April 2005 Archives

Yesterday, late in the afternoon after two demanding rehearsals, John Sant’Ambrogio was seated in the foyer getting in a little more practice for this weekend’s concerts. John putting in extra time with his cello – in the morning before rehearsal, at lunch break, after rehearsal -- somewhere around the hall is not an uncommon sight. When I saw him yesterday, I remembered my first days working here and coming upon John deep into his self-imposed regimen. That was when I still had a certain awestruck fascination seeing one of the players at work. Especially a musician as gifted as John, who, for so long seated at the front of the orchestra, silver-haired and agelessly handsome, has been an integral part of the identity of the SLSO. I remember I sort of tripped over my feet, uttered an “excuse me,” and John, keeping his concentration, said “hi, hi, hi” to the stumbling fool.

Then I remembered another time, a number of years ago, when I was visiting the hall in my capacity as a journalist. I was waiting for my appointment near the Green Room, when I heard a cello interrupted by colorful and vehement profanity. It was John, furious with his repeated imperfections as he practiced an unforgiving passage of music. At that moment I had a glimpse into the difficulty, the anxiety, the monstrous frustration a musician has at maintaining and excelling at his craft.

Principal Cello of the SLSO since 1968, John retires at the end of this season with his final performances this weekend. The audience has seen and heard a player of great elegance and charm – all constructed out of those trying hours alone wrestling with the demons of imperfection. He’s battled them admirably.

As David Robertson said to open rehearsals this morning, “Perfect weather for Sibelius.”

A minor marathon of cello auditions yesterday. Due to the delicacy of the process, staff is requested to step quietly about the hall. If this sounds a bit precious, it isn’t. As has been said before, this is a beautiful art form and a brutal business. A lot is at stake in auditions, both for the candidates and for the orchestra. Consider that John Sant’Ambrogio, who retires this season as principal cello, was with this orchestra for close to 40 years. So these are decisions that determine the long-term quality of the orchestra; and for the candidates, they are choosing what may be their lifelong home. That’s a lot of pressure. No wonder then that when I returned from my afternoon walk and started up the stairs, the tension in the air was palpable, as if I had walked through a thick, persistent cloud of anxiety.

After all that stress Sibelius Five felt like a relief this morning. David Robertson was very talkative in early rehearsals, and as the strings were playing a particularly angsty passage, he called for them to “get all the substance out of the note.” Later, he described a phrase to be played as if the strings “come in sounding like a huge ogre.”

I asked him about the “ogre” metaphor at break backstage. He talked about the incredibly beautiful sound the strings of this orchestra produce, but for this passage, that sound had to be more brutal, terrifying, even ugly – hence the ogre.

I don’t expect any ogres for this evening’s On Stage at Powell event, which David hosts. As I look over the program, there will be members of the Saint Louis Symphony Youth Orchestra playing the first movement of Brahms’ Quartet in C minor, a solo bassoon piece played by Robert Mottl, pianist Barbara Liberman playing a Scott Joplin rag, and a lot of other ultra-cool stuff. Free, intimate, at 7pm. No ogres.

SLSO library assistant Roberta Gardner was rearranging scores into neat piles across the bar in the main lobby of Powell. Roberta has the most lovely, silvery hair, which stood out amidst the chorus when she sang Israel in Egypt last weekend. As seems to always happen whenever I tell someone the night I went to a concert, say, “I was at Friday night’s performance and I thought the audience was going to jump out of their seats at the end,” (which is true), there is always someone to tell me, as Roberta did, “Oh, it was even more so on Saturday.”

Israel in Egypt was a score that few, if any, of the chorus members had sung, Roberta included. She said that it took a number of rehearsals, and then finding a CD and listening to it again and again in the car, until she finally began to hear the extraordinary quality of Handel’s work. The result, she said, was just phenomenal, a gift, an absolute treasure to experience.

