Young audiences should twinkle the eye of the seasoned symphony-goer, and the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra’s concert on Friday, October 4 at the Touhill Performing Arts Center was attended by a bustling but respectful group of Ritenour middle-school musicians under the watchful care of Mr. Elder. This would turn out to be an eminently teachable concert for any aspiring musician.
Guest conductor Cristian Măcelaru busted the orchestra out of the gate with Antonín Dvořák’s Carnival Overture (1892), arguably the most stirring selection to open a symphonic program. Grace Roepke brought us in with the flick of a harp, the first of many striking individual flourishes in this music that defines spirited ensemble play. Cally Banham, who is emerging as one of the orchestra’s most consistently featured players, took literally a solo (just her and silence) on oboe.
Jennifer Nitchman and Nadine Hur presented the flute as an omnidexterous instrument: their flutes became a rhythm section as the double basses laid off for a spell; they became gymnasts and tumblers; they danced in advance of horns on the march.
All those featured musicians happened to be women. Woman power was further manifested in the conductor’s inner circle, where three women – Melissa Brooks and Jennifer Humphreys on cello and Beth Guterman Chu on viola – represented the lower strings. That was cool, given that most of the diverse middle-school musicians I saw grazing at the donut tray were girls.
Măcelaru then treated our donut-glazed students to a local premiere of a piece by a woman composer, Concertino Cusqueño (2012) by Gabriela Lena Frank. He introduced this piece (which the composer likens to taking British composer Benjamin Britten to her mother’s home country of Peru) by explaining what he already had been up to with the overture. Măcelaru said this program has no guest soloist “on purpose”: because of the “incredible depth of the individual players” in this symphony, he programmed pieces that “feature many, many individual players.”
Grace Roepke, whose harp provided the concert’s first feature, took many rhythmic runs in the Frank piece, paired with Peter Henderson on celesta. The uniquely spectral voice of the celesta, a bell piano, itself may have been new to student ears. At one point Henderson hammered on the celesta keys to create a psychedelic echo chamber effect that may have opened all our ears. Frank and the orchestra also somehow made violins sound like a theremin. Mr. Elder will have a lot of explaining to do.
In no way did this become a parade of features or novel effects. The writing called for collective ensemble virtuosity, and in Măcelaru’s hands the orchestra was spry, deft, and precise. At one point Frank scored simultaneous percussive strikes across several sections, where so many players holding so many different pieces of wood all across the stage had one strike to get it right. They nailed it.
I was so grateful to see that this score called for concertmaster David Halen to fingerpick his violin. Let me tell you, if you’re an SLSO regular, what has been tickling your ear all these years if it hasn’t already surfaced from your subconscious: David Halen’s name is a mash-up of the names of rock bandmates David Lee Roth and Eddie Van Halen. Seeing Halen finger-pick his fiddle like Eddie slapping the neck of his Frankenstrat finally freed me to say this aloud. I don’t think it needs to be on Mr. Elder’s quiz, though.
The first half of the concert closed with Alberto Ginastera’s Variaciones concertantes, which he premiered in Buenos Aires in 1953, with SLSO becoming a fairly early adopter in 1956. Music Director Emeritus Leonard Slatkin conducted it here as recently as 2021 – Ginastera is pretty slick for a repertory piece.
Ginastera divvied his variations into 12 bits without pauses in between, each named for the featured instruments, which was perfect for the conductor’s mission to spotlight many players throughout this deeply talented orchestra.
The first feature was harp (Grace Roepke, again, and when have you seen a harpist star in three successive pieces of music?) and cello – Melissa Brooks, sitting in on first chair for Danny Lee i the second successive concert. On opening night, Brooks wore a scarf in her hair, looking pleasantly like a hippie cellist. At the Touhill, she was not as theatrical as the low-riding Danny Lee, who appears to perform in a bucket seat, though she had an interesting tic of poising just the heel of her left shoe against the stage, with toes angled upwards.
Other variations featured clarinet (Scott Andrews), viola (Beth Guterman Chu, though the whole section flourished), and trumpet and trombone (Steven Franklin and Jonathan Randazzo, with Shannon Wood joining them on timpani for a triple feature). Hearing a series of features played over a similar musical bed, you could really hear the distinctive voices of the different instruments. I don’t think Mr. Elder can use this either, but it reminded me of Schlafly Brewing’s single hop series, when they brewed a series of ales from the same recipe, only switching in and out one single hop. These are good ways to learn about instruments – or hops.
Yet, again, this was tight ensemble playing enlivened by features, not the symphonic equivalent of an endless static jam. For a piece that spotlights many soloists, Variaciones concertantes is oddly quiet. Ginastera wrote with a wide dynamic range, employing lulls and sculpting delicate, even brittle sounds. It was another teachable moment, illustrating the nerve-wracking musical challenge of making small sounds. It’s actually easier to play loud: volume may broadcast mistakes, but noise also masks them.
The concert closed with Dvořák’s Symphony No. 6 (1881), which SLSO had not dusted off since 2007 with Hans Graf conducting. Dvořák called for superlative ensemble play, and Măcelaru and the orchestra delivered it. They shimmered, swelled, crashed and burned (in this case, a good thing) all together. The playing throughout the orchestra was bodily expressive, at times even aggressive, and this caught on with me. With the Touhill’s relatively generous leg room, I found myself dancing in my seat. This, normally, does not happen, and let’s try to keep it that way.
Dvořák, Măcelaru and the orchestra ran a master class on making use of the resources of these particular instruments deployed together. A theme was developed from flute to oboe to bassoon in a way that sounded like gradual animation. At one point cello and viola were left to carry the low end with no double bass, which added complexity to the lower end – muting the double basses made us really hear them again when they came back in. Clarinet was paired with bassoon and then with oboe, which illustrated the varying textures of all three instruments. The high and low strings engaged in call and response, almost speaking coherent vocables to each other. You have heard of talking drums? These were talking strings.
On the conductor’s podium, Măcelaru looked athletic but not acrobatic. Physically, he looked wound pretty tight, but musicians tell me he is just the opposite temperamentally. He is said to be a bro, and I could see that. His conducting seemed transparent, just letting the musicians play. As the concert began to wind down, I could see and feel him not wanting the music to end. Almost at the end of Symphony No. 6, Măcelaru cued cellist Jennifer Humphreys so intently he almost touched her with the baton. Good-byes can be so awkward.
This was a Friday morning Coffee Concert, which for our middle schoolers spelled a free all-you-can-eat donut party. Donuts probably should be a controlled substance, but they’re not, and to bring a bunch of middle schoolers to an all-you-can-eat donut party and not let them stuff their faces with donuts would be untenable and cruel. I endorse Mr. Elder and SLSO for tricking them in with the treats – those were future symphony subscribers, musicians, conductors, and composers living their best lives in donut heaven while everyone else was stuck in class.
It’s important to note that Mr. Elder wore a tweed jacket with leather elbow patches. All is not lost in this crazy country if public school teachers are still putting on tweed jackets with leather elbow patches and escorting middle-school children who look like a student United Nations to the symphony.
SLSO performed this program again 3 p.m. Sunday, October 6. Visit SLSO.org.
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