June 2009 Archives

Some of my colleagues have been asking me questions about the upcoming season as they prepare to send me their Staff Picks for 0910. I ask both staff and musicians to send me their Hot Picks, and some staff members actually like to do some research. I recommended to one colleague, who I already knew enjoyed more uncommon fare, to listen to György Ligeti's Violin Concerto, which is paired with Holst's The Planets on a program in March, with David Robertson conducting.

The final Casual Classic concert was Sunday, as was the finale to the Opera Theatre season, with Salome.

The Henchmen were bringing stuff back from the Loretto-Hilton Center Monday morning, and a few of us bade farewell to the 0809 season with malts and cholesterol busting sandwiches at Crown Candy Kitchen.

While I was out tracking down a memory Thursday afternoon, I stopped in at the Central Branch of the St. Louis Public Library to check out a few CDs for my summer listening of the SLSO 0910 season. As sometimes happens, I ran into an SLSO musician doing the same thing, percussionist Tom Stubbs, who was turning in multiple versions of Mahler 5, Janacek Sinfonietta and other selections. "Hearing the different interpretations is really the fun part," Tom told me.

With Scott Joplin's "The Ragtime Dance," "The Entertainer" and "Maple Leaf Rag" on Sunday's Casual Classics program, I ventured out into Heat Advisory City to track down a memory. In the summer of 2000, Opera Theatre of St. Louis opened its 25th-anniversary season with Joplin's Treemonisha, his sole surviving opera. It's known that he wrote an opera prior to Treemonisha, A Guest of Honor, which dramatized Booker T. Washington's visit to Theodore Roosevelt's White House. Joplin toured a production of A Guest of Honor around the Midwest, and pretty much went broke because of it. The opera score and libretto have disappeared. If you happen to find it in your great-grandparents' attic, you'll have truly found something.

The big top is all the way down. The circus passes, the dogs bark, and so on.

I've solicited the musicians for their top picks for the 0910 season, trying to catch them before they disperse to places clear and cool for festivals and such. Violist Chris Woehr placed the weekend with André Previn high on his list. The SLSO has a significant history with Previn, as he made his conducting debut with the orchestra in 1961. Chris wasn't around for that, but he has a much more intimate Previn connection that he shares:

Circus Flora's big top is going down in 97-degree heat today.

David Robertson is back in town to get his fill of St. Louis summer heat and to conduct the Casual Classics concert tonight (Friday). A very go-for-Baroque program; or an if-it-ain't-Baroque-don't-fix-it program and so on. The trumpets are sounding very bright and sunny, and Andrea Kaplan's flute makes the Bach Suite No. 2 a festive occasion. Pachelbel's Canon, Handel's Water Music: big hits to cool the evening. Many of my colleagues are in their blue Casual Classics polos. The foyer glows with butter-colored table cloths and those darling little sand-bucket centerpieces. Come early for food and drink. Tap your flip-flops to the Baroque.

Michael Christie is in the pit conducting Ghosts of Versailles at Opera Theatre of St. Louis. He was last at Powell in December conducting Barber, Chopin and Tchaikovksy, and he's obviously grown fond of the orchestra, as he wrote on Twitter the other day: "Fourth time working with saint louis symphony. Their professionalism and musicianship are thoroughly uplifting. Superstars that value teamwork."

Wednesday morning I went to the press conference announcing the International American Choral Festival that will come to St. Louis November 17-21, 2010. Powell Hall will serve as one of the venues for the Festival, which you can learn more about on the Regional Art Commission's website and watch a cool video. Click here. There may be anywhere from 2,000 to 3,000 participants, with all varieties of choral music represented. My favorite quote from the press conference: "...not that there's anything wrong with Grandma's choir..."

I was in the dentist chair for much of Monday afternoon so I couldn't quite find the inspiration to get into the blog zone. I can tell you that before my afternoon procedure I heard many good things about Simply Sinatra, with the SLSO morphing into a big band and getting all sassy and brassy for those boffo Ol' Blue Eyes tunes. Both Steve Lippia, who so closely approximates the Sinatra croon, and conductor Victor Vanacore received kudos all around.

There won't be any Rat Pack martinis at the bar, and if you smoke you have to do it outside, but the sounds of Simply Sinatra, with Steve Lippia providing the vocals to the Sinatra Songbook and the SLSO delivering the big-band accompaniment, will make for a swingin' evening, 7:30pm, Saturday, June 13 at Powell Hall. You can slide into a Saturday night's bad behavior after the show. It'll probably be done before 10, and that's early, baby.

