Meet me in St Louis
Robin Holloway
Last month I used the Boston Orchestra’s new season as a yardstick with which to beat the London orchestras’ effete and provincial programming. And Boston isn’t unique in the so-called conservative US. The San Francisco Symphony would make the point just as well, and my recent trip to St Louis shows that the country’s Middle can stand nobly with both East and West.
In all three, the great names of the 20th century weigh equally with the standard classics of earlier. And some of these classic moderns are represented by rarities: alongside Debussy’s l’après-midi d’un faune, St Louis gives his early Printemps and his late Jeux; as well as the complete score of Stravinsky’s Firebird, we have his symphonies for wind instruments and the piano concerto with wind orchestra, the elegant/eloquent Ode in memory of Koussevitsky, and the delicious late reworking of Bach’s organ-variations on Von Himmel hoch. Other 20th-century concertos are rarer still — Hindemith’s for horn, and those for violin by Busoni (not yet quite characteristic) and Janacek (so late as to be virtually posthumous).
And a great majority of the concerts contain a substantial work (not just your five-minutes’-worth — a customary London sop) by composers still living or only recently departed: native Americans include Harbison, Feldman, Reich, Wuorinen; the Finns Lindberg and Salonen; the French Messiaen and Dutilleux; the Hungarian Ligeti and Kurtág. Brits do very well; Benjamin’s Palimpsest, MacMillan’s Veni Emmanuel, Knussen’s violin concerto, my own Scenes from Schumann. All the music from across nearly three centuries is sensitively and tellingly juxtaposed and integrated: no ghetto, special pleading, tub-thumping, breastbeating distort the balance.
The handsome features of David Robertson, the orchestra’s new chief conductor, flutter in the breeze from every lamppost issuing invitation. Unfortunately, he was elsewhere during my five-day stay, so I didn’t see and hear the new broom in action. The band sounded vital, keen, allover harmonious, with a horn section that never dropped a stitch. Their hall is admirable — a converted Thirties cinema with sumptuous, chandelier-hung entrance and a décor of quasi-rococo white-andgold, rich enough in itself, but chaste by comparison with one of the city’s principle landmarks, the Fox Theater just up the street. Here, the eye goggles and the spirit boggles: the foyer, three storeys high, emulates the grandeur of the pharaohs; the stairways curve and swell as though they are exploring the insides of a whale; the auditorium combines writhing dragons and placid Buddhas within an enclosure of glorious crimson/scarlet pillars; the ceiling is consummated by an ethereal glass dome, the proscenium by a vast elephant, raising his trunk in triumphant salaam. The tour I took promised one of the world’s biggest Wurlitzers, which would rise through the floor in a nimbus of rainbow lights and foaming torrents of sound. Alas, this particular morning only the secondary Wurlitzer was vouchsafed. Its demonstrator gripped his audience like the ancient mariner, enabling me to wander the wonder untrammelled, even to serve myself a beer from one of the array of glamorous pulls, fashioned in a whorl of illuminated crimson glass with brass trimmings; like something around the Celestial Throne in Revelation.
Going about the city on foot, one feels that its inhabitants need all the lavishness they can get. Downtown is uncannily quiet, the stately hunks of office block and warehouse, austere for their first 15 or so storeys only to burst into bloom at the ornate cornices supported by many a bosomy caryatid, seem destined mostly for conversion into loft-apartments; there are next to no shops, and the famous Arch describes a curve of civic barrenness all the more regrettable when one learns what was destroyed to erect this idealistic symbol of the ‘Gateway to the West’ — a teeming old waterfront along the Mississippi, remembered now only in an audiovisual ‘heritageexperience’ and a sad acre pickling in aspic what little was left.
Much the same applies to once glamorous Union Station, pride of the railroads; half its enormous canopy shelters twaddlesome ‘shopping’ (knick-knacks, souvenirs, fudge — rolled on a marble slab as you wait by missionary minstrels ever ready with a spiritual knees-up); the other sticks naked and rusting into the sky, above the inevitable carpark. At least the preposterous façade (Disneyland avant la lettre) and the gorgeous ticket hall (Nouveau Byzantine) survive intact as an hotel. Other grandiose relics of former prosperity are not, for the time being, so fortunate. An immense Opera House, alarmingly girt with improving platitudes incised deep into the living stone, appears to be up for sale; the Babylonian Law Courts hard by appear to be out of business, the fearsome stone seats, formed as primeval reptiles, all along this would-be grand mall had no bums on them (perhaps they’d been moved on, or swallowed up).
Positively desolating, however, is the great gash of empty land between the city centre and the expansive inner suburbs. Here at last domesticity was indicated by its absence: pathetic ruins of a pretty residential area, shored up by keep-out notices, surrounded with grassy graveyards where once the little streets resounded to a thousand parlour-pianos tinkling ragtime. For one of the very few houses that survives (and is indeed lovingly cherished amid the nowhere all around) was the home of Scott Joplin for the first seven years of the last century, before he made an ill-fated move to New York. The modest museum is the more touching for the devastation outside.
My route from town had centred (despite many diversions to left and right) upon Locust Street. Symbolic enough already, its name resonated yet further when I discovered that the city’s other great cultural figure, T.S. Eliot, had been born in it and lived there till his late teens. The waste land the locusts have made of it now came some 30 years after his masterpiece: like all post-war urban disasters it was effected with the highest social and architectural motives. Nothing remains, save the drear terrain of small industry, carparks, sportsgrounds, motorways, till one again reaches midtown and its juicy cinemas as described. And also its heady collection of religious buildings: St Francis Xavier (gruesome Gothic sadism), Third Baptist (constructivist moderne), Masonic (Glaswegian-Greek, its Attic temple perched attic-wise atop a white block of high-rise), Moolah Shrine (garishly stuck with shapes and colours from a toy-box), finally the Basilica of St Louis himself, whose Natural History Museum front yields to a splendid internal space encrusted wherever craftsman could reach with the world’s largest acreage of mosaic. One reels out from this clashing kaleidoscope to be clonked anew by the vivid bird’s-eye pea green of the tiles that clothe the two external domes. But relief is near; only a few blocks on lie the solacing expanses of the generous city park.
Plenty for the eye, the thoughts, the ear, as one settles down in the plush comfort of the ex-cinema seats, to lose oneself in the uniquely animated American way of tuning up wherein fragments of the programme to come, with its indispensable mingling of every epoch of orchestral music, swirl surrealistically about — a little concert in itself.
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