STL Symphony Blog

Mid-May means that Circus Flora moves into the Grand Center Parking Lot directly east of Powell Hall, which means part of the Symphony week has been spent watching the big top go up and up. I checked on the progress today and supply a visual report.

Ground-level view

I'm very grateful to our friends at St. Louis Public Radio for giving me the opportunity to interview many of the artists who pass through here each week, as well as the artists who make up the St. Louis Symphony. And my greatest thanks goes to KWMU's Mary Edwards, who spends many hours making these interviews so listenable. She has put together my complete interviews with Hans Graf and Stephen Hough, as well as Robert Peterson's live interviews with Fred Bronstein and Peter Oundjian, as a kind of end-of-the-season package. Click

Let's do it again!

From the hard charge of Led Zeppelin's songs to the subtle seductions of Sinatra songs, the orchestra asked the weekend's musical question: "Suit or sweat?" Which did you choose? Or, which did Mom choose?

Following Music of Led Zeppelin rehearsal, I asked flutist Jennifer Nitchman about where playing the flute part to this material ranks in her career.

"St. Louis has the second-oldest one of these behind the New York Philharmonic."

And the teen responded with the correct question.

Music has power. A boisterous audience of St. Louis schoolchildren turned into a subdued, quiet and thoughtful audience as Dvořák's famed "Going Home" melody from the "From the New World" Symphony was played by the St. Louis Symphony.

Whoever has been spreading the rumor that the Symphony is in the process of gaining the rights to Grand Funk Railroad's classic rock hit "We're an American Band" to use as a promotional theme across Europe needs to stop. "We're coming to your town/ We're gonna party down" is not the image the St. Louis Symphony wishes to project in London, Lucerne, Berlin or Paris. Nor, for that matter, in Davis, Santa Barbara, Costa Mesa or Palm Desert on the California tour in 2013.

Thank you.

If you are, or know someone who is, a talented young musician who would like to take a shot at auditioning for the St. Louis Symphony Youth Orchestra, this is the last weekend to get in an application, which is due on Monday, May 7. All you need to know is here.

It is one thing to perform two of Rachmaninoff's piano concertos over a single three-concert weekend, it's another thing to rehearse them both--the First and Third--on the same afternoon.

A staff member spoke as the orchestra rehearsed a very familiar symphony, the music pouring through the office speakers: "Beethoven Five sounds really good today."