Last week I asked our assistant principal clarinet Diana Haskell to share some of her Carnegie moments with me. Diana came to the SLSO in the 2004-05 season after playing with the Milwaukee Symphony for a number of years. She and John married last summer and share their time traveling back and forth between Milwaukee and St. Louis – a juggling of professional and family obligations that is not uncommon in the orchestra business. The trip to Carnegie, then, served as a reunion outside the Wisconsin-Missouri matrix. Diana writes:

“John met me at LaGuardia, where we took a cab to the hotel. The weather was perfect so we headed toward the Upper West Side. We passed my (old) apartment building where I yelled hello to any remaining cockroaches.

“New York City is so beautiful in the springtime! We decided to walk through Central Park, eventually ending up at the lake, where we rented a rowboat. It was difficult to believe that we were in the city as John rowed and we were greeted by geese, a white heron and an assortment of turtles. Upon our return to the boathouse, the reality that we were indeed in NYC came back as we shared one $10 glass of wine.

“It was a joy to be back in Carnegie Hall. The orchestra was relaxed and jovial as we rehearsed. Paul Newman gave the best narration I've heard of Lincoln Portrait. The concert went well. I tried to get an autograph from Mr. Newman, but the Carnegie staff informed me that he had bodyguards. He was also to be ushered out through their secret tunnel system (!!) to avoid being followed by fans.

“There is a rare camaraderie and strength amongst the musicians, both on and offstage. The energy was astounding at Carnegie. I am proud to work with these artists, who spur me on to greater musical heights. Their integrity as players is an inspiration.”

At intermission of Israel in Egypt on Friday evening I spoke with a woman who wasn’t a frequent visitor to the symphony. Most of her concert money in the past, she told me, went to rock & roll. She had joined the ranks of the middle-aged and lived on the Illinois side of the river with her children, one of whom was mentally disabled. A “high-maintenance” life, as she described it. But she managed to come to the concert on Friday as a gift to herself, she told me, something she felt she just had to do. We talked about Bob Dylan and Willie Nelson coming to the minor-league-baseball park in Sauget this summer, which promised to be another one of those rare gifts, if she could work the fare.

When I returned to the auditorium, I slipped to the upper-tier seats as a means to soak it all in without the distractions of close proximity to others. But, of course, I only became more aware of those other isolate souls around me, such as the man who listened to the entire second half of the program with his eyes closed, (no, he wasn’t sleeping) with a blissful smile across his face.

I mentioned on Friday my anticipation of hearing Cyndia Sieden, who was indeed a soprano sweet and generous to the ear, whose finale with the chorus gave just what I treasure from a night of music – a pleasant ringing in the brain that stays all the way home (or until I check the baseball score on the radio). But there were two moments of music that stood out to me that night. One was the chorus singing “they shall be as still as a stone,” which carried with it the weight and horror and awe and drama of God's judgment. The other was Daniel Taylor, the brilliant countertenor who sang the alto part, and whose final solo was of such lustrous beauty that everything – chorus, musicians, soloists, conductor, audience, the dust motes in the air -- seemed stilled and held for a brief moment by his voice: an invisible architecture that contained us all.

Israel in Egypt Friday and Saturday night. I’m looking forward to the concert tonight and the impressive roster of singers, especially soprano Cyndia Sieden, who received such acclaim for singing Ariel in the world premiere of Thomas Adès The Tempest.

Meanwhile: An empty, darkened hall. A lone violinist on stage. One lamp, the only light in the house, shining above her music stand. She practices Handel in the mid afternoon before the evening concert. There is something uniquely quieting about such an image, which I will leave with you until Monday.

In my unending search for topical information, I was looking up bio data on Christine Brewer, who sings Strauss’ Four Last Songs with the SLSO and David Robertson on the big finale weekend. Brewer, of course, is no stranger to St. Louis audiences, being our homegrown opera star. She returns to Opera Theatre of St. Louis this summer to play Elizabeth I in Glorianna.

