Gateway

Die Frau and I went to St. Louis this past weekend to hear the symphony perform. Here's the program:

Berlioz - King Lear Overture
Berlioz - Le mort de Cléopâtre
Bernd Alois Zimmermann - Musique pour les soupers du Roi Ubu
Ravel - La Valse

Berlioz is Berlioz. But the real reason we went was to hear Susan Graham perform Le mort de Cléopâtre. As always she was terrific. The only distracting thing was that she was performing with music. I'm not opposed to this but I think it does take away from the atmosphere surrounding the piece. There were also many parts of the piece where I can certainly understand why Berlioz' teachers at Conservatoire were a little confused.

I had never heard the Zimmermann before and I think I can honestly say I don't think I've ever heard anything like it before. Zimmermann wrote the piece when he was hired to teach at the Berlin Academy. It's scored for large wind orchestra, jazz combo, percussion and 2 guitars (one doubling electric and the other doubling mandolin) and draws on tons of disparate influences. It's chock full of quotations from dozens of other pieces woven into Zimmermann's own framework. It was a pretty nifty piece though not something I would listen to on a regular basis.

The evening ended with Ravel's La Valse which is just a wonderful, bizarre piece of music.

Between the Zimmermann and the Ravel there was a large span of time to reset the stage for to bring the strings back on stage. What blew my mind was that, rather than go back to his dressing room, David Robertson came out and started chatting up the audience. He asked who liked it....applause. He asked who didn't like it. One older gal raised her hand and he immediately went over to her. He wanted to know why she didn't like it and not so he could tell her why she was wrong but, rather, because he genuinely seemed to want to know.

The performance itself was absolutely impeccable. There was clearly a lot of artistic give-and-take between David Robertson and his orchestra. None of it seemed forced or heavy-handed. All-in-all it was a good day. While I don't think we'll be driving over and back in the same day again it was definitely worth the trip.