Symphony Preview: Swan songs

Twentieth century American composer William Grant Still (1985–1978) has been getting a fair amount of long-overdue attention in recent years. His one-act opera “Highway 1, USA” got an exceptional production at Opera Theatre of St. Louis in 2021. Just last month on his “Sticky Notes” podcast, conductor Joshua Weilerstein did a detailed analysis of Still’s 1931 Symphony No. 1 (“Afro-American”)— the most popular of all American symphonies until 1950. Search for him on Spotify and you will find an impressive list of recordings of his music. And yet for decades after his death his work was routinely ignored.

William Grant Still By Carl Van Vechten/ Adam Cuerden Public Domain

[Preview the music with the SLSO's Spotify playlist.]

I mention all of this because the local premiere of Still’s 1965 “Threnody: In Memory of Jean Sibelius” opens the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra (SLSO) concerts this weekend (Friday and Sunday, November 22 and 24). Guest conductor Jonathon Heyward (last seen here in 2022) will be on the podium and Yeol Eum Son will make her SLSO debut in a program that includes the Piano Concerto No. 2 in G minor, Op. 16, by Sergei Prokofiev (1891–1953) and (not surprisingly) the Symphony No. 5 by Jean Sibelius (1865–1957).

What motivated Still to honor Sibelius? To begin with, there was the fact that, as Matthew Mendez wrote in program notes for the Boston Symphony, “during the 1920s, when Still was discovering his musical voice, Sibelius’s scores were in considerable vogue in the English-speaking world” and his symphonies “were viewed by many as outstanding achievements with which any young composer would need to come to grips.”  There’s also the fact that Sibelius, like Still, insisted on composing in his own voice, regardless of what particular school was in vogue at any given moment.

The ”Threnody” is short but intense, opening with a dramatic declaration from the brass section followed by a sustained elegy that alternates between lament and funeral march. It’s intensely moving and yet comforting at the same time.

Prokofiev in New York, 1918 Photo by Bain News Service

The Prokofiev concerto that follows sounds like something of a lament at first, possibly because the composer’s friend pianist Maximilian Schmidt had committed suicide just a few months before the concerto's first performance in 1913. Then fate dealt the composer a second blow in the form of a fire that incinerated the original manuscript along with the composer’s apartment.

The rebirth of the concerto took place in 1923, when Prokofiev completely rewrote the piece from memory. By then, however, his approach to composition and orchestration had changed significantly and he had written another concerto (his Third, in C major). "I have so completely rewritten the Second Concerto," he wrote to a friend "that it might be considered the Fourth."

Number it how you will, the G minor concerto is, as I wrote in a 2019 preview, a testament to Prokofiev's skill at the keyboard. It's a wildly difficult piece, with four movements in which the tempo never falls below Allegro and a stunningly challenging first movement cadenza that, at around five minutes, takes up almost as much time as the rest of the movement. In fact, as David Nice wrote in BBC Music Magazine, even Prokofiev “got into a terrible mess trying to perform it with [Ernest] Ansermet and the BBC Symphony Orchestra in the 1930s, when it had gone out of his fingers."

Finally, a few words about the Sibelius Symphony No. 5 in E-flat major, Op. 82. Originally composed in 1914 and 1915 and first performed on the composer’s 50^th birthday in 1915, the Fifth went through several subsequent rewrites, reaching its final form in 1919. Having heard both the original four-movement 1915 version and final three-movement 1919 version, I have to say that the composer saved the best for last.

Ainola, photographed in 1915 By Unknown author Public Domain

Slightly shorter and more structurally compact that it was the first time around, the final version of the symphony covers a vast swath of emotional territory.  From the first movement’s mellow horn quartet, swirling woodwind figures, and mysterious bassoon solo over pianississimo strings, to the grand sweep of the Allegro molto final movement, this is music that overflows with both the light and darkness of Finland’s wild beauty. Possibly the most glorious example of that comes at the very end of that movement with the famous “swan theme”—so called because Sibelius wrote it after witnessing a flight of sixteen swans, which he described as “one my greatest experiences”:

Lord God, what beauty! They circled over me for a long time. Disappeared into the solar haze like a gleaming silver ribbon… Strange to learn that nothing in the whole world affects me—nothing in art, literature, or music—in the same way as do these swans and canes and wild geese.

In fact, before he turned thirty Sibelius had already left urbanity to live closer to the soil. From 1892 until his death in 1957, Sibelius lived and worked in Ainola, a home he had built entirely of wood (he didn't want to hear the sound of rain in metal gutters) on Lake Tuusula in the Finnish forest, where he often went for long walks. That love of nature informs every bar of the both the first and final versions of the Symphony No. 5. This weekend, you’ll hear the latter. Done well, it will be inspiring.

The Essentials: Jonathan Heyward conducts the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra and piano soloist Yeol Eum Son in William Grant Still’s “Threnody: In Memory of Jean Sibelius,” Prokofiev’s Piano Concerto No. 2, and Sibelius’s Symphony No. 5. Performances are Friday at 10:30 am and Sunday at 3 pm, November 22 and 24, at the Touhill Performing Arts center on the UMSL campus. A recording of the Friday morning concert will air on Saturday, November 23, at 7:30 pm on St. Louis Public Radio and Classic 107.3.