STL Symphony Blog

May Migrations

2012-05-16T21:07:33Z

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]]> This also means it is time for the annual e. e. cummings' quote: "Damn everything but the circus!"

View from Adam Crane's window

Bruce Mourning talks tent with Anna Kuwabara

Sign in place

To Make You Want More

2012-05-15T15:26:52Z

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!

Mom's Pick

2012-05-14T21:53:32Z

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?

Classical or Metal

2012-05-11T19:42:35Z

Following Music of Led Zeppelin rehearsal, I asked flutist Jennifer Nitchman about where playing the flute part to this material ranks in her career.
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"Pretty high actually. I'm super nostalgic about all of the music on this show. I only wish I could hear better because I have my earplugs stuck in so far. It's funny, when I was a teenager I either listened to classical or metal. Nothing in between."

Today's Jeopardy Answer

2012-05-11T00:59:37Z

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

And the teen responded with the correct question.

Oye

2012-05-09T19:03:31Z

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.

]]> Wednesday morning buses arrived at Powell Hall carrying schoolchildren, teachers and chaperones from throughout the St. Louis region for the annual LinkUP! concerts. A program developed by Carnegie Hall's Weill Institute--and continually evolving--LinkUP! supplies schools and orchestras across the country with a year-long music curriculum. Music teachers love it. Students love it. The St. Louis Symphony loves it. Everybody gets a recorder. Everybody sings. Everybody learns.

Laura Reinert, the Symphony's Early Childhood Education Coordinator, worked with 74 St. Louis and St. Louis County schools throughout the year. Each season LinkUP! focuses on a particular concept, and for 2011-12 it was "The Orchestra Sings": melody, melodic form, contour, steps, leaps and phrases.

Laura had to miss the LinkUP! concerts because she was busy giving birth to her second child on Tuesday night (Welcome Jacob Henry Reinert!). Dacy Gillespie, Education Programs Manager, took over as chief backstage manager and worrier, and ran the progression of slides that complement the show.

As almost always happens with LinkUP!, and most Symphony Education Concerts, I thought, "I know a lot of grownups who would like to learn this stuff," including myself. When the English horn played the melody to "Going Home," a caption on a slide told the audience "English horn plays the melody." "Contour," the students learned, is "a musical shape." Guest conductor Andre Franco's motions to start the orchestra mean "ready, set, go." "Steps" are "small changes in pitch." "Leaps" are "large changes in pitch." Everybody sings "Tis a Gift." Everybody sings "Oye" and learns some Spanish along the way. And if you want to hear schoolchildren rejoice, tell them "We're going to sing 'I Bought Me a Cat'" by Aaron Copland. For a finale, the Symphony played one of the greatest, the finale to Stravinsky's "The Firebird," as the slide informed the audience "Horn introduces melody"; "Melody's now twice as fast"; "Listen for 7 huge chords." And they did.

Afterward, the seal of approval came from one student: "That was way cool."

Grand Funk

2012-05-08T01:47:26Z

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.
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Call for Procrastinators

2012-05-04T18:00:34Z

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.

So Many Notes

2012-05-04T03:18:16Z

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.
"And so well," she added.
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B5

2012-05-02T19:33:26Z

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."

RadioLand

2012-05-01T20:19:43Z

I recently put up some photos of the work-in-progress that is the new building for St. Louis Public Radio, 90.7, KWMU, our partners in delivering the Saturday night Symphony live broadcasts on the radio dial and online. But that's not the only new construction in the growing Grand Center RadioLand.
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Our friends at KDHX will be neighbors soon as well. This photo shows the less-than-photogenic gutting stage of the building, making room for the ensuing nostalgia for the little radio paradise on Magnolia Ave.

Rach Rules

2012-04-30T15:33:48Z

Playbill, taped interview at Powell for radio broadcasts, and then live for a group of subscribers following Sunday's performance of Rachmaninoff Piano Concerto No. 2. Hough is delightful, smart and witty and engaging, and I would be happy to talk with him even more. But I must say my favorite comment from him came when I asked about the over-the-top possibilities of that lush, romantic, emotionally wrought Second Piano Concerto.
]]> Hough told me he didn't mind playing some things over-the-top, but not this concerto, and reminded me of Rachmaninoff's personal demeanor, his nobility and austerity. Those waves of emotion should be in the audience, not in the playing. Or as he put it in a sentence: "It should never sound sweaty."

Joyous Time

2012-04-29T02:32:45Z

Rev. Earl Nance has been a friend to the St. Louis Symphony for many years. He is senior pastor at Greater Mount Carmel Missionary Baptist Church, which is one of the founding members of the St. Louis Symphony IN UNISON program, which began in the mid-90s to build relationships between the Symphony and the African-American churches that are our neighors at Powell Hall.

]]> Rev. Nance suffered a stroke late last year, and was in the hospital for a number of months during his recovery. He returned briefly to his pulpit at Easter. He says he is not going to miss the St. Louis Symphony IN UNISON Chorus Community Concert at his church on Sunday, April 29 at 6pm. St. Louis Symphony IN UNISON Chorus Director Kevin Mcbeth will be sharing conducting duties with David Morrow, leader of the renowned Morehouse College Glee Club. Also performing will be former St. Louis Symphony Principal Trumpet Susan Slaughter, a longtime friend and supporter of the IN UNISON Chorus.

Greater Mount Carmel Missionary Baptist Church is celebrating its 100th anniversary this year, so with the combination of welcoming its senior pastor home and the voices of the St. Louis Symphony IN UNISON Chorus, this will be a joyous time of faith and song.

Vroom

2012-04-28T02:22:35Z

As the Friday morning all-Russian concert was humming along, I thought of something Hans Graf told me the other day: "With this orchestra, all that is needed is fine tuning."

2, 3, 1

2012-04-26T14:19:44Z

It's always good to see one of our St. Louis Symphony Playbill articles picked for playbillarts.com, and especially when it is at the top of the homepage, as it was Thursday morning with my article on marathon concerto performances, in which I interviewed percussionist Colin Currie and the Symphony's Rach Fest star of the next two weeks, Stephen Hough. To read: click. ]]>
But that is not what happened with Rachmaninoff's Piano Concerto No. 1. Rachmaninoff wrote an early version of that work when he was a young man still figuring things out. The first St. Louis Symphony performance of the First Piano Concert was that version, in 1911, with soloist Arthur Shattuck and conductor Max Zach.

Rachmaninoff, as Hough explained to me the other day, grew as a pianist as he grew as a composer. He told me that the Second Concerto is actually the most difficult, because Rachmaninoff was still developing as a pianist. The legendarily difficult Third Concerto, Hough told me, actually "sits better under the hands." It is fiendishly hard, but hard in the way a great pianist would challenge himself, which is what Rachmaninoff had become.

By 1917, Rachmaninoff was a much more confident and accomplished pianist and composer, and he went back to his First Concerto, written when he was a teenager. He managed to keep some of the wild impetuosity of that young artist within the revision, but fused it with the mature, experienced artist that he had become.

And that is how the First Concerto became third.