“This weekend at Powell Hall, music director Stéphane Denève and the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra concluded what has been the strangest of musical seasons with a program of resignation and hope,” writes Eric Meyer in Saturday’s (5/15) St. Louis Post-Dispatch (MO). “Opening the concert, American composer TJ Cole’s ‘Death of the Poet’ set a somber mood. Composed in 2014, the piece was inspired by the 1925 painting ‘Death of the Poet Walter Rheiner’ by Conrad Felixmüller, [which] depicts Rheiner leaping from a high-rise window with a dark cityscape behind him…. Denève and the orchestra managed with apparent ease the prolonged phrasing and sustained backdrop of sound. [In] Mendelssohn’s violin concerto … SLSO second associate concertmaster Celeste Golden Boyer gave the concerto a formidable reading…. The final piece of the concert, fitting for the final performance of the season, was … Beethoven’s Symphony No. 7, a work full of joy and hope…. The orchestra brimmed with energy…. In his opening remarks, Denève thanked the SLSO musicians for their ‘courage and generosity’ in adapting to the difficult pandemic conditions this past season and announced that in the fall, the SLSO will expand the number of musicians onstage to perform full orchestra repertoire.”
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