Symphony Preview: E pluribus, unum concentus

It’s quite a mixed bag this weekend (October 18 and 19) as guest conductor David Danzmayr makes his third appearance with the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra since his notable local debut in 2021. During its relatively brief span (around ninety minutes, including intermission), the band will play works from the 18^th, 19^th, 20^th, and 21^st centuries from England, France, Scotland, and Germany.

[Preview the music with the SLSO's Spotify playlist.]

Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, 1905 By Adam Cuerden Public Domain

The concerts open with the “Ballade” in A minor, Op. 33, by British composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor (1875–1912). Composed in 1897 just after Coleridge-Taylor left the Royal College of Music, the work was commissioned by the Three Choirs Festival, where it met with considerable success. Coleridge-Taylor went on to become a celebrated composer, conductor, and teacher—a career tragically cut short by his death from pneumonia at the age of 37.

The son of Daniel Hugh Taylor, a doctor from Sierra Leone, and Alice Hare Martin, an Englishwoman, Coleridge-Taylor (as Stephen Banfield and Jeremy Dibble write in Grove Online) “saw it as his mission in life to help establish the dignity of the black man.” The black American poet Paul Lawrence Dunbar was an especially strong influence in this regard, helping the composer become more aware of his heritage. That led to works such as “African Romances (1897),” the “African Suite” (1898), and “Toussaint l'ouverture (1901),” described as “a musical illustration of the 18th-century slave who led the liberation of Haiti.”

All that was still to come, though, when he wrote the “Ballade.” The title might suggest something soft and dreamy, but the music itself is dramatic and exceptionally attractive. The opening theme, marked Allegro energico, ma non troppo presto, is played by the strings over agitated trills in the woodwinds. It gets developed and expanded a bit before giving way to the contrasting second theme, moderato ma con passione. Both themes get a fairly conventional sonata form treatment, complete with abbreviated development and recapitulation sections, before winding up with a slam-bang coda (Piu presto. Con fuoco.).

On the whole, the “Ballade” is a bit reminiscent of Grieg’s Symphony No. 1 from 1863, although since Grieg suppressed it, I don’t think it’s likely that Coleridge-Taylor would have been familiar with that work. “Ballade” should get things off to a rousing start, in any event.

Saint-Saëns in 1900 By Petit, Pierre (1831-1909) Photographer Restored by Adam Cuerden

Next, it’s time for the program’s Big Work, the Piano Concerto No. 2 in G minor, Op. 22, by Camille Saint-Saëns (1835–1921). It’s the most popular of Saint-Saëns's five piano concertos, and when you listen to the recording by Pascal Rogé and the Royal Philharmonic under Charles Dutoit on the SLSO Spotify playlist you’ll understand why.

Like the Coleridge-Taylor “Ballade,” the concerto starts big and bold, Andante sostenuto, with a flashy solo keyboard fantasia of the sort that Bach might have written followed by an equally dramatic entrance by the full orchestra. The second movement, Allo scherzando, trips along merrily and sparkles like Champagne. The Presto tarantella finale provides a real workout for the soloist. Done well, the concerto is always a crowd pleaser and likely to induce standing ovations.

This week's soloist, Conrad Tao, played the Second Concerto here in 2014, with Conductor Laureate Leonard Slatkin at the podium.  Back then I called his performance “a model of power and delicacy.”  At the time, Tao was only 20 and just getting started on what has proven to be a spectacular career as a pianist and composer, so it will be interesting to see whether or not that intervening decade has changed his approach to this work. Oh yeah: he’s also a fellow Midwesterner, born in Urbana, Illinois in 1994.

The second half of the program begins at the other end of the sonic spectrum from the big, outgoing romanticism of Coleridge-Taylor and Saint-Saëns. Scottish composer Sir James MacMillan (b. 1953) wrote his evanescent orchestral miniature “One” in 2012 for the 20^th anniversary of The Britten Sinfonia, an innovative chamber ensemble the aim of which was “pushing the boundaries of what a chamber orchestra can do.” It’s dedicated to the Sinfonia’s then-Artistic Director David Butcher (now CEO of the legendary Hallé Orchestra).

