pianissimo, made for the softest breeze of all. Harrowing the underworld sounds heavenly. What an amuse-bouche for Ludwig.

Beethoven’s Piano Concerto № 4 in G, Opus 58, stands as a repertory favorite that, though it looks inevitable to Classical audiences, took a long nap after its premiere prior to being excavated by Mendelssohn—to whom we owe so much of Bach as well. It premiered at Beethoven’s incomprehensible December 1808 concert that also heard the debuts of the Fifth and Sixth symphonies, the Mass in C, and the Choral Fantasy that seeded the Ninth symphony’s fourth movement. Plus some other stuff! From this ludicrous hit list, Paul Lewis, CBE, furnished us with the piano concerto, programmed in series this SLSO season with its four siblings. Lewis handed off the opening motive to the strings serenely. While the orchestra worked up their B major lather prior to the music rocking back to Lewis, something happened that I haven’t heard in Powell. The longer the Steinway and the orchestra spoke separately and then together, the more they both seemed to the ear like integrated sides of the same big instrument. The low strings contributed to a sense of air support as in a pipe organ. In Powell, soloists feel as though they’re sonically runwayed, out among us, between us and the orchestra. Lewis and the orchestra fused, when one wasn’t silent for the other.

Lewis escorted us with grace through that huge first movement, in which so much occurs. The undulating first cadenza sounded like human prosody. He gave an almost delicate rendering of Beethoven’s heroic mode, and then in the second cadenza created the sense that a proto-Romantic lack of restraint would break out any second—but it never did. He rarely became physically demonstrative until the forte return of the A motive, but then swiftly after, mountain brook soft again. He drew out the delay in the last cadenza without pulling; he created scope without sprawl. And there was dancyness like Haydn to close.

The second movement has found itself attached to a programmatic idea, Orpheus taming the Furies, at least since Beethoven’s mid-19C biographer Adolf Bernhard Marx. It works. As the Furies, Denève and the orchestra severe, stern, the low strings declamatory as in the ninth symphony finale, interrupting, projecting “Noo, no no, no no, no nyo, no no no noo.” (The ‘nyo’ is for the grace note). And Lewis’ Orpheus, responding instead in song, quietly and fearlessly. The opening quietude renders the chromatic crash landings so jarring after. Just when you thought Lewis would float away during the pianissimo close, the quick transition to the rondo last movement gave him a chance to rein in the orchestra rather than the reverse. The conversation between the soloist and the orchestra became more of a volley; Beethoven requires more and more calisthenics from the pianist, but Lewis glided. Even the last cadenza, with those weird misfooted stair-steppy arpeggios, gave way to smoothness. The usher next to me mock conducted the tutti martial close. The audience roared. Even applause sounds amazing in the AB. “There’s something slightly unattainable about the fourth,” Lewis has said, citing it as both his favorite and the most difficult of the five Beethoven piano concertos. My ear is deaf to whatever he’s failed to attain.

Returning for an encore, Lewis offered from Mendelssohn’s “Lieder ohne Worte / Songs without Words” the opus 53, № 3 presto agitato in g-minor. With his ceaselessly rocking left hand, the equestrian feel from the close of the piano concerto remained. Beethoven never quite became Romantically unglued in 1808, but Mendelssohn obliged in 1840, in a petite blitz sounding like an overbeveraged Chopin playing an upright in a western saloon. Lewis’ versatility flourished. A sassily Romantic detour in our very good Neoclassical evening.

After intermission, Denève directed music in one of his strengths, 20C compositions with an anterior glance, here Ravel’s “Le Tombeau de Couperin,” the 1919 four-movement arrangement for orchestra rather than the six-movement baroque format for keyboard—which you’d also have heard in Couperin’s time (1668-1733). This work continued the theme of classical dance rhythms, its movements Prélude, Forlane, Menuet and Rigaudon. Roitstein isn’t the only principal chair in the winds the SLSO has been showing off this season; Associate Principal Phil Ross spun a nearly-virtuosic obbligato for oboe in the Prèlude. This movement gives the sense of a chase. The Forlane offered a contrasting lopsidedness, sort of a zigzaggy saunter through a meadow, perhaps with one of Tim Burton’s ancestors. The Menuet departed the courtly language you’d have heard in the 18C for an autumnal journey, perhaps outdoors in the French countryside, maybe with some wildlife. And the Rigaudon moved nature about the listener in a dance, again with the aural sense that the orchestra comprised one organism. Aaron Copland later echoes some of this sonic language.

Prokofiev’s Symphony № 1 in D, subtitled “Classical,”—with no “neo,” per the composer—closed the concert with another work right in Denève’s strike zone. My in-person introduction to the maestro was an all-Prokofiev concert his first season here, before which he told a brilliantly cheesy joke with his infectious charm. The audience received this as if Dave Chappelle had executed it.

SD: So I have a question for you. Do you like Prokofiev?  [audience, widespread applause].

[pouty face] Me, I don’t like Prokofiev. [pause four beats]
 
I LOVE Prokofiev. [audience, gales of unsupressed laughter]

It surely does show. In the allegro first movement, the Haydn-like “dancyness” we heard in Beethoven returned with a humorously postured tossing of the theme back and forth between the violins and the ‘cellos, like marionettes bouncing their heads to and fro. Ross again starred, with a staccato figure in the oboe reminiscent of pantomime. The second movement, larghetto, began with a soft descending figure in the violins and soon became densely textured, with sudden dynamic contrasts. I’m continually floored by how the orchestra smoothly negotiates sudden diminuendi with Denève such that any sense of abruptness evaporates. The jocular Gavotte, which he recycled later for his “Romeo and Juliet” ballet quickly led to the molto vivace finale, which opened with a burst of off-to-the-races craziness like a complex marble run. Descending figures would repeatedly reset and begin a new chase. The work and the concert ended with a Flight of the Bumblebee-level furor.

I cannot wait to hear the SLSO in the Anheuser-Busch Hall again. I left UMSL with the sense the same performance in Powell would have been satisfying, but not quite as delicious. Orpheus sojourns in North County.