No Modern Music Allowed!

[Replete with pictures that are fun to look at!]

Sarah Bryan Miller has a fair, if somewhat confusing piece up (on the vestigial blog to which they've relegated her at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch) about their recent guest-conducted concert.

Symphony in A Cheerful Mode.

Is that cheerful mode...major?

If you’re one of those sometime St. Louis Symphony Orchestra patrons who has complained about unfamiliar works and dissonant (or sort-of dissonant) new music on programs,

Ugh. Open your minds, people! What freaking year is it?

you need to get over to Powell Symphony Hall this weekend, pronto. They’ve given you what you’ve been asking for.

The fine arts are merely for pandering to the audience.

Friday night’s concert was a light, bright, major-key

I was right! Yay!

crowd-pleasing delight;

A light, bright...crowd pleasing delight? Was it also at night? And out-of-sight? Ah, I kid because I love. (But that doesn't mean I'll stop...) All right! Night Flight!



Plight blight fight! Slight might!

it was filled with familiar music in a Classical or Neo-Classical mode, all beautifully played. Guest conductor Hans Graf was dressed like an apparatchik, in a quasi-military black Nehru-style jacket, but he led his musicians with a sense of fun.

It had a sense of fun...despite his jacket? Also, the modernist-haters probably don't know what apparatchik means. Just guessing. Also, Nehru jackets are outstanding.



The concert opened with a sparkling reading of Prokofiev’s



witty Symphony No. 1 in D major, the “Classical.”

Okay. The nickname of the piece gets quotes, but not the title. Got it.

Thoroughly enjoyable, if not super-subtle (there’s a time and a place for profundity, and this wasn’t it), it benefited from particularly good work from the winds.

Classical music concerts are not the time and place for profundity?

Mozart



is good for what ails you even an historically noxious week in the financial markets and this performance of his Sinfonia Concertante for Violin, Viola and Orchestra in E-flat major, K. 364, was enough to lift any mood and stop any worrying.

I seriously doubt that those homeowners that were foreclosed upon were that cheered up by the Mozart. (However, your point is taken.) Thanks, though, for providing the Koechel number! That rocks.

Its soloists were drawn from the orchestra: concertmaster David Halen and principal viola Jonathan Vinocour. They proved well-matched, and demonstrated yet again what terrific players the SLSO has performing in its ranks, week-in and week-out. Both were spirited and accurate, and they were perfectly in sync, particularly in their duet sections. Graf led this cheery score with a light touch.

In Sync! (Okay, 'N Sync. It was just an excuse to post a pic that is fun to look at.)



The concert’s second half opened with Stravinsky’s



“Scenes de ballet.”

Is that...is that the nickname of the piece? Because I thought we'd established that the titles of pieces (Prokofiev, Mozart) don't get quotes, only the nicknames. Thanks, editor!

Written for Broadway, it didn’t really mesh with prevailing tastes there, but its slightly sarcastic humor fit well in this program. A series of brief vignettes, each featuring different instruments, its highlight was a cello duet, played by associate principal Melissa Brooks and assistant principal Catherine Lehr.

Stravinsky, why that's *Gasp!* Modernism! Neo-Classical modernism, sure, but I was lead to believe there wouldn't be any of that...that not-completely major stuff on this program. The horror!

The evening’s finale was Bizet’s



youthful, joyful Symphony in C. Oddly enough, it hasn’t been performed here in nearly a decade, since the last season of “Classics in the Loop;” its return is most welcome.

I have nothing to say about this sentence. Oh, except that the title of the piece is back to having no quotes. The symphony series, though, apparently does. What?

The strings executed the perpetual motion of the fourth movement with elan; the horns were in terrific voice throughout. Performed with a combination of meticulous musicianship and soufflé-light execution, it was all infectious fun.

First: soufflé-light execution is delightfully silly, and I love it. Second, why does soufflé get its accent ague, but not elan? Thanks again, Mr Editor!

In fact, the only disappointment of the evening was the inexplicably small size of the audience for such an accessible program.

Accessible = not modern. And small audience sizes are disappointing regardless of program.

It’s a little bit like the political system: If you can’t be bothered to vote, you really have no right to complain.