Sir James MacMillan Photo courtesy of the SLSO

Best known for "Veni, Veni, Emmanuel," his 1992 percussion concerto closely identified with the celebrated deaf percussionist Evelyn Glennie, MacMillan is solidly opposed to the academic abstraction that often made audiences react to the phrase “contemporary music” the way Dracula reacted to garlic. Specifically, MacMillan disdains composers who are “deeply suspicious of any significant move towards tonality, any hint of pulse that is actually discernible, and any music which communicates successfully with a non-specialist audience.”

There is certainly nothing dry or obscure in “One,” which evokes a universe of ethereal beauty with impressively minimal resources. The title refers, I believe, to the fact that MacMillan’s orchestration creates the illusion of single voices engaging in a kind of bucolic “call and response” over a vast outdoor space. In reality, each “voice” consists of multiple instruments playing together. “I pluribus unum” (“from many, one”), if you will. The Celtic-inspired melody starts, stops, then starts again with different instrumental combinations.

“One” concludes with the melody played pianissimo at the very top of their registers by the flutes and violins, then rapidly descending through the orchestra to land in bassoons and basses playing at the bottom of theirs. There’s a last one-measure rest followed by a brief section marked tutti: misterioso that includes flutter-tongued clarinets and trumpets along with ad lib pizzicatos in the violins (“Not together. Each player to enter in rapid succession, starting with section principal”). “One” ends with an ambiguously dissonant pianissimo chord from the full ensemble.

My description hardly does it justice, but fortunately you can hear an authoritative 2014 performance by the Britten Sinfonia conducted by the composer in the SLSO playlist. If you read music, you can watch that same recording synchronized with the score on YouTube.

Finally, it’s back to the familiar with the Symphony No. 5 (“Reformation”) by Felix Mendelssohn (1809–1847). The symphony’s nickname (which came from the composer’s sister Fanny) refers to the fact that it was originally intended for a celebration of the 300th anniversary of the presentation of the Augsburg Confession to Holy Roman Emperor Charles V. The document is a cornerstone of the Lutheran faith, and the celebration in Berlin on June 25th, 1830, was a Very Big Deal, backed up by the Prussian King Frederick William III. Having a new symphony played as part of the festivities would have been a major coup for the 21-year-old composer.

Portrait of Mendelssohn by James Warren Childe, 1839 en.wikipedia.org

Mendelssohn started work on the symphony in January of 1830 but was sidetracked by a case of measles—a serious business in those days before vaccines. The composer made a full recovery, but not in time to submit the work for the big event. He finally conducted the premiere in Berlin in 1832, but reviews were unenthusiastic and the composer himself ultimately turned against it, declaring the only one of his compositions he “would most like to see burnt.”

History’s verdict has been a bit kinder. “Happily for us,” writes the anonymous program annotator at the Los Angeles Philharmonic, “the ‘Reformation’ Symphony has survived, and it can give great satisfaction as a four-movement symphony with or without its references to the great events it was intended to celebrate.”  It might not be quite as popular as the “Italian” or “Scotch” symphonies, but it probably deserves to be. It has much to offer, as you can hear in the excellent recording by John Eliot Gardiner and the London Symphony on the SLSO playlist.

The Essentials: David Danzmayr conducts the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra and pianist Conrad Tao in Samuel Coleridge-Taylor’s “Ballade,” Saint-Saëns’s Piano Concerto No. 2, James MacMillan’s “One,” and Mendelssohn’s Symphony No. 5 (“Reformation”). Performances are Friday and Saturday at 7:30 pm, October 18 and 19, at the Touhill Performing Arts Center on the University of Missouri–St. Louis campus. The Saturday night performance will be broadcast live on St. Louis Public Radio and Classic 107.3 and will be available afterwards for streaming on the SLSO web site