April 2008 Archives

For fans of the double bass, this weekend's Mendelssohn "Scottish" Symphony, with Leonidas Kavakos conducting, gives you an upstage center view of your favorite section. For the Mendelssohn, Kavakos wants the full, deep resonance of the instrument projecting out over the orchestra, trumpets to the bass' left flank.

Some visiting artists, when they come to town, like to try and get to know the city. Itzhak Perlman grew extremely fond of Ted Drewes frozen custard when he was Music Advisor here, and makes a stop there whenever he is engaged with the orchestra (there is even a Perlman Concrete named after him). Last week guest violinist Leila Josefowicz took in the Anheuser-Busch tour, found some hot wings at The Mack in South City, and also made it to St. Louis' frozen-custard Mecca.

John Adams on The Dharma at Big Sur, from www.earbox.com:

"I wanted to express the moment, the so-called 'shock of recognition,' when one reaches the edge of the continental land mass. On the Atlantic coast, the air seems to announce it with its salty taste and briney scents. Coming upon the California coast is a different experience altogether. Rather than gently yielding ground to the water the Western shelf drops off violently, often from dizzying heights, as it does at Big Sur, the stretch of coastal precipice midway between Santa Cruz and Santa Barbara. Here the current pounds and smashes the littoral in a slow, lazy rhythm of terrifying power. For a newcomer the first exposure produces a visceral effect of great emotional complexity. Many writers have tried to describe it directly, but Jack Kerouac did it best. In both his poetry and his novels he comes the closest to evoking my own sense of liberation and excitement, an ecstasy that is nevertheless tinged with that melancholy expressed in the first of Buddha's Four Noble Truths: 'All life is sorrowful."'

Wednesday morning as the orchestra began to warm up for the rehearsal of John Adams' The Dharma at Big Sur, the sound that carried through the office speaker over all the rest was the propulsive rhythms of the piano. I wondered who was playing the part and rushed down to the stage to check.

1) Seeing Henchman Joe Clapper walking (yes, walking!) from Washington Ave. to Grand on his way back to Powell Hall. Apparently he was called over for an emergency at the Fox Theatre (an extra Henchman needed, I guess), but it turned out to be a false alarm. The Fox should be ashamed. He'd hardly had his morning coffee.

We're in the last days of the renewal period for current subscribers (April 25, hurry up), but anybody can become a subscriber at any time. One of the coolest subscription offers we have is Compose Your Own, where you get to pick six concerts, any date, and thus create your own subscription series. An ideal offer in the world of myspace, myMTV, mynetscape, myyahoo, and my maypo. Myslso.

Sturdy Powell Symphony Hall took the 5.2 earthquake without flinching. The aftershock too. I've spoken to a few folks around the hall and heard from some SLSO fans via email who all claim that if you are after another sort of earth-shaking experience, the Prokofiev 5 with Carlos Kalmar conducting Friday night is it. Certain elements, or combinations thereof - the repertoire, the conductor, the time of year, the phase of the moon - can ignite an energy in the orchestra that is beyond its usual excellence. For those who've been with the orchestra for a while, they have a sense of ownership of the Prokofiev 5 from the days with Leonard Slatkin. For the newer musicians, it's a terrifically exciting symphony to play - and this might be the finest ensemble of musicians they've ever played it with. Whatever came together last night, I've been hearing raves about it. And with the tectonic plates shifting... Go!

A guest of the orchestra this week is Kathleen Strahm, a UM-St. Louis student who is doing independent-study work with John McGrosso of the Arianna Quartet (and former SLSO violinist). Strahm is studying the repertoire for this week's concerts, which includes Beethoven's Piano Concerto No. 2 and Prokofiev's Symphony No. 5, with SLSO violinist Dana Edson Myers. Strahm also gets a back-of-the-first-violin-section view of rehearsals with guest conductor Carlos Kalmar and guest soloist Joseph Kalichstein. And she'll have a good seat in the auditorium for the concerts too.

The job of the guest conductor is one that calls for multiple levels of diplomatic skill and communicative facility: something akin to labor negotiator or foreign ambassador. If you are new to the orchestra, you need to communicate your authority and knowledge within your first few minutes in front of the musicians. It's not unlike the rule of theater: if the audience doesn't get the play in the first eight minutes, it's over.

I returned from my Monday away to discover that my Playbill article, "A Sex Appeal," was picked for artsjournal.com today. Those of you who have been following along on the blog have read many of the ideas found in this piece. I'm very glad to see that my prurient interests continue to serve me and (I hope) the SLSO well. You can find the article either by visiting artsjournal.com or playbillarts.com. Or come to a concert and take it home with you.

From Friday morning's Coffee Concert:

All that river energy coming from the orchestra is creating some unusual excitement around the hall. For those of you outside of St. Louis, we're following up the wettest March on record with soaking April rains.

With Gilbert Varga and the SLSO rehearsing Schumann's evocation of the Rhine and Smetana's Moldau today, all that was needed was a reading from A River Runs Through It and some Joni Mitchell and all would have been complete. Maybe Stevens' "The River of Rivers in Connecticut" too: "...Call it, one more, a river, an unnamed flowing,// Space-filled, reflecting the seasons, the folk-lore/ Of each of the senses; call it, again and again,/ The river that flows nowhere, like a sea."

Another Pulitzer of note went to Gene Weingarten for his Washington Post feature in which he observed Joshua Bell performing at a D.C. metro stop, just like any other busker (except that he was Joshua Bell) and wrote about what happened (most people rushed right on by, although the musician pocketed about 50 bucks and change for less than an hour's work) and what it might have all meant. Weingarten won the award for feature writing "for his chronicling of a world-class violinist who, as an experiment, played beautiful music in a subway station filled with unheeding commuters," as the Pulitzer committee described it.

Alex Ross may not have won the Pulitzer Prize for The Rest Is Noise this year, but Bob Dylan was awarded a special citation "for his profound impact on popular music and American culture, marked by lyrical compositions of extraordinary poetic power." Ross' book is certainly a pleasure, and one we will have a long time, but Bob has given us a lifetime.

"The past is never dead. It's not even past," wrote Faulkner. Yesterday, Principal Bassoon George Berry asked me who the singers were in the last, and only previous, SLSO production of Fidelio. George played that concert 42 years ago (he joined the orchestra when he was 18). I found a Playbill and give it over to George who looked it over on stage as the musicians took a break during Elliott Carter rehearsal. "Eileen Farrell, she was the 'name,'" George said. "Arturo Sergi. A lot of local people were involved, too. I remember it was a really good production," he added, looking over his glasses, "but not like this one. The voices we have this time are phenomenal. I really like the guy with the ponytail." "Greer Grimsley?" "Yeah, Don Pizzaro. What a wonderfully menacing voice."

And to continue with the no-rest-for-the-wicked theme of yesterday, as I was leaving the hall last night violinist John Macfarlane and horn player Tod Bowermaster were onstage putting the finishing touches to Brahms' Trio for Horn, Violin and Piano. Martin Kennedy later joined them as pianist. Kennedy also served as the On Stage at Powell at 6 speaker, giving insights into musical color, following that up with some colorful Bartók, the Brahms Trio, and a composition of his own for On Stage at Powell at 7. I know, we've got to give that series a different name.

A former colleague of mine once said, "I would like to have just one boring day around here."

With "Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star" as musical background, Milo the Powell Pooch went scampering down the hallway, which meant David Robertson was not far behind.