Every once in a long while, a listener stumbles across a composition that moves them from start to finish, finds an ensemble that consistently communicates with their sounds, or encounters a space designed with such perfect acoustics that a single pitch can be beautiful. But finding all three of these together is rare indeed. Friday night at the Bing Concert Hall, Augustin Hadelich’s performance of Benjamin Britten’s Violin Concerto with the Saint Louis Symphony Orchestra was one of these rare events.
Britten’s phenomenal composition was at the center of the experience. The piece grabs attention from the beginning with its unusual order of tempi: a slow start, fast middle movement, and slow final movement. The slow opening tempo and initial whispering tones and timbres of percussion excite curiosity. Beautifully strange, short drones (sustained tones) waft from various sections of the orchestra to accompany the solo violin lines. And the melodic writing is full of an expressionistic melancholy that makes one’s heart fall apart in the gentlest way.
Britten provides contrast in the second movement, where jolts of energy alternate with rhythmic chugging. The cadenza erupts from this context with a whirlwind of thrilling sequences virtuosically accompanied by polyphonic references to earlier musical ideas. And as the second movement dissolves seamlessly into the third and final slow movement, a simple theme emerges: a scale, a musical staircase, a walk up and return down. Britten is able to present this simple figure in entrancingly diverse ways: at various times suspenseful, overwhelming, mournful, and grand. As the piece comes to a close the soft undulations of the soloist over brass harmonies and the careful fusion of solo lines into buzzing, string-section drones are ecstasy-inducing. And Britten allows the listener to indulge in these final moments, finding exquisite musical excuses to keep the sound going until the piece melts away and the hall sits in silence.
The ensuing rupture of applause was well deserved by Friday night’s performers. Violinist Augustin Hadelich was profoundly on point: totally committed to every heavenly-intoned sound he made and visibly engaged the entire time. Hadelich’s etude-like precision in the cadenza made for the fastest, highest double stops I have ever witnessed and his virtuosic control was always musical, never technical display. All of Hadelich’s awe-inspiring performance was inextricably interwoven with the orchestra’s sensitive playing under the baton of David Robertson. The soloist, orchestra, and conductor were so tuned into one another that even their communicative gestures and visual turns to each other looked organically automatic, like waterlilies bobbing on ripples. But the musicians often harnessed that energy for powerful effect, filling Bing Concert Hall to the brim with a voluminous, all-engulfing loudness in which every timbral detail was still audible.
Thomas Adès’s recently expanded orchestral suite based on his 1995 opera Powder Her Face and Shostakovich’s first symphony rounded out the program. The orchestra performed Adès intentionally desynchronized rhythms impeccably and put their dynamic control on display in the symphony but compositionally it didn’t rise to the level of Britten’s piece. At best, the Adès felt like a musically unfulfilling, coy advertisement for the original opera and the Shostakovich symphony like an interesting introduction to a musical style that the composer would go on to develop in more convincing pieces.
But these are quarrels over programming decisions, not the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra’s consummate performances of the selected works. Experiencing this performance of the Britten concerto was so memorable that it overwhelmed all else. But this was the orchestra’s final performance of the tour and the final tour under Robertson’s musical direction. Fitting, then, that they achieved such sublimity last night.
