“As of Thursday night, music director Stéphane Denève and the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra returned to Powell Symphony Hall for a live concert,” writes Sarah Bryan Miller in Friday’s (10/16) St. Louis Post-Dispatch. “It’s on a small scale, of course. After a team of medical experts, working with the staff, decided that the hall (which seats 2,700) could safely accommodate as many as 300 people, management decided to go with just 100 in the audience, carefully spaced, and chamber ensembles performing…. These concerts are abbreviated; this one was just an hour long, with no intermission…. The concert-opener was a video recording of the four members of the SLSO trombone section performing ‘Fanfare for the Uncommon Woman,’ by Joan Tower, a onetime composer-in-residence here, while distanced on an otherwise empty stage. They’re a tight group and played the complicated score perfectly. A live string orchestra next performed ‘Starburst,’ by Jessie Montgomery [which] got a solid, committed performance…. Then came … Beethoven’s Symphony No. 3, ‘Eroica.’ The orchestra was close in size to what the composer would have expected. It received a stirring, accurate reading throughout…. It was a performance to cherish and not just because we’ve been waiting so long.”
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