Illustration by Edward Kinsella III
David Halen
He started playing violin at 6, graduated from college at 19, and became the youngest-ever Fulbright recipient. In 1995, the symphony named him concertmaster without an audition. He’s also concertmaster of the acclaimed Aspen Music Festival, and in 2007, Yale University named him a Distinguished Visiting Artist. Halen plays on a 1753 Giovanni Battista Guadagnini violin, and his solos have spanned the concerto repertoire. Washington Post music critic Tim Page called him “incapable of playing a less than musical phrase.”
David Robertson
Musicians appreciate David Robertson’s lyricism; audiences, his ability to make the most serious and challenging music delightful. As music director of the St. Louis Symphony for the past seven years, he teaches effortlessly, and his gentleness has endeared him to members of the orchestra. Robertson studied at London’s Royal Academy of Music and directed the Ensemble Intercontemporain in Paris for eight years; this spring, he’s taking the St. Louis Symphony on its first European tour in more than a decade. He remains principal guest conductor of the BBC Symphony Orchestra, and last year he was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences.
Christine Brewer
She’s the only one of BBC Music Magazine’s top 20 sopranos of the recorded era who started her career teaching music in Marissa, a coal-mining town in Southern Illinois. Brewer then began singing with the St. Louis Symphony and Opera Theatre of Saint Louis choruses; now she’s in her prime, critics say, praising her range, golden tone, and boundless power and control. She sings regularly with London’s Academy of St. Martin in the Fields, the Scottish Chamber Orchestra, the Staatskapelle Berlin, the Gewandhaus zu Leipzig, and the Orchestre de Paris. Then she comes back to Lebanon, Ill., hosts hootenannies, and bakes gingerbread cookies for her neighbors.
Robert McFerrin Sr.
When the often-haughty diva Kathleen Battle met Robert McFerrin in St. Louis, she had tears in her eyes. She knew the history. Three weeks after Marian Anderson smashed the color barrier at New York’s Metropolitan Opera in 1955, McFerrin’s baritone rang deep and clear from the same stage. He performed at the Met nine more times, but sang far more often in Europe, where African-Americans were more readily accepted. In Hollywood, he dubbed Porgy, singing for Sidney Poitier. McFerrin was also an amazing siffleur (whistler). His talents spilled into his son, 10-time Grammy winner Bobby McFerrin, who once said, “I cannot do anything without hearing his voice.”
Sir Colin Graham
Sir Colin Graham found a surrogate father in Benjamin Britten and directed all but one of the composer’s stage works. Graham directed opera at Covent Garden’s Royal Opera House and Glyndebourne before coming to Opera Theatre of Saint Louis in 1978. He never left, but he directed at top opera houses elsewhere—55 world premieres, all told—and softened his exacting demands with quick wit and a gentle spirit. He was working on a new Anna Karenina when he died in 2007—by which time he’d studied theology, became a minister, and been knighted.
Helen Traubel
Helen Traubel sang torch songs and musicals, wrote murder mysteries, and owned a share of the St. Louis Browns baseball team, but she found her truest calling when she sang the parts of Richard Wagner’s Brünnhilde and Isolde at the Met. She performed there between 1937 and 1953. Her voice was called “a gleaming sword,” its power and endurance formidable. In 1959, she wrote her autobiography: St. Louis Woman.
Grace Bumbry
Grace Ann Bumbry was born to a railroad worker and a schoolteacher. She graduated from Sumner High School, won a scholarship to a conservatory on Arthur Godfrey’s Talent Scouts radio competition, and couldn’t use it because the conservatory was segregated. She graduated from Northwestern University instead and made her debut at the Paris Opera when she was 23. Her breakthrough came the following year, in 1961, when Wagner’s grandson cast her in Tannhäuser. A black Venus! Patrons of the Bayreuth Festival shrilled outrage beforehand, but Bumbry performed so brilliantly, they leapt to their feet and gave her a 30-minute standing ovation. She hasn’t sung a small role since.
A Lot Happens in 132 Years
Today, the St. Louis Symphony draws world-class musicians from Europe and Asia, but back in 1880, its talent base came from local German and Czech immigrants. Powell Symphony Hall’s elegance seems almost Platonic, but it started as a glorious vaudeville hall. (When the symphony bought the place in 1966, it was a movie theater; its last offering was The Sound of Music.) Powell was a glorious relief after decades at Kiel Opera House, where you could hear roars from the next-door basketball crowd with every dunk shot. Alas, the move came too late for Vladimir Golschmann, whose tenure as music director (1931 to 1958) was even longer than Leonard Slatkin’s. It was under Golschmann’s refined Parisian baton that the symphony (which now holds six Grammy Awards) started recording and made the first of its many trips to Carnegie Hall.
Pick Five
Tom Sudholt
Former Announcer on Classic 99 KFUO-FM
1. Robert McFerrin Sr.
He was the first black baritone at the Met; he’s been underrecorded and underappreciated.
2. Helen Traubel
She was America’s Wagner soprano through the 1930s and ’40s.
3. Grace Bumbry
Amazing Grace broke the color line at the Bayreuth Festival.
4. Malcolm Frager
The pianist reached the pinnacle of his profession in an all-too-short life.
5. Christine Brewer
She’s the world’s reigning Wagner and Richard Strauss soprano.
