Symphony Preview: The Light Fantastic

St. Louis Dance Theatre joins the SLSO for a program of "music and movement"

Dancer Sergio Camacho in St. Louis Dance Theatre’s Way Out West. Photo courtesy of the SLSO.

This Saturday and Sunday, January 10 and 11, Stéphane Denève leads the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra in what the web site describes as “a program that celebrates powerful partnerships between dance and music.” A good summary, that, given that three of the four works on the program are actual ballets and the fourth eventually became the basis for a ballet by Jerome Robbins, albeit over three decades later.

The work in question was the Concerto in E-flat major, “Dumbarton Oaks,” written by Igor Stravinsky (1882–1971) in 1937–38 on commission for Robert Woods Bliss and Mildred Barnes Bliss in celebration of their 30^th wedding anniversary. The first performance was in May, 1938, at a private concert at their Dumbarton Oaks estate in the Georgetown neighborhood of Washington, D.C. It’s a bright and cheerful work, heavily influenced by the Bach Brandenburg Concertos, especially the Concerto No. 3.

As the composer recalled later:

I played Bach very regularly during the composition of the concerto, and I was greatly attracted to the Brandenburg Concertos. Whether or not the first theme of my first movement is a conscious borrowing from the third of the Brandenburg set, however, I do not know. What I can say is that Bach would most certainly have been delighted to loan it to me; to borrow in this way was exactly the sort of thing he liked to do.

No doubt, although I expect Bach would have found the astringent harmonies and constantly changing time signatures a bit weird.

The concerto follows the general format of its 18th-century inspiration, with two fast movements framing a slower Allegretto second movement. Themes are lobbed back and forth among the members of the small ensemble like the ball in a fast-paced game of tennis and there’s even a very traditional fugue at the end of the first movement. The score directs all three movements to be played attacca (without pause), separated by only a series of more solemn chords to signal a break in the emotional tone.

The entire piece runs around 12 to 16 minutes. It’s fun to hear but difficult to play and gives all the musicians a chance to test their mettle. The members of the SLSO passed that test with flying colors when the work was presented as part of its digital concert series in March and April 2021.

Photoportrait of Russian composer Igor Stravinsky. Taken by George Grantham Bain's news picture agency. Public Domain.

Up next is the suite Stravinsky prepared in 1922 from the score for his 1920 ballet Pulcinella. Commissioned by the eccentric entrepreneur Sergei Diaghilev, for whose Ballets Russes de Monte Carlo Stravinsky had composed his previous hits The Firebird and Le Sacre du Printemps, the ballet drew its visual inspiration from 17th-century Neapolitan commedia dell’arte characters in general and the titular character in particular.

Stravinsky’s score takes the form of a collection of sprightly pastiches on tunes by the short-lived (1710–1736) Italian Baroque composer Giovanni Battista Draghi (a.k.a. Giovanni Battista Pergolesi after his birthplace in Pergola). Later research would reveal that many of them were the result of historical misattributions, but since Stravinsky put his own personal stamp on all of them, it probably matters only to scholars these days. Stravinsky’s full score consists of 21 numbers, including several songs. The composer’s suite includes only eight of those numbers (and none of the songs), but they’re all winners.

The SLSO last performed the Pulcinella Suite in May 2021, but this weekend the experience will be very different. That’s because the orchestra has teamed up with St. Louis Dance Theatre and its Artistic Director Kirven Douthit-Boyd to create a new ballet based on the eight movements of the suite. In an article on the SLSO web site by Iain Shaw, Douthit-Boyd talks about his process in designing the ballet, which is inspired in part by Powell Hall’s origins as a vaudeville theatre.

“It’s kind of paying homage to that,” he said. The idea of a performance troupe coming through St. Louis gave him the impetus to start creating. “I’ve used each of the sections to highlight the dancers in different ways.”

In program notes for the 2021 performance, Denève said that Stravinsky “captures the spirit of several 18th-century composers and others in Pulcinella. He treats them with such respect, creating such tender and charming music.”

The second half of the concert is dedicated entirely to 20th-century French music for the ballet, beginning with the rarely heard score by Claude Debussy (1862–1918) for his 1913 ballet Jeux. It would prove to be one of his last orchestral works as the cancer that would kill him in 1918 began to tax his strength.

In his 2018 book Debussy: a Painter in Sound, Stephen Walsh describes Debussy as a composer for whom visual elements were central to his music and who in his spare time was more likely to be found at the Louvre than the Opera. He was a close friend of painter Henry Lerolle and was very taken with the work of Edgar Degas and Pierre-Auguste Renoir.

This is important not just because Jeux is a ballet but also because the scenario is primarily a set of somewhat static images of two girls and a boy in tennis outfits flirting with each other while supposedly playing tennis. Sergei Daighliev first approached Debussy with the idea in June 1912. The choreographer would be the legendary Vasily Nijinsky who had just scored a major hit in Debussy’s Prélude d’après-midi d’un faune the month before.

