Review: Ringing in the New with the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra
- Written by Chuck Lavazzi
The second half of the concert opened with Mr. Kernis’s “Musica celestis,” a work of transcendent beauty. Originally the slow movement of the composer’s 1990 String Quartet No. 1, the movement soon gained an independent life of its own. The title translates as “heavenly music” and to my ears it fully lives up to that title, building from a quiet opening to an ecstatic peak before fading out in the highest reaches of the strings, as though ascending to heaven.
“Musica celestis,” as befits its origins, is scored for string orchestra, and the SLSO strings acquitted themselves brilliantly here. The quiet final moments for the work were especially powerful and the overall sound of the section was full-bodied and rich. You could also hear the string quartet origins in the solo passages played so beautifully by Concertmaster David Halen, Associate Concertmaster Heidi Harris, Principal Viola Beth Guterman Chu, and Principal Cello Daniel Lee.Mr. Kernis achieves this with a striking economy of means. The work is, as the composer himself has noted, essentially a passacaglia, in which a simple descending figure first heard in the opening bars becomes the basis for a series of variations, finally leading to the ethereal coda. Mr. Kernis acknowledges the work of 12th century composer, author and mystic Hildegard von Bingen as an influence here.