PentaTone PTC 5186318, 69:35 ****:
Conductor Hans Vonk (1942-2004) had led the St. Louis Symphony 1996-2002, when neurological deterioration forced him to resign from all conducting duties. Vonk, a Dutch-trained musician who worked in Dresden, the Hague, and in Amsterdam, brought a distinctly middle-European sound to the St. Louis Symphony, which conductors like Gunter Herbig and Leonard Slatkin had already honed into a responsive ensemble capable of relishing large scores. These two performances from Powell Symphony Hall attest to the joie de vivre Vonk could generate from his St. Louis players, the spontaneous virility of their music-making.
The “live” Beethoven First (5-7 November 1996) achieves both serenade and symphonic dimensions under Vonk. The Andante cantabile receives a molded, carefully pointed reading, in which the woodwinds and strings engage in assorted dialogues, the musical phrases nurturing each other. The modulation to the minor in the latter half of the movement calls for a tempo shift from Vonk, the basses and low winds now the center of gravity. Horns and flute, aided by a longing oboe, extend the sometimes darkly-colored idyll into a pastoral of graduated colors, Haydn’s world transfigured into a deeper hue. The Menuetto treads a delicate balance between Mozart’s refinement and a scherzo’s burlesque humor. The trio resonates with delicate clarity, the strings skittering and then gamboling with muscular energy. Humor and light-handed bravura mark the finale, especially the burst of melody Allegro molto e vivace. The lithe figures suggest as much Rossini as they anticipate the aggressive imagination of the mature Beethoven.
The Brahms Fourth (17-18 March 2000) enjoys a warm gloss, the secondary theme of the first movement–what Leonard Bernstein called “a strange tango”– played for its color allure that leads to the treatment of the motifs in ascending and descending thirds. At several points in the development, the spaciousness and deliberate tempi invited comparisons with the classic Koussevitzky rendition. Elastic, broad transition via the E-flat clarinet takes us to the recapitulation, the two-note motif even creamier this time. Graduated stretti punctuated by strings and tympani achieve a grand apotheosis, the St. Louis brass not far from Valhalla. The E Major/Minor Andante, the Brahms analogy to the Pilgrim’s March in Tannhauser, weaves a smartly etched series of variants, the soaring moments in the strings particularly rapt. A rollicking scherzo leads to the mighty passacaglia after Bach’s Cantata No. 150, the individual strands never sacrificing the taut pulse that keeps the eight-bar theme in strict motion. Again, muscular stretti and grand sonorities move us to an ineluctable sense of closure, a fine valedictory for composer and gifted conductor. This is one of eight discs Vonk himself selected as a fitting tribute to his artistic legacy in St. Louis.
–Gary Lemco