As I googled along I found a listing of Belleville, Illinois “famous citizens.” Brewer was at the top of the list, followed by fellow soprano and another OTSL star, Erie Mills. Then came former bad-boy tennis star Jimmy Connors; the legendary Miles Davis; Buddy Ebson, who before he played in The Beverly Hillbillies and Barnaby Jones had to turn down the role of the Tin Man in Wizard of Oz because he was allergic to the body paint; the tremendous actor William Holden (Stalag 17, Sunset Boulevard, Bridge over the River Kwai, Network); former Masters champion Bob Goalby; the one for whom “Whitey Ball” is named, Whitey Herzog; Olympic gold medalist Jackie Joyner Kersey; retired Washington Redskins star Dave Butz; Ken Kwapis, who has directed episodes of such hit TV series as The Office, The Bernie Mac Show, and Malcolm in the Middle; jazz great Clark Terry; and the notorious Ike Turner.

I looked the list over and wondered, so what’s in the water in Belleville?

But then I looked again and thought, so where’s Jeff Tweedy and Jay Farrar?

Get with it Belleville, Illinois “famous citizens” list-makers!

Jet lagged after a flight from Philly, violinist Amy Oshiro nonetheless called me this morning to offer her Carnegie moment:

“Before Paul Newman left the stage after dress rehearsal on Saturday, he turned to the orchestra and said, ‘This is only the second time I’ve stood before an orchestra, but you are a force.’

“That has just stayed with me. We’re dealing with an artist – somebody who knows what it means to deliver to an audience again and again. His career, his legacy, his intelligence about this business – I found that to be so profound. I think 'force' means more than just 'power,' for me it means 'beauty."'

I always enjoy a visit with Melissa Lange in her office down the hall from mine. She’s one of those people who can talk passionately about Shostakovich while Sheryl Crow plays on her desk radio. Melissa carries the title of Director of Patron Services, which means she has a whole lot of work to do around the hall coordinating a host of events, including weddings, high school graduations, the Speakers Series, David Sedaris readings – and then there are those SLSO concerts and making sure the good stuff is available behind the bars and at the pastry table. She keeps it all running smoothly with abundant energy and remarkable good cheer.

She also happens to be married to assistant principal trombone Stephen Lange. They took the trip to Carnegie together so I asked her for her own personal highlights.

First, she evokes her brass prejudice. At the conclusion to Ives’ Second Symphony, which was the grand finale of the program, David Robertson directed the brass to stand, which was Melissa’s favorite part of the concert, naturally. “I love the Ives’ Symphony,” she told me. “It’s not what you’d expect from Ives. It was such a fun way to end the program. (Having the brass stand) was engaging to the audience and brought the volume up.

“You remember when we talked about that final flat note?” During rehearsals last week, as we were listening over our office speakers, Melissa asked me if this loud, abrupt, and very flat note the brass played was right. I wasn’t sure. Stephen told her it was not only right, but that they were really going to push it. At Carnegie the horns did just that, and “the audience loved it,” Melissa said.

She was also impressed by Orli Shaham’s performance of the feverishly difficult Century Rolls. “David and Orli hugged after the Adams, which is nice to see. They don’t do the standard handshake. She got at least three bows. During the piece it was great to watch her physical movement. Orli would kick her left leg out at times during the piece. The Adams is so complex – lots of mixed meters all over the place. You could tell she always knew where the beat was, as if her body was falling into the piece. I couldn’t see here hands from where I was, but I could see her feet and shoulders and she was so physically into it.

“It was a very different program to take to Carnegie. It made people think. That’s David’s M.O. I loved what he said after the concert. He could have talked about how this part went really well or this part wasn’t as good as he’d like it, but instead he talked about how they would make legends. David’s glass is never half full or half empty. His glass is totally full.”

Cello auditions are in progress so I haven’t had the opportunity to talk with any musicians about the Carnegie experience. You can access both Bryan Miller’s P-D review and Anthony Tommasini’s NYT review on our homepage to see for yourself that the orchestra received raves. Hooray for our team!