So, the accessible major-key programming failed to bring a large audience despite the fact that Mozart makes you forget that you lost half of your 401K. Might as well have been atonal music, I guess.

Music Espresso, How May I Help You?

There is something to be said for the consistency of analytical method in a review. There are exceptions (mostly poetic), of course, but if inconsistent, the review can easily expose its author’s biases, unfamiliarity with the work or even the low levels of caffeine in her or his system. None of which, I think we’ll all agree, makes for good, fair criticism.

In Sarah Bryan Miller’s case, one can see, via the progression of her stylistic consistency, how the St. Louis Symphony’s morning concert series may not be the best idea. That is, from a PR standpoint, if you want a good review, make sure there is plenty of espresso to wake up the critic; they often have late, late, finger-crampy nights.

Perhaps it was appropriate to open a Friday morning coffee concert with a piece by Igor Stravinsky jn [sp.] jittery, nervous mode; the Concerto in D sounds distinctly overcaffeinated in places.

Perhaps it was the sheer rudeness of being disturbed before Stage N3 was complete, but isn’t it Sarah’s job to be wide awake and alert?

Apparently, the coffee hadn’t worked its magic, yet.

The Concerto demands great technical ability, but doesn’t offer listeners much to cherish. From its skittish opening, it drifts into a limping dance and a melody that loses its way -- and back into anxiety.

I can just see the eye crusties and the unwillingness to listen. Maybe a few yawns and a cowlick or two.

However, by saying that the piece “doesn’t offer listeners much to cherish” is downright lazy. (Personally, I wasn't familiar with the Concerto in D, so I took a few minutes to become acquainted, at which time I found this lovely little YouTube video of the middle movement, and an article written by Greg Sandow who said this about it:

One of my great musical pleasures — in many ways a guilty one — is the slow movement of Stravinsky's Concerto in D, written in 1946 for string orchestra. Stravinsky, of course, was a Very Serious Composer, but in the 1930's and 40's he wrote some fluff, and this slow movement sounds, I swear, a bit like Mantovani, the man who once reigned as the king of easy listening.

Not exactly “limping” by my account, anyway.) It’s lazy because it doesn’t make its case very well. Why does “skittish” to “limping” to “anxiety” make for a bad piece of music? I don’t think there’s anything inherently non-cherishable about this description or progression of descriptors.

No doubt, the coffee hadn’t settled in.

The compactness of the first half was accentuated by having the conductor double as soloist in the morning’s second work. Leonidas Kavakos, an estimable violinist who made his Symphony conducting debut on Friday morning, led a small chamber ensemble in J.S. Bach’s Violin Concerto in D minor, BWV 1052.

As a violinist, Kavakos offered his usual spot-on accuracy, with great beauty in the lyric passages and technique to spare. As conductor, he had great interaction with the players in the front stands; some of the lower strings, however, didn’t stay with him as well.

And that’s all there was to say about the Bach. No “good piece.” No “bad Bach.” It just was.

I liken this to that moment of repose after waking up, having had the first sip of Sanka, sort of neither fully conscious nor asleep, but still kind of functional, spewing out inconsistent gibberish and clichés like “technique to spare.”

But don’t worry. Sarah was fully awake for the second half. I’m guessing another cup of Joe and a cigarette during intermission.

The second half was a reasonably solid, if not overwhelming, performance of Felix Mendelssohn’s Symphony No. 3 in A minor, op. 56, "Scottish."

HYOPERBOLE TIME! I’M WIDE AWAKE. JITTERY AND OVERCAFFIENATED IN PLACES! OVERWHELMING! AHHHH! BUZZZZZ! ROMANTIC SWEEP! ROMANTIC ARCHING! NARRATIVING NARRATIVES! WEEEEEEE! BLACK! NO SUGAR! SUN-DAPPLED WHIMSY!

The Mendelssohn, a full-blown Romantic work, offers an abundance of melody and evocative tonal painting to gladden the heart and ears of the most traditional of concertgoers.

A Note to the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra Program Director: Let’s make it the “Friday Lunch Time Tea & Cookie Concert Series.” Please.
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