David B. Olsen is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of English at Saint Louis University, where he teaches courses in writing and literature. He is a gallery assistant at the Pulitzer and the co-host of The Review Process, a local arts podcast.

by David B. Olsen, Gallery Assistant

Immersed in the familiar quiet of the Pulitzer, it’s sometimes less easy to lose oneself and drift than it is to develop a kind of sonar.  As a gallery assistant, for example, I have learned to recognize people by the speed of their strides or the force of their footfalls; although everyone is never equally visible, some little electric presence is still always stirring. The space of the building doesn’t echo exactly, so much as it resounds, and the light white noise of movements or murmurs floats through the galleries and collects in the corners. To hear it filled with music for the first time at Wednesday night’s concert challenged my relation to the space. It’s not like I was lost as much as transplanted; the simple shapes and contours of Tadao Ando’s architecture seemed to multiply and became many in the bouncing of sounds between them. Even in its most meditative moments, the music of Jonathan Harvey was expansive and alive, searching, active, and enveloping.

For the first performance of the St. Louis Symphony for Reflections of the Buddha, five works by the British composer Jonathan Harvey were chosen by Music Director David Robertson, who remarked that Harvey’s love of simple sounds and chords belied a dark, slumbering sense of annihilation in his music. In particular, Harvey’s integration of electronic music–reflected in two of the concert’s pieces–seemed to invoke the spiritual world of “ghosts and angels,” whose language was composed of sounds that we would not immediately recognize. And although the Buddha is often associated with a sense of serenity and bliss, there was a certain haunting quality to Harvey’s work that reminds us that to be spiritual is to dwell among spirits, to commune with a spectral world on the other side of our own. In the opening piece, for example– “Buddhist Song No. 1” (2003), featuring lyrics adapted from A Guide to the Boddhisattva’s Way of Life–the piano’s innocent, childlike arpeggios were interrupted by a few violent stabs on the high notes, as though to remind us of the impermanence of joy. The lyrics, sung by mezzo-soprano Debbie Lennon, also recalled the vagaries of life in an often unwelcome world: “Just as on a dark and cloudy night / A flash of lightening for a moment illuminates all, / So for the worldly, through the power of Buddha’s blessings, / A virtuous intention briefly occurs.”

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Peter Henderson, Debby Lennon and Eric Gaston

by Eddie Silva, External Affairs and Publications Manager, St. Louis Symphony

“There’s a certain slant of light…” Emily Dickinson’s phrase comes to mind inside The Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts on a late autumn afternoon. The light enters slyly through Tadao Ando’s sublime architecture, a play of radiance and shadow.

Appropriately enough, silent Buddhas stand sentinel in this light, at peace in the rage of the world.

Peter Henderson is at the keyboard, at the foot of the stairwell below Ellsworth Kelly’s Blue Black. He’s here to rehearse the second of Jonathan Harvey’s Buddhist Songs, which will be performed Wednesday evening as part of the Pulitzer and St. Louis Symphony’s collaborative concert series.

I know nothing about Jonathan Harvey. To know as much as I know you can Google his name. I know now, from listening to Henderson and mezzo-soprano Debby Lennon rehearse Buddhist Song No. 2, “With excellent raiments,” that he can make music that resonates through the body like shimmering water. Read the rest of this entry »

From Brett Kostrzewski, the host of “This Week at the Symphony” on KSLU:

Music commonly conveys familiar emotions such as the triumph of Mahler’s second symphony or the heart-wrenching sadness of Tchaikovsky’s sixth. Less commonly, however, music can become a dream based on a famous tale, containing both sleep’s intrinsic darkness and the constant rumble of reality. This is Salvatore Sciarrino’s opera Lohengrin, performed by musicians of the St. Louis Symphony and David Robertson at the Pulitzer this past Wednesday.

“It’s a bit unusual,” said bassoon player Felicia Foland. This may be the understatement of the year, as the bassoonists were tapping the reed with their tongues, the flutists were blowing through the instrument without pitch, the strings glissed like I’ve never heard before, and the percussionist gently rumbled thunder on a large bent piece of steel. A daunting and confusing score was visible over the Maestro’s shoulder, demanding such difficult and unusual sounds. It was executed with surreal mastery by his musicians.

Yet the most unique sounds and the most energy came from soprano Marianne Pousseur, and if any emotional connection could be made with this piece, it would have to be with her performance. Dreams occur in the brain, but somehow our logic escapes us as the impossible seems routine, and even the inexplicable images can leave us with a sense of loss or love when we awake. Pousseur served as this bridge to the heart, pouring energy into her “singing” that one could feel across the small space. Read the rest of this entry »

Concert-goers in the Grand Foyer at Powell Symphony Hall

Working in Grand Center, or the “the intersection of art and life,” I inevitably pal around with other arts institutions, and experience different forms of art. Friday, November 12, was the fifth annual “Bloggers’ Night” at our neighbor/partner in crime Powell Symphony Hall. Eddie Silva, the St. Louis Symphony Publications Manager, invited me and several other St. Louis bloggers to attend a concert in exchange for online digests of our experiences.

Let me first say that I love Powell, and if you haven’t been to the Symphony in a while, go. You’ll immediately feel more cultured, happier and as if you’re really living, even if you know nothing about classical music. Pronouncing the names of composers is intimidating, and I’ve wondered if I’m not refined enough to touch Powell’s red velvet handrails, but you don’t need to be an art major to enjoy the Pulitzer, and you don’t need to be a classical musician to enjoy a concert. Read the rest of this entry »

Soprano Susan Narucki and violinist David Halen discuss performing Gyorgy Kurtag’s Kafka-Fragmente, after rehearsing for this week’s concerts.

The stylus Concert Series begins tonight and tomorrow night with Gyorgy Kurtag’s Kafka-Fragmente. For more information on these and other concerts at the Pulitzer, visit our concerts page.

David Robertson, Music Director of the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra, describes how Gyorgy Kurtag’s Kafka-Fragmente relates to the work of Ann Hamilton.

For every exhibition, the Pulitzer teams up with the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra for a concert series related to concepts behind the works of art in the galleries. The stylus Concert Series begins this September 14th and 15th. For more information, visit our main website.

Right now, the sounds of a piano are drifting up from the galleries, through the hallway, and into our offices.  The musicians from the Symphony are having their dress rehearsal for tonight’s performance. This is everyone at the Pulitzer’s first taste of the program and it’s nice — it’s like a little primer to get us in the mood.  And so far, it’s sounding really good… I might sneak into the galleries in a few to eavesdrop a little more…