From those who were there I’ve heard:

1) yes, I stood right next to Paul Newman but I didn’t say anything to him;

2) the best SLSO Carnegie concert since Vonk conducted the Mahler 3;

3) Newman was nervous – he’d never done anything like this before, it was his Carnegie debut – and was concerned that he would get too emotional reading Lincoln’s words (you have got to love that guy);

4) this complex, eyebrow-raising program of Ives, Copland and Adams came together in an inspiring fashion;

5) I'm exhausted, and I can’t wait until next year.

With a huge flock of orchestra and staff whooshing on its way to the Big Apple today it feels like all the energy has been sucked out of the hall. I was downstairs in the main lobby briefly when I noticed that a stage monitor was on. Images of the ghostly stage hovered on the screen with a bright light glowing in the center. I watched for something Blair Witch-like to appear, but all the spirits must be appeased.

I don’t know if last night’s performance had anything to do with the supernatural calm. I did receive this bit of elevator chatter from my colleague Stephanie DeChambeau:

“I had to go up to my office after the concert and ended up riding back down the elevator with Orli (Shaham). I complimented her on playing the heck out of the Adams (John Adams’ Century Rolls, a gorgeous beast of a work). She said she was completely drained, just as if she had played the Brahms (Brahms’ first and second piano concertos are dual 19th-century gorgeous beasts). I commented on all the styles Adams covered, and Orli said, ‘Yes, and all the NOTES!’”

Bon weekend. Get those taxes done.

This morning I checked in with some of our stage hands, who looked a little weary after an 18-hour day and two-hours sleep following the Columbia concert last night. They have at least a couple more of those marathon days to come as they pack up for Carnegie after the Powell Symphony Hall concert tonight. Then the truck heads on down the road for Manhattan.

Musicians and staff fly out tomorrow morning. A Saturday afternoon rehearsal at Carnegie with guest narrator Paul Newman is scheduled, then the concert Saturday night. The stage hands pack it all up again and back to the Lou.

A number of musicians were making use of the morning quiet time in the hall for some extra practice. David Halen was in his office working on some wicked fast runs. Sarah Hogan was on stage with her double bass practicing a particularly tricky bowing, then stretching down the neck to find a high sweet note that you wouldn’t expect from that wide, cumbersome, demigod of wood and steel.

In the afternoon the full ensemble had reconvened for a rehearsal of the program. No time to think about what to say to Paul Newman.

I’m remaining in St. Louis to hold down the fort. If I get any Big Apple updates, I’ll let you know.

A writer working for Art in America parachuted into St. Louis a few years ago and wrote a piece about the local art scene in that worldly magazine. As I was writing about art for a local tabloid at the time, I wrote a column about what she had written, and then a writer for the daily paper wrote about what the Art in America writer had written, as well. Not too long after that a writer for Salon, who had just transplanted to St. Louis from San Francisco, wrote about the peculiar attention local writers had given to what an out-of-town writer had written about St. Louis. Such a thing would never happen in San Francisco, he observed.

Well, duh. They don’t call the Midwest the fly-over zone for nothing. When outsiders take note of us, as did the New York Times recently in an after-Final-Four-hangover piece, we get excited. San Francisco gets all the attention it needs.

I mentioned The New Yorker writer Alex Ross’ blog a while back, www.therestisnoise.com, and lo and behold he mentioned us today. And he said nice things too.

Here it is: “The St. Louis Symphony, having apparently recovered from its recent attempt at public hari-kari, has announced its first season under David Robertson, and it’s a pleasure to behold. Everything from Josquin to Adams, in elegant groupings. Without trying to force thematic connections, the orchestra has come up with neat titles for each event. I like ‘Radiance’ as a catch-all for the Magic Flute Overture, Feldman’s Coptic Light, and Das Lied von der Erde. Notice also that the orchestra now has its own blog. It’ll be interesting to hear how the St. Louis plays for Robertson at Carnegie on Saturday. An all-American program: Ives’ Unanswered Question and Second Symphony, Adams’ Century Rolls, and Copland’s Lincoln Portrait, with none other than Paul Newman as narrator. Will he wear the beard?”

Oh my. I’m as giddy as the farmer’s son at the big-city dance.

You, of course, can hear the Carnegie program pre-Carnegie at Powell Thursday night. No Paul Newman, however, with beard or otherwise.