Tamara Karsavina, Vaslav Nijinsky and Ludmilla Schollar in Debussy's ballet Jeux in 1913.

The composer’s first response, in a telegram, was “Subject ballet Jeux idiotic, not interested,” but Diaghilev doubled the fee and the deal was done.

One the surface the scenario, such as it is, is as straightforward as it is banal. As described in Walsh’s book, the titular games take place in or near a tennis court. Léon Baskt’s set for the premiere was a densely tree-lined London square. The curtain rises on an empty stage. A ball bounces on to the stage followed by a young man leaping across the stage in a tennis outfit. Two young girls appear and a series of flirtations follows, first between the young man and each of the girls in turn, then among all three of them. It culminates in “a kiss of disturbingly ecstatic intensity” at which point another tennis ball bounces on to the stage “like a passing policeman” and the players flee. After that an airplane was supposed to crash land on the stage, but Debussy apparently made removing that one of the requirements of accepting the commission.

But, as Nijinsky later wrote in his diary, tennis was just a cover for a much older game. Jeux, he wrote, “is the life of which Diaghilev dreamed…he wanted to make love to two boys at the same time and wanted those boys to make love to him. In the ballet the two girls represent the two boys and the young man is Diaghilev. I changed the characters, as love between three men could not be represented on the stage.”

When Diaghilev talked to Debussy, though, it was about the way he wanted the music to reflect a particular style of dancing. He wanted all three dancers to spend a lot of time en point—that is, on their toes—to create a feeling of lightness and elegance. Debussy jokingly said that “I’ll have to find an orchestra ‘without feet’ for this music. I’m thinking of that orchestral color that seems lit from behind.”

That footless orchestra announces itself so softly in the opening bars of Jeux that the opening bars might have been hard to hear for the First Nighters. The dynamic doesn’t rise above piano until a sforzando and a few fortissimo bars mark the entrance of the tennis ball at around rehearsal number 8 (bar 70 or so). For the rest of the ballet forte markings are rare until the flirtation becomes heavier in the last several minutes.

Jeux is familiar territory for Denève, who recorded it with the Royal Scottish National Orchestra as part of an all-Debussy two-disc set for Chandos in 2012. At the time he was Music Director of the orchestra—his first such appointment and a big step up for a young conductor. During his tenure, which ended in 2012, he led the RSNO at the 2006 Proms concerts in London, and for the orchestra’s first ever appearance in France in 2007. He would go on to conduct the Stuttgart Radio Symphony Orchestra (among others) before taking charge of the SLSO in 2019.

Albert Roussel by Agence de presse Meurisse - Bibliothèque nationale de France, Public Domain

Finally, we have the Suite No. 2 from Bacchus et Ariane, op. 43 by Albert Roussel (1869–1937). A relatively solitary and independent figure, probably due to the loss of his parents and grandparents before he turned ten, Roussel was influenced by both Impressionism and Neo-classicism. He absorbed those trends into his own personal style, which Nicolle Labelle (in Grove Online) describes as “harmonically spiced and rhythmically vigorous.”

Although not one of France’s better known musical sons, Roussel is a favorite of Denève, who recorded all of his symphonies with the RSNO for Naxos back in 2010. His performance of Roussel’s Symphony No. 3 with the SLSO in 2020 was enough to convince me that his admiration for the composer is fully justified. Composed in the same year as that symphony, the music for Bacchus et Ariane has a strong rhythmic drive and an appropriately Bacchanalian climax.

In this version of the story of Ariadne (Ariane in French), the spurned lover of the ungrateful Theseus, abandoned on the isle of Naxos, is about to throw herself into the sea when the god Bacchus intervenes. “Shall we dance,” he asks (anticipating Rodgers and Hammerstein by millennia). She accepts, the bacchantes join in, and (in the words of the noted musicologist Nicolas Slonimsky), “the ballet ends in a triumph of Ariadne as the consort of the god of wine.”

I’ll drink to that.

The Essentials: the regular concert series resumes as Stéphane Denève conducts the SLSO in music by Stravinsky, Debussy, and Albert Roussel. The orchestra will accompany St. Louis Dance Theatre and choreographer Kirven Douthit-Boyd in an “adventurous collaboration to imagine Stravinsky’s Pulcinella Suite in an entirely new way. Also on the program are Stravinsky’s Dumbarton Oaks Concerto, Debussy’s ballet Jeux, and the Suite No. 2 from Roussel’s ballet Bacchus et Ariane. Performances are Saturday at 7:30 pm and Sunday at 3 pm, January 10 and 11, in Powell Symphony Hall.

The Saturday concert will be broadcast live on St. Louis Public Radio and on Classic 107.3. Classic 107.3 is also where you can hear Tom Sudholt and yours truly host the Symphony Preview episode about the concert on Wednesday, January 7, from 8 to 10 pm as well as via on-demand streaming beginning on Thursday, January 8.