music

Chamber Music Society Serves Tasty Mexican-Flavored Music for Cinco de Mayo, by Chris King, The St Louis American First Bank, Concert Sponsor. The rousing show closer was Panamanian Dances by William Grant Still, whom impresario Marc Gordon described as “the dean of African-American composers.” Credit: Photo from CSO Programming a chamber music concert on May 5 with Cinco de Mayo as an amorphous organizing principle came off brilliantly in the hands of the Chamber Music Society of St. Louis, who packed the Pillsbury Theatre at 560 Music Center for a long night of lively music on Monday. The generous heaping of varied and tasty music cinched the connection to a holiday of Mexican descent for me. At our many beautiful local Mexican restaurants, I need the pozole and a chorizo torta, for starters; a chicken mole, if you have it; ceviche, if you have that; chips and salsa, of course; some pork tamales; I don’t want to stop! Marc Gordon, the society honcho, took a similar ravenous approach to curating this glut of delicious compositions from every corner of the Latin American musical menu. Perhaps the most distinctly Mexican-sounding piece over two solid hours of music was the rousing show closer, Panamanian Dances by William Grant Still. Clearly, this is a pan-Latin American menu – Panama, in this case – and influence is acceptable in a composer, not only national origin. Gordon described Still as “the dean of African-American composers,” and this smoking hot workover of folk music that Still learned from an ethnomusicologist friend shows why this crafty composer belongs in repertoire. Panamanian Dances was performed by the most familiar musical grouping we heard that night, a string quartet, though Still shifted the register of what was possible for strings further south and off the grid. Siyu Zhang led the quartet on violin, with Seul Lee also on violin, Chris Tantillo on viola and Alvin McCall on cello – all masterful St. Louis Symphony Orchestra musicians playing at top form. The program’s second half that ended with Still opened with music by another Black genius, a brother from our block, Scott Joplin. Solace – A Mexican Serenade shows a more ruminative Joplin than his most beloved ragtime numbers, yet the irresistible gaiety of his rhythm rolled right along under the sadness in the nimble hands of pianist Shen Wen, a decorated performer and coordinator of keyboard studies at Saint Louis University. Wen accepted the tough assignment of playing two sets of two-song medleys on solo piano. Joplin’s Mexican siesta was paired with Juventino Rosas, whose name is mostly lost to history (Gordon taught it to me), but whose waltz Sobre Las Olas will start singing in your head after half a bar and you’ll be challenged not to scat along. Charles Chaplin and Chuck Jones (as Bugs Bunny) drilled this ear worm into my brain. I did not know it was written by an indigenous striver who ended up a Mexico City street musician and died young at 26. Wen’s medley in the program’s first half was Teresa Carreño (La cesta de flores) mashed up with Manuel Ponce (Gavota). Ponce was a Mexican composer who found Latin American folk forms just as fertile for innovation as did Still, but French Baroque dance inspired him on this one. Carreño was a prolific Venezuelan prodigy who, Gordon told us, once performed for Abraham Lincoln at the age of nine. Speaking of prodigy, the Chamber Music Society of St. Louis opens its programs with a young artist performance. Zoe Baldwin did a prodigious turn on violin (with Wen, herself a former prodigy who performed on Chinese national TV at age eight, accompanying) on Zigeunerweisen by Pablo Sarasate. This is the old-as-the-hills vagabond mountain music – though this term for Rom people is now considered insulting, to the Spanish composer these were “Gypsy Airs.” Baldwin – assistant concertmaster at Clayton High School and a member of the St. Louis Symphony Youth Orchestra – burned on these wild tunes, which call for both crazy dexterity and outer-soul energy. I thought of the great fiddler Alicia Svigals. All of that – and a star turn by a quietly featured artist, quietly in the sense that she was not billed as such: Alice Dade on flute. Various groupings led by Dade –a world-traveled soloist and professor at the University of Missouri School of Music – carried the first half of the program. After the Zoe Baldwin surprise on the Sarasate, Dade led a trio you don’t hear every season: flute with viola (Tantillo) and harp (Megan Stout). They performed Trio by Carlos Chavez, another Mexican composer who innovated from folk forms – but, in this case, he was writing for an American harp player, Edna Phillips. She was the Philadelphia Orchestra’s principal harpist — the first woman to occupy such a position with a major American orchestra, Gordon told us. The first half of the concert closed with Impresiones de La Puna by Alberto Ginastera, an Argentine composer, where Dade’s flute was joined by the string quartet. McCall’s lyrical flights on cello leapt out at me here – that, and solid, sweet, intricate ensemble playing. Dade really was put to the test by Heitor Villa-Lobos‘ Jet Whistle, which falls somewhere in between the invention of industrial music on acoustic instruments and a novelty tune. The musicians – Ranheim on cello but especially Dade on flute – were challenged by the Brazilian composer to whistle like a jet roars. Villa-Lobos was another street musician who became a composer, though he busked the streets of Rio, not Rosas’ Mexico City. His Jet Whistle is a study in writing for a duet. The flute and cello have such different sonic resources and technical challenges, it was fascinating to watch the flute and cello trade off figure and ground, melody and rhythm. Flute holding down a repetitive rhythm for the cello to solo over was an especially choice challenge that these musicians enjoyed rising to. On a cool night in St. Louis, thinking of the sizzling temperatures far to our south (though coming