Many hands are involved in transporting an orchestra from St. Louis to Columbia, back to St. Louis, then on to New York City and back home again. Crates containing wardrobe and double basses have been taking up space backstage and in the foyer as the prep for the moving begins. People move briskly with cell phones and pagers on their hips. The anxiety level increases significantly throughout the hall. Ready for this day to be over? This week? This month? Where’s the Tylenol?

Steve Reich’s Three Movements for Orchestra placed extra demands on our stage hands this weekend. They had to move not one but two pianos onstage and offstage, as well as a battery of large percussion. This took six stage hands, double the normal contingent. In the meantime, a number of musicians actually came out into the audience during the break before Bolero, had a little chat with the patrons, shook hands. A generosity of spirit among stage crew, musicians, audience, the music itself made last weekend special to all I’ve spoken with about it.

Today auditions for utility horn are in progress. So what is a utility horn? I wondered if it was a player comparable to the great Jose Oquendo – can play around the infield, some outfield. Always ready in case of injury or a double switch. (Oquendo, of course, once played all nine positions in one game.)

Ron Gray, our operations coordinator – he helps oversee that all the musicians are where they need to be when they need to be there – informed me that the utility horn isn’t quite as versatile as Oquendo was. Essentially utility horn is a fifth French horn, who remains on call for when a big blow like Mahler or Shostakovich or Bruckner comes along.

One of the benefits of playing works by living composers is that if you have a question about the score, you can step right up and ask the author. That’s what cellist Alvin McCall did with Christopher Rouse in the house for this morning’s run through. Rouse said the question had something to do with the fingering of a certain phrase, and that McCall was pleased by the answer.

The Rouse Flute Concerto is an astonishingly beautiful piece. At one moment in the concerto the orchestra came together for a great explosion of sound, at which point David Robertson looked over his shoulder toward composer Rouse in the auditorium. Robertson was just beaming.

It’s a piece that finds its way around and through many different Celtic rhythms and phrases and melodies, yet is also a totally new and complex and absorbing work distinctive from its heritage. Mark Sparks plays this piece brilliantly. I had the good fortune to sit with a friend through the concerto rehearsal, and we both turned to each other with expressions of complete delight at its close.

I will be unable to attend the concerts this weekend, but I hope you can make it. It is a very compelling and intriguing program – many forms of beauty to discover.

Until Monday... have a lovely April weekend.

Ravel’s Valses nobles et sentimentales takes off, a wobbly waltz, and Robertson encourages the musicians to pay attention to the rhythmic skeleton underneath the bassoon part. When he hears something that is just the way he wants it, the conductor emits a roar: “Yeah!”

Listening in this morning to the art-in-progress, I turn to these lines from Refusing Heaven, Jack Gilbert’s new collection of poems: “We must risk delight. We can do without pleasure,/ but not delight. Not enjoyment. We must have/ the stubbornness to accept our gladness in the ruthless/ furnace of the world.”

Beck’s new CD has been on display at the Starbuck’s counter for so long now that I had to buy it this morning. I got to work and plugged into the NYT website and saw that Saul Bellow had died. Downstairs David Robertson and the SLSO were rehearsing Ravel, then Reich, then Rouse.

The art critic Dave Hickey has said that the beauties never die. He says this partly in response to those folks who get locked into a certain view of art to the exclusion of new possibilities of art. If you love representational painting, it hasn’t disappeared just because non-representational abstraction appears. Steve Reich’s minimalism of the 60s and 70s still drives some audiences, and some musicians, batty; yet it didn’t erase Mozart.

Lately, in various critical reviews the new generation of authors – Jonathan Lethem, Jonathan Safran Froer, David Foster Wallace, Jonathan Franzen, and such – have been taking a bashing. It’s their time to get slapped, as in previous reviews they were highly praised as the next generation of authors. Criticism works like that. One of the reasons they’re getting kicked around is because they’re not Saul Bellow. They, the revised criticism says, stand frailly in the shadow of a giant such as Bellow. And with his death, Bellow becomes “the last great American novelist … Our loss is incalculable,” as Jonathan Yardley writes in today’s Washington Post.

