Moussa, Wagner, Respighi cast spell at Powell Hall 

Opening a concert program with Richard Wagner’s Prelude to Act I from Lohengrin, as the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra did this weekend, offered deep pleasure and set the stage for what was to come. With its long, slow, gradual, shimmering build, the Prelude sounds like how growing accustomed to hearing musical complexity feels after the random incoherence of the sounds of the street. I will cheer a rousing concert opening with a fanfare as lustily as anyone, but when an orchestra takes a risk by starting slow and quiet, I always think how I needed that adjustment after the inevitable aggravations of getting to the concert hall.

No orchestra ever got into trouble by closing the first half of a program with a Mozart piano concerto, but his Piano Concerto No. 9 temporarily broke the spell of a concert otherwise uniquely devoted to slow, swelling, mesmerizing music. Though the second movement got moody for Mozart, the concerto was buoyant verging on lightweight. The orchestra musicians sat dead on their center mass as they played, nowhere near the edges of their seats.

They were joined by soloist Jan Lisiecki, another one of these tall, thin, white man pianists with fingers longer than the white piano keys. Unlike recent guest pianist Víkingur Ólafsson, the young Canadian has not yet developed a stage act to make him memorable – he tended to just shake his head side to side when the playing got tough – though he fit in well with the beautifully balanced orchestra. In one spare moment just before the third movement, Lisiecki surprised me by pointing to where Thelonious Monk had thumbed his Mozart score. A performance of Mozart that makes you want to listen to Monk is a gift.

Lisiecki and the orchestra were led by guest conductor Hannu Lintu with open hands. Dispensing with a baton, his open two hands appeared to draw the musicians and music into himself and then through him, like an emotional amplifier, to the audience. He treated his young soloist with total respect, trusting him to cue himself, though at one point as the conductor turned left to concertmaster David Halen, Lintu’s left hand, which gestured toward the pianist, broke out into a run of air piano.

Enjoying its St. Louis premiere, Samy Moussa’s Elysium recast Wagner’s spell to open the program’s second half. Born in 1984, Moussa is from a new generation of composers for whom the classic film scores of the 1970s rate as classical music. Given how much John Williams lifted from the Wagner of Prelude to Act I from Lohengrin to score Star Wars, it was thrilling to feel Moussa (also Canadian) push the orchestra through pitch shifts that felt like a starship departing Earth’s atmosphere.

Though Elysium offered mostly simple, broad cinematic themes, Moussa did episodes of feisty writing for instruments throughout an orchestra that was mammoth in scale, with second violinists wedged in higgledy piggledy anywhere the stagehands could fit a chair. The xylophone, trumpet, snare, violins and timpani, among other instruments, enjoyed standout moments. The musicians inhabited more of their bodies and edged forward on their seats after the slight stupor of Mozart.

Such a concert simply had to close with Ottorino Respighi’s Church Windows, which took the slow-building, mesmerizing musical motives of Wagner and Moussa to the proverbial 11 on the Spinal Tap amplifier dial. With all the shimmering of the violins we had been hearing, Respighi gave the lower strings a taste. Beth Guterman Chu, principal viola, nearly took to flight like a witch on a broom. There was hot-shot feature writing throughout a lush winds section, with a clever melding of notes played by disparate instruments that occasionally stumped me as to where the sound was coming from – a literally magical effect.

By the fourth movement of the Respighi, dark horns were joined by groans from the low strings and a deep, distant rumbling from the percussion section, which was one of those sounds that came out of nowhere. The entire orchestra swelled perceptibly, moved off their center mass for good. After a flourish that seemed final, an organ was given voice for the first time and blew through Powell Hall like the primordial sound. The long, slow bow strokes that, in Wagner, sounded like the dawning of time, now sawed us through the ending of times.

The deceptively titled Church Windows – 

Rocks Through Church Windows would sound more like it – culminated in a gong-pummeling, cacophonous yet highly musical apocalypse that no rock music, however heavy or hardcore, has yet to approach. Respighi died in Rome eight years before Jimmy Page was born in the West London suburbs, but Led Zeppelin never got nearly as heavy as this.

In closing, let me point out a piece of musical malpractice that SLSO needs to remedy. Church Windows was not performed in St. Louis until nearly a century after its premiere, and before this weekend had not been performed here again since its January 2002 local premiere. We deserve to hear this strange, dark, thrilling music much more often than that. Further, its one previous local performance was staged – brilliant idea! – at the Cathedral Basilica of St. Louis. I know SLSO has bills to pay in its refurbished Powell Hall, but let’s bring Respighi back to the Basilica!

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