Symphony Review: Stéphane Steers SLSO’s soggy season-opening soiree

Written by Benjamin Torbert

The Saint Louis Symphony Orchestra soft-opened its 144th season with its traditional free concert on Art Hill (21 September 2023) combining a cheerful mix of film music, classical excerpts from its Spring 2023 European tour, and the genre you might call American fireworks accompaniment. An early-arriving audience arrayed itself about Saint Louis’ favorite winter sledding slope, beneath ominous clouds that produced severe thunderstorms just a few miles away. Organizers postponed the national anthem’s downbeat for twenty minutes, and always-mirthful Music Director Stéphane Denève invited the crowd to sing alongside SLSO chorus members and Kevin McBeth’s In Unison chorus, amidst a manageable mizzle. In Unison performed a stirring rendition of the Johnsons’ “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” often called the Black national anthem. Then, rain began in earnest.

Denève always entertains in his yakkety-yak with the audience, but this night he pivoted to frequent expressions of gratitude to the audience for staying as the heavens opened. Appropriately, the third number was the "Blue Danube Waltz" (J. Strauss) as the deluge increased. I know not how, but while the temperature dipped and then spiked approximately fifteen degrees during the seventy-five minute concert, the strings stayed largely in tune, beneath the bandshell separating the audience from the Grand Basin that we inherited from the 1904 World’s Fair. The third through seventh numbers spanned the heaviest rain, during which perhaps only a tenth of the audience decamped. CEO Marie-Hélène Bernard and Denève periodically reiterated their thanks for the audience’s hardiness, as the orchestra offered the Radetzky March (J. Strauss again), and the March and Schrezo from Prokofiev’s “The Love for Three Oranges.” It’s hard to truly evaluate the orchestra under such crazy conditions, but Bernstein’s “Candide” Overture provided a boffo soundtrack to our intensifying saturation.

The French love Spain, Denève reported, and the band complied with selections from the two suites derived from Bizet’s “Carmen.” I was positioned at the top of the hill at the base of “Apotheosis of Saint Louis,” the oversized equestrian monument to our town’s namesake, Louis IX of France. At the [in]famous “Habanera,” anyone within a good fifty yards of Louis could have heard a heart-warming interjection from someone young-sounding, “YES! This is my favorite!” If we’re in the business of audience-building, these free outdoor concerts rate not only fun but necessary. Principal oboist Jelena Dirks won the “Carmen” suite. The European tour section concluded with that loveliest heart-string plucking, the Intermezzo from “Cavalleria Rusticana” (Mascagni), a wonderful plug for the SLSO’s upcoming Veteran’s Day concert presentation of the opera at the Stifel Center. The harps were so lovely in this piece, probably at least as familiar from the soundtrack to “The Godfather: Part 3” as from the opera. Here the radar cleared, and the audience managed to begin drying out, lightning still flashing eastward past the Central West End’s skyscrapers.

The symphonic meat and potatoes arrived with the “Juba” movement of Florence Price’s Third Symphony. Price is enjoying a moment nationally with major orchestras; like so many sudden inclusions by Classical organizations of African American music during the post-George Floyd reckoning, one hopes this will outlast the early 2020s. Denève said more than ten thousand people locally have heard the SLSO play Price’s music in the orchestra’s visits to churches and other community organizations. “Juba” offers a driving, jazz-inflected dance, heavy on xylophone and snare drum, replete with intricate orchestration; if you have a chance to hear the whole Third Symphony (2 February 2024), do so; you’ll enjoy its filmic flair. Continuing jazzily, Gershwin’s rousing overture to “Girl Crazy” promoted Music Director emeritus Leonard Slatkin’s, count ‘em, three Gershwin concerts with the SLSO this year. A fitting tribute, days from the composer’s 125th birthday.

For the last third of the concert, Denève donned a Saint Louis City FC jersey, leading the orchestra in two crowd-pleasers by that most prominent of living American film composers, John Williams, who has appeared conducting the SLSO in his own music as recently as four years ago. The Raiders’ March from “Raiders of the Lost Ark” drew hooty support from my hill-mates, but concertgoers reserved their biggest applause and most vocal reception for the return of In Unison in “Dry Your Tears, Afrika” from “Amistad,” an epic piece sometimes encompassing the hill and the basin in triple forte.

Prior to the expected fireworks marking class dismissal, the concert ended with “America the Beautiful,” again in audience singalong mode, and, of course, Sousa’s “The Stars and Stripes Forever,” jelly to the fireworks’ peanut butter. The concert bade me reflect on attendance and audience development. Opening weekend saw one of the planet’s greatest violinists, Hilary Hahn, play a less-than-full Stifel Center (Kiel Opera House) with a devastating performance of Mendelssohn and Bach; I’m not a great crowd-estimator but I’d be surprised if the Art Hill attendance didn’t outnumber both weekend indoor concerts combined. Some of this owes to the price being right, but audience engagement in the 2020s will require a great deal of varied programming. Three days later I wept at Hahn’s delicate caress of the Sarabande from Bach’s Second Partita in d-minor, but perhaps I should have shouted “YES! This is my favorite!” Classical music yet has a future, and we’re still discovering it.