But Bellow is still there. Herzog, Henderson the Rain King, The Adventures of Augie March – all to be rediscovered for generations to come. Meanwhile, those that toil in his wake will either have the staying power to remain or not – it all depends on whether they have created the beauties that endure.

In David Robertson’s programming there is an apparent understanding of the interplay of generational beauties. Reich and Rouse and Ravel can complement each other. Ives and Copland and Adams can give us a capsule of 20th-century musical experience. There are sometimes aesthetic oppositions, but these make for a dramatic tension rather than an impasse. There is a recognition that artistic endeavor is human endeavor, bound by the ceaseless dynamo of desire and ambition. It goes on. It doesn’t stop. It’s made new.

And the new Beck really rocks.

Around Powell we take our music and our basketball seriously (and we take our baseball more seriously than our basketball). In the March Madness bracket competition among the staff, the winner is Mary Balmer, who works in Development and totally smoked the competition. As she said this morning, “All I won are braggin’ rights,” and then she proceeded to wield those rights on the IS guys at the end of the hall. Smoked them.

However, outside the official competition, PR director Jeff Trammel picked three of the Final Four, picked the championship game, and North Carolina over Illinois 78-72. Close. I have examined his bracket sheet and found no sign of tampering. Wonder who he has in the Derby?

Back when the comedian Albert Brooks was doing standup, before he moved to film (Taxi Driver, Real Life, Lost in America), he made an album called A Star Is Bought. I have never heard the whole record, but I remember hearing a part of it on the radio many years ago. In the routine, Brooks claims to have uncovered lyrics to Ravel’s Bolero. He presents the material in mock-documentary form, with references to Bolero as one of the sexiest musical compositions ever written. There is a bit about the French horn section having to be roped off when Bolero was first performed. Brooks claims the original lyrics are actually about a one-night stand, and then he sings those lyrics in the bawdiest fashion imaginable. Just as it’s hard to get the music of Bolero out of my head, it’s hard to get the memory of the Albert Brooks’ routine out of my head. If I ever find those lyrics, I’ll offer them to David Robertson for a possible after-hours concert. You never know.

Maybe it was the flush of spring, maybe it was the donuts, maybe it was the day for fools, but this morning at Powell had a certainty jaunty quality. It began with meeting Wendy Bush’s grand nephew, Jack, an Oklahoma lad on his first visit to the SLSO. (Wendy is Randy Adams’ assistant, and who around here has earned the Harry Truman Plain Speaking Award many times over.) Jack’s favorite composer? Mozart. Instrument he wants to learn to play? Clarinet.

Then there was the concert itself. William Eddins displayed an athletic right-leg kick early in the Saint-Saëns, which recurred during the Rachmaninoff – a signature gesture, it seems, by the ebullient conductor.

I was sitting behind a man who was – literally – on the edge of his seat throughout the concert. He anticipated shifts in tempo during the Saint-Saëns. When the Ravel Piano Concerto moved to its slow, Satie-like second movement, he leaned his head back as if in rapture.

Eddins plays and conducts the concerto, the piano turned so Eddins’ back is to the audience; thus, everyone, not just the left-side-of-the-house fans, get to watch the fingerwork. (For those following along, compare Ravel’s second movement to the movement entitled “Manny’s Gym” in John Adams’ Century Rolls, which also nods to Satie’s Gymnopédies, on April 14.)

During the string-edge thrills and percussive delights of Rachmaninoff’s Symphonic Dances, I thought the happy patron in front of me was about to enter a dervish state.

Music is cool stuff.

I saw cellist Melissa Brooks-Rubright on the stairs after the concert. “That sounded just cracker jack, this morning,” I told her. She laughed, “I’m glad you thought so,” she replied, although giving me a brief, quizzical look, checking for irony.

But it was: a candy-coated-popcorn-peanuts-and-a-prize musical start to a full-house Final Four weekend in the river city.