May 2010 Archives

Ward Stare spent a fair amount of his Friday before the holiday weekend on the Powell Hall stage. He rehearsed the Celebrate America! program with the SLSO in the morning--and conducts the performance in the evening. In the afternoon he rehearsed the Saint Louis Symphony Youth Orchestra, on the eve of the YO's NYC concert at Riverside Church on June 5.

The musical action was in Webster Groves, the home of Opera Theatre of St. Louis, Thursday, with rehearsals for both Eugene Onegin and A Little Night Music in progress. But the orchestra will be back in Powell to rehearse Celebrate America! with Ward Stare Friday morning. I'll try not to march when the Sousa plays.

The SLSO performs three very different film scores, live with the films themselves, next season: Psycho, City Lights and Fellowship of the Ring. Each score and film is remarkable in its own way. Psycho re-invented the musical language for horror/suspense, a language that has now become a staple, if not a cliché, of the genre--the violin shriek being the most copied phrase. Charlie Chaplin, making a silent film in the talkie era, used music to express the unspoken. Fellowship of the Ring borrows from classic adventure scores, but creates a thematic scheme of its own based on a world-music patois that sounds both of this world and otherworldly.

As you may recall, I posted a photo of the Circus Flora sign, sans tent a little while ago. Now look: the tent is up. Behind the tent is a village of small trailers for people who once upon a time really did run away with the circus.

A dear nephew is getting married in Wisconsin, so it will be blog gone for a few days. Enjoy all that is Gershwin at Casual Classics at Powell Hall Friday night. There's a wedding that you can attend Saturday night, The Marriage of Figaro, which opens the Opera Theatre of St. Louis season. Those are members of the SLSO playing Mozart in the pit. Be sure to give them a hand.

My next blog post will be Tuesday, May 25.

I just happened to step onto the stage with video camera in hand about an hour before rehearsal Wednesday morning to find Terrence Wilson, who is the soloist for the Gershwin concert Friday night. He had just finished warming up on a piano that seemed to have been set in one corner of the stage like a stray. While Terrence waited for his concert piano of choice to be set into place by the Henchmen, he graciously agreed to participate in this week's video blog, telling us wonderful things about Gershwin's Concerto in F.

If you've been following along the slso blog seasonal cycles over the years you may have been feeling that it's time for the annual e.e. cummings quotation: "Damn everything but the circus."

A Youth Orchestra fan writes:

"Once again it is time to say 'Thank You' for the fine season presented by the St. Louis Symphony Youth Orchestra. The final performance [Sunday] was seemingly hard and complex and they handled it all beautifully AND gave an encore. It is always a delight to attend their performances. When you consider how busy they are attending classes during the day and then doing homework and practicing you have to marvel at the darned good job they do performing at Powell Hall.

The inspiring Saint Louis Symphony Youth Orchestra performs its final Powell Hall concert of the 2009-10 season, Sunday, May 16 at 3pm. For those of you who are in a fever over the Russian Festival that the grownup orchestra plays next season, you can cool down with YO performances of Shostakovich, Rimksy-Korsakov, and Stravinsky's The Firebird Suite. YO Concerto Competition-winner Andrew Robson plays Mozart's Flute Concerto No. 1 as well.

I have heard no reports of lizard sightings on Thursday, and from the sounds of the Marriage of Figaro rehearsal there has been no sudden discovery. But I have heard of another possibility as to how the lizard came to be in Powell Hall.

I was chatting with members of the Red split during a break in the Eugene Onegin rehearsal, discussing, among other things, the wide difference between the music of Onegin--quiet, slow, melodic, serving as underpinning to the vocalists--and the other opera on the Red split, The Golden Ticket--fast, fast, fast; as well as summer plans, including the Sun Valley Summer Symphony regulars (Sun Valley becomes the home of SLSO West)--they're playing with Garth Brooks!?--and the home-repair initiatives of those who are sticking close to St. Louis.

As the orchestra splits into the red and the green, Powell Hall becomes the home of graduation ceremonies for high schools, colleges and universities around the region. When I mention that I work for the SLSO at Powell Hall, the two most common responses are "My grade school/high school took us to a concert there" or "My high school/college/university held our graduation there."

Tonight it's Harris-Stowe State University. Class of 2010. Congratulations!

And just like that, the SLSO moves from being a grand orchestra spread across the stage of Powell Hall playing the oceanic music of Vaughan Williams' "A Sea Symphony" and becomes split orchestras (designated as the red and the green--kind of like color-coordinated twins, and no reports as yet as to which is the evil twin), which will reside within the indelicate pit of Opera Theatre of St. Louis. 

The word came in that the sale of KFUO to JOY-FM had been approved by the FCC Thursday morning. With hope being the buoyant emotion of spring, there had been the feeling that maybe, just maybe, the lengthy delay in the approval process boded more welcome news--at least to those of us who believe having more music options on the radio is a good thing. The SLSO and SLSO fans are undeniably biased when it comes to that point.

I had the good fortune to "Behold, the sea" Wednesday evening with the SLSO and Chorus, and to chat up my neighbor--and Saint Louis Symphony Chorus member--Sharon Lightfoot. I don't think you can catch it in this clip, but in a pre-edited version on my screen, I could see Chorus director Amy Kaiser's fist, just a few rows below me, rise into the air triumphantly with the opening chord of Ralph Vaughan Williams' "A Sea Symphony."

A few years ago the Pulitzer Prize-winning critic Justin Davidson wrote a fascinating article about conducting for The New Yorker magazine, with this week's guest conductor, Robert Spano, as the writer's principal guide through the "mysteries of conducting." The good people at NewYorker.com have kept the article available online in their archives. You can read such provocative insights as Spano's dismissal of the notion of posterity: "I think of composers as setting up possibilities, not creating objects. There's no such thing as Beethoven's Seventh. It's only a hypothesis." To read, click here.

Tuesday morning Powell Hall was a foot stomping, hand clapping, recorder playing kind of place, with many, many local schoolchildren (grades 3-5) taking part in the annual Link UP! concerts, presented in partnership with the Weil Music Institute at Carnegie Hall. Music teachers have been teaching music literacy and basic music concepts to their students as part of a comprehensive curriculum, the culmination of the year's efforts being the morning concerts. The concerts are highly interactive, with the schoolchildren playing, singing, stomping and clapping their parts along with the SLSO.

An SLSO fan writes: "What exactly was the instrument between the trumpet section and the trombone section? Was it simply a rotary-valve trumpet? Or was it something more."