Jane Glover leads SLSO in delicious meat-and-potatoes Mozart program

An all-Mozart program is the most musically defensible programming choice for ringing the bell at the box office that a symphony orchestra can make. The all-Mozart program being performed this weekend by the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra – led by legendary British conductor Jane Glover – is a magnificent contribution to populist orchestra programming that deserves the crowded houses it started to attract on Friday.

We get two symphonies and a violin concerto, all in major keys, which is to say all meat and potatoes with no diversions, miscellany or  opera. These are some delicious meat and potatoes – performed by an orchestra of almost modest scale, by contemporary standards. For example, when brass and woodwind instruments were present they were only in pairs, and there was only a pair of double basses and only one percussionist on timpani (when an SLSO percussion section can look like a jungle gym).

An orchestra of this scale lets the audience hear the tone and timbre of individual instruments and players. When a theme cycled around the orchestra it was like hearing a baseball infield throw the ball around the horn, where you can hear the distinctive sound of the same ball popping into a series of different mitts. Visually, the more open spacing between chairs gave the musicians wider ranges of motion, so we got to see the more physically expressive players dance more with their instruments.

The program opened with one of the most accessible pieces of what we now call classical music ever composed: Mozart’s Symphony No. 36 in C major. The musical environment is so familiar – for example, from the history of film and cartoon scores – that it’s possible to forget for entire movements that one is listening to melody. It’s like the scene in the basement of the Overlook Hotel in “The Shining” when the zombie bartender tells Jack Torrance that he’s “always been here.” It’s as if these melodies have always been here as a kind of global folk music and one could forget about melody to dwell on harmony and orchestration. Mozart has a way of dropping out one of the two oboes, then one of the two bassoons, for solos, then staging an intersectional oboe/bassoon duet. It’s musically dynamic – a single woodwind slices through the violins in a way that a pair or quartet does not – and clever in a way that refreshes the ear.

For Violin Concerto No. 4 in D major, the orchestra thinned out further, with the bassoons, trumpets and timpani leaving the stage to open up more space for the strings. SLSO called upon one of its own for the featured solo spot, concertmaster David Halen. While it’s always gratifying to see an orchestra treat one of its own musicians like a royal guest, the choice was especially apt for a violin concerto rich in calls and responses between soloist and ensemble and ensemble and soloist. We got to listen to our concertmaster have an intense conversation about Mozart with his coworkers for half an hour.

What a pleasure it was to see Halen standing beside Glover with his orchestra behind him. Simply looking at the man play the part was riveting. Halen is a sizable, almost burly man – one thinks of mid-career Alec Baldwin. A man of his stature could play outside linebacker or would look credible roofing a house. Yet this burly presence did just about everything with a violin that Mozart could imagine – long fluid strokes, short urgent jabs, feverish wailing like some mountain fiddle elegy. Halen’s left wrist will need a break after this weekend.

Lest I be mistaken for an SLSO stooge in writing one gushy review after another, I must say the second half of the program, Symphony No. 38 in D major, while well programmed, was something of a letdown from the first half. It’s hard to say this, but it is partly Mozart’s fault; the Andante, as written, kind of drags. It goes from a decisive musical statement of hesitation to sounding slightly hesitant and even repetitive. This is to say it’s not completely and constantly possessed of genius for every second that sound is happening. Similarly, the orchestra’s performance was slightly less crisp than usual. Again, this is a very limited claim of fallibility – the ends of the movements were slightly less perfectly unanimous than this orchestra has spoiled us to expect. 

However, the arc of this symphony followed well upon the violin concerto, given the intermittently dramatic first violin part. For much of this symphony, coming immediately after the violin heroics of the violin concerto, Halen looked like Clark Kent right after a Superman gig. There he sat  in his violin section, sawing away with the others – beautifully so, yet human. And then Mozart would throw the first violin a cork ball that is a screw ball that is a fastball that is a knuckleball, and it would be like, hey, that’s Superman on first violin.

Though ever so slightly less than perfect, this symphony as performed by SLSO and conducted by Glover remained essential listening. Listen to the use of the woodwinds. Listen to how Mozart groups the oboes with the bassoons and then the oboes with the flutes and then the bassoons with the flutes. The intervals in range between these three pairs of instruments is ideally suited for spotlighting a melody and then returning the melody into a more richly melodic episode joined by the strings. 

The addition of the flutes particularly enriches Mozart’s palate. The flutes almost never do what one can be forgiven to think flutes are there to do, which is sort of trill away as a decorative feature. The flute parts in this symphony made the flautists, literally, rock to deliver their parts. Mozart uses the flute to show the bright colors in a melody and tease out the distinctive sonorities in the bassoon and oboe which then continue to tickle the ear when the spotlight has been shut off and the woodwinds are enfolded in the ensemble again. What a thrilling experience of variation in melody; what a master class on the possibilities of these three woodwind instruments.

Glover was a delight to behold as she led the orchestra. She conducted with athleticism and virtuosic range of hand signals, gestures and body movements. She has one mean magic wand wave with the baton at an entire section, an intense left finger point at a particular player, thrilling wide sweeps right as she sent a theme from the violins to the darker strings, the energy of a wide receiver leaving the playing field to reach for a football as both of her feet left the conductor’s stand in a leap, intense use of her hips as she bent her upper body almost horizontal to the stand, and, on the last movement of the final selection, she swept back and forth and back and forth like someone standing on the deck of a storm-battered skiff, rather than on a conductor’s stand in concert hall. Yet she was not at all stagy or self-centered. Quite to the contrary, everything she did with her body was there in the music and clearly used only to communicate the music to the people playing it.

For that reason, an orchestra of this manageable size was perfect for watching the interaction between a conductor and an orchestra. It was less crowded, with more space between the players and the musicians not stacked as deep, which gave more opportunity to follow the movements of each musician. A videotape of this performance would be of great value in teaching conducting and how musicians should follow a conductor. More than I can remember from any previous orchestral performance, I really felt the extent to which a conductor shapes and guides the performance of a composition. 

The SLSO front office and its music director Stephane Deneve make so many good musical decisions one might never stop to consider what a wide variety of deeply gifted and distinctive guest conductors are provided the opportunity to show St. Louis audiences what a resourceful and talented orchestra calls Powell Hall their musical home. Glover showed us very clearly how very lucky we are.

SLSO performs this program at Powell Hall again 8 p.m. Saturday and 3 p.m. Sunday. See slso.org. 

Chris King covers classical music for The St. Louis American.