Symphony Preview: There and back again

Guest conductor Cristian Măcelaru and the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra have a quick trip through time and space this weekend (Friday and Sunday, October 4 and 6), with music that zaps you from 19th century Bohemia to 20th and 21st century South America and then back again. Don’t worry, it won’t make you dizzy—although the music might be intoxicating.

Anton and Anna Dvořák in London, 1886 en.wikipedia.org

This week, I’m going to try something different with the symphony preview. I have been doing these for years and thought I’d change the format a bit and make it more concise. Let me know what you think by leaving a comment on the version of this that appears on my blog.

The concert opens with the “Carnival” concert overture, Op. 92, by Antonín  Dvořák (1841–1904). The composer originally intended it to be the second of three overtures with the blanket title “Nature, Life, and Love” but his publisher persuaded him to issue the three works separately. So the first movement, “Nature,” became “In Nature’s Realm” (Op. 91), “Life” became “Carnival,” and “Love” became “Othello” (Op. 93).  Even with their separate titles, though, the three overtures share a common “nature” theme that shows up at the beginning of “In Nature’s Realm” and in the middle of “Carnival.”

Listen to The Academy of St. Martin in the Fields under Neville Marriner. The “nature” theme shows up at 4:20 in this recording.

Next, it’s off to Peru by way of the USA for the “Concertino Cusqueño” by Gabriela Lena Frank (b. 1972), a contemporary North American composer with whose Peruvian/Chinese mother left her with a lifelong fascination with the music of Peru (among other locales). Founder of the Gabriela Lena Frank Creative Academy of Music, and a graduate of my alma mater, Rice University, Frank was Appointed Composer-in-Residence with the Philadelphia Orchestra in 2019, who first performed the “Concertino” in 2012. In her program notes, the composer writes that the work was “written to celebrate the fine players of the Philadelphia Orchestra on the eve of Yannick Nézet-Ségun’s inaugural season as Music Director, [and] finds inspiration in two unlikely bedfellows: Peruvian culture and British composer Benjamin Britten.”

Gabriela Lena Frank Photo by Mariah Tauger

The former is represented musically by the first few notes of “Ccollanan María,” a religious song from Cusco, the original capital of the Inca empire, Tawantinsuyu. Britten is represented by the tympani motif from the opening of his Violin Concerto. Those two brief ideas get tossed around quite a bit in this brief (11 minutes) piece that prominently features the first-chair string players.

Watch a 2019 performance by the Thailand Philharmonic under Jeffrey Mayer on YouTube. The link starts at the 1:15 mark so you’re spared the spoken introduction. You can also see a 2004 setting by Frank of “Ccollanan María” by the chorus Sacred and Profane on YouTube. Neither of these was available on Spotify.

Up next is a work making its third appearance with the SLSO in recent years, the "Variaciones concertantes," op. 23, by the Argentine composer Alberto Ginastera (1916–1983). It takes the conventional theme and variations form and combines it with a concept that emerged mainly in the 20th century, the "concerto for orchestra"—a work in which each section of the ensemble gets an opportunity to take the spotlight.

Ginastera wrote the “Variaciones” in 1953, at a time when he was out of favor with the fascist Péron regime, losing his steady gig as director of the music conservatory of National University of La Plata. He made ends meet by scoring film and composing commissioned works like the “Variaciones.”  It was written for the Asociación Amigos de la Música in Buenos Aires, where Igor Markevitch conducted the premiere in June 1953.

Listen to the Norwegian Radio Orchestra under Miguel Harth-Bedoya on my Spotify playlist.

Alberto Ginastera en.wikipedia.org

Finally it’s back to old Bohemia for the work that marked Dvořák’s emergence as an independent symphonic voice, the Symphony No. 6 in D major, Op. 60. “Every bar of this work shows him at the height of his maturity,” wrote Alec Robertson in his 1943 biography of the composer. “The village boy can move amongst the greats of the symphonic world with ease and assurance. He speaks their tongue, albeit with his own accent.”

Too true. This is music that speaks for itself. It brims over with bucolic charm and optimism, and if there’s more than a hint of Brahms’s D major symphony in the last movement, so what? It’s still 100% Dvořák. I defy anyone to emerge from a performance of this piece without a smile. “The only way we can eradicate darkness is by bringing light,” notes Măcelaru.

Amen to that.

Listen to the 1995 London Symphony Orchestra recording under Istvan Kertesz on my Spotify playlist.

The Essentials: Cristian Măcelaru leads the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra in Dvořák’s “Carnival” Overture and Symphony No. 6, along with Gabriela Lena Frank’s “Concertino Cusqueño” and Alberto Ginastera’s the "Variaciones concertantes.” Performances are Friday at 10:30 am and Sunday at 2 pm, October 4 and 6, at the Touhill Center on the University of Missouri–St. Louis campus. The Friday morning performance will be broadcast Saturday night (October 5) on St. Louis Public Radio and Classic 107.3.