As the calendar turns to late October, the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra serves a hearty broth of Romantic period masterworks, pairing Felix Mendelssohn’s “Reformation†symphony with Camille Saint-Saëns’ Piano Concerto No. 2 in G-minor.
These works bask in October’s golden hour well, and they find a felicitous venue in the Touhill Center. Already, audiences are running low on opportunities to hear the orchestra there.
This year, the SLSO spends its second of two seasons on the road, while its venerable 99-year-old home, Powell Hall, undergoes renovation. The orchestra has mostly camped out at two friends’ places, in the meantime: Stifel Theatre and the Touhill. While the first offers extensive architectural detail and a stately majesty, a drier acoustic doesn’t privilege the warm sound Stéphane Denève coaxes from the strings, and those huge stage curtains can swallow the SLSO Chorus a bit.
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Contrastingly, the University of Missouri–St. Louis’ Touhill Performing Arts Center has proven more hospitable. America constructed oodles of expansive concert spaces from the 1930s to the 1960s, and much of Stifel’s 3,100-seat capacity lies far from the stage. But A-B Hall, of early 2000s vintage, boasts a more intimate, European-style scale at around 1,600 seats, and scarcely believable acoustics.
Reviewing the SLSO at the Touhill last year for KDHX, I phrased it so: “the strings sounded — felt — like an intense golden haze, medium-dark hue, perfectly calibrated such that the light issuing from the gold warmed the body but did not tax the eyes. A gold like that in the fantasy world in Guillermo Del Toro’s ‘Pan’s Labyrinth.’†In concerti, the works that soloists play benefit, too, as their sounds mix with the orchestra better, instead of feeling sonically runwayed out into the audience.
This week the symphony welcomes back thrilling pianist Conrad Tao, still just 30, but who seems like he’s been around forever.
When he made his SLSO debut at age 18, Sarah Bryan Miller wrote for this newspaper, “Remember the name Conrad Tao. You’re going to be hearing a lot about him.†Back then, Tao was pinch hitting for the indisposed Markus Groh on three days’ notice and wowed the audience in Prokofiev’s difficult Piano Concerto No. 3 in C-major.
Tao returned in October 2014 for his second appearance with the SLSO, to play Saint-Saëns’ Piano Concerto No. 2 in G-minor, which he reprises this weekend at the Touhill. If you’ve never heard this concerto before, you’re in for a treat, and if you have, you know that mesmerizing opening for the unaccompanied piano that sounds like a Bach fantasy, before the orchestra roars in a fully Romantic outburst.
A composer, too, Tao plays violin and used to tour as a concert violinist; you can hear the delicacy he learned playing that instrument in his slow movements for piano. But Saint-Saëns’ No. 2, unusually, places the slow movement first, a jaunty scherzo second and then a driving presto movement to close that allows the soloist to show off.
Guest conductor David Danzmayr anchors the concert with Felix Mendelssohn’s Symphony No. 5, “Reformation.†Composed in 1830 to mark the 300th anniversary of one of Protestantism’s founding documents, the symphony’s number doesn’t correspond to compositional sequence.
Mendelssohn actually wrote it second, prior to his more popular “Scottish†Third and “Italian†Fourth symphonies. It was only published, though, two decades after his death. His sister Fanny, herself an accomplished composer, gave it the subtitle “Reformation.â€
The Fifth’s history reflects the complexity of religion for Mendelssohn’s family. Ethnic Jews, his family was best known in German-speaking lands for the writings of his grandfather Moses, a philosopher and polymath whose work Jews and Christians alike valued highly during his lifetime. Moses Mendelssohn’s “Jerusalem,†published in 1783, addresses the position of Judaism in a gentile-dominated society, but one with a developing boundary between church and state.
Moses’ son Abraham left the Jewish faith and had Felix baptized at age 7 into a Calvinist-flavored Reform Protestant sect.
“Reformation†reflects musical ideas associated with Christianity, chiefly the Dresden Amen. This seven-chord motive later took off in classical music. Symphonic music fans might be most familiar with it from Richard Wagner’s 1882 opera “Parsifal.â€
“Reformation†displays all the ways Mendelssohn delights listeners, with a little more Romantic bombast and a little less classical float than his more famous “Italian†symphony.
Rounding out the concert, Danzmayr lines up two shorter works, including “Ballade†in A-minor by Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, another minoritized composer accorded esteem at the turn of the 20th century by a white, protestant majority. Coleridge-Taylor — raised in London by his English mother, Alice Hare Martin — had a Sierra Leonean Krio father, Daniel Taylor. He inhabited social circles with composers such as Edward Elgar, premiering “Ballade†in 1898. Despite pre-dating the widespread popularity of film, the work offers a proto-filmic flair.
Finally, the music of James MacMillan returns to the SLSO, where regular attendees may remember his powerful “The World’s Ransoming†in 2023, starring Principal English Horn player Cally Banham.
Composed for Maundy Thursday, that work portrays Jesus in peril, but not yet arrested by the Roman authorities. A Scottish Catholic, MacMillan, too, though not minoritized racially, is religiously.
This week, Principal Oboist, Jelena Dirks, plays MacMillan’s lovely “One,†a sort of song-without-words for oboe, backed by chamber strings. “One†will precede “Reformation†without a break.
Don’t let the title “Reformation†fool you—Danzmayr gives us an ecumenical mixture of music this weekend at the Touhill. All participants will blend beautifully in the prime acoustics there.