The SLSO has been in the news a lot lately, even beyond its connection with the Catsup Bottle Festival. The new contract garnered attention from media outlets large and small, and was the top story on artsjournal.com this morning (Thursday), with the headline "St. Louis Symphony Players Get New (And Healthy) Contract." Click here for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch coverage (the same article to which artsjournal linked).

I know I was thrilled, and my colleagues in the Box Office were thrilled, to receive a letter from the Big Tomato of the 11th Annual Catsup Bottle Festival today, requesting a couple of tickets to an SLSO concert this upcoming season. The Catsup Bottle revelers, I think, may win the tickets as a raffle or prize or some such festive loot. However the tickets are distributed, the Big Tomato informed us that they were always a hit. An official thank-you plaque from the Catsup Bottle Festival hangs proudly in the Box Office, and we can only hope that we may receive another one this year.

So you've got the Nonesuch release date of Doctor Atomic Symphony and Guide to Strange Places, July 21, both John Adams' works recorded live at Powell Hall with David Robertson conducting the SLSO, and here is our recently introduced Select Your Own Seats option. You not only get to pick your own seat but you get an approximate view of the stage from that location. We can not yet give you an approximation of what the orchestra sounds like from that seat, or a picture of who might be sitting next to you, but the way the technologies keep scooting along...

Not so long ago an SLSO fan called me sounding slightly perturbed. When is the Doctor Atomic Symphony CD coming out? he asked me. I wish I knew, I told him.

And now I do. Click here for the news.

I was pleased to hear reports of members of the Gipsy Kings audience dancing in the aisles, dancing in their seats, dancing in the SRO spaces, dancing wherever there was room to dance Friday night.

An SLSO staffer reminded me: "Dohnanyi inherited a pretty good band," which takes us back to George Szell, who made his U.S. conducting debut with the SLSO before taking the Cleveland Orchestra to the top-rank status that preceded the top-rank status it achieved with Dohnanyi.

I got a call from a man doing research into a biography of Christoph Von Dohnanyi, the great conductor who led the Cleveland Orchestra to top-rank status. Apparently the SLSO was the first orchestra Dohnanyi conducted in the U.S. I hunted through the bound volumes of programs and found December 1, 1961, an afternoon concert at the Kiel Opera House. He conducted Pictures at an Exhibition, as well as Beethoven's Piano Concerto No. 2, with Leon Fleisher at the keyboard.

Dohnanyi conducted two weekends in St. Louis, and was re-engaged the following year for three weekends. I called the man back to tell him what I'd found. He told me, "He [Dohnanyi] didn't remember any of that."

The sounds from the rehearsals for John Corigliano's The Ghosts of Versailles, which opens at Opera Theatre of St. Louis on June 17, have been coming through the office speaker this week. Michael Christie is ably conducting the Red Orchestra through the challenging score (the SLSO splits into two ensembles for OTSL, the Red plays Ghosts and Salome, the Green Il Re Pastore and Bohème). I had gotten a glimpse of the battery of percussion for Ghosts the other day, so when I saw SLSO Principal Percussion Will James at the rehearsal break, I joked, "You always get the easy assignments, don't you Will?"

A welcome newcomer to the blogosphere in recent months has been Washington Post music critic Anne Midgette, whose The Classical Beat is always worth a daily check-in. Last month she wrote a two-part post, "In Praise of the Amateur," which, among other themes, talked about the seriousness of orchestral programming, especially subscription programming, and informing us that it hasn't always been that way, and spoke of musicians such as Arthur Rubinstein and Jascha Heifetz who performed with a sense of fun and delight, who reveled in showmanship. They revealed their love for the music and audiences responded in kind.

An SLSO fan writes:

"I am 27 and I may not be a particularly average member of the post-baby-boom generations, but I know the show you're talking about. I do not personally remember experiencing the radio show, but my parents purchased some VHS tapes of The Lone Ranger television show when I was a kid. Now that I'm thinking about it more, however, I think my Dad videotaped episodes from television re-runs since I don't remember them having any boxes or printed labels. Those tapes were favorites on rainy weekends and I'm pretty sure we wore them out from use. Hi-ho, Silver!"