Stéphane Denève takes the baton at the St. Louis Symphony

It’s February 8, and Union Station’s ballroom is a giant valentine, the lights gelled pink, the tulips and table linens candy-heart red. Guests bypass Indian and Asian fusion stations to line up for French (beef bourguignon, salade périgourdine, crêpes Suzette) or St. Louisan (T-ravs, pulled pork sliders, gooey butter cake). There’s a happy little shiver of anticipation in the room, heightened by rather a lot of celebratory Champagne. We are here to welcome the new music director of the St. Louis Symphony, Stéphane Denève.

At long last, the guest of honor enters the room, his chartreuse tie bright against all that pink. He stops short to chat with the Fabulous Motown Revue’s horn player, his grin pushing deep dimples into his soft cheeks. Marie-Hélène Bernard, president of the St. Louis Symphony, nudges Denève along. He steps forward to shake hands with the photographer who’s trying to take his picture.

Denève even looks like a Romantic composer, his long, curly reddish locks falling forward as he bends his tall frame toward an elderly woman who’s tucked her arm through his crooked elbow. Still, had he been raised in, say, Wentzville, he’d just seem like a nice guy. What transforms him is the unabashed Gallic chivalry, the way he swoops low to kiss every woman’s hand. After speaking a little French with him, Marjorie Johnson pronounces him “très sympa, charmant.” Kina Shapleigh says, “Conductors can be very flat and formal, but he has this joie de vivre—” her hand arcs high. “It’s like Champagne.”

When Denève has logged about 20 minutes of hand-kissing and shoulder-squeezing (men are not exempt from his tactile warmth), I ask, keeping my voice low, how he’s bearing up. Is he an introvert, or an extrovert? Is this all too much?

“It’s overwhelming and moving,” he says. “It’s incredible to feel so welcome. I know people say that Missouri is very warm, but the way they want to say something in French, the way they want to say welcome to me…” His marveling seems sincere, even a little boyish.

We take seats for the obligatory

St. Louis video, Ted Drewes holding a concrete upside down and so on, followed by remarks from various orchestra members. It’s far more toast than roast, although there’s a little obligatory teasing about The Hair.

Finally, Denève walks onstage. “I have been told not to prepare anything, because it was kept secret,” he says, cheerfully blowing either the strategy or the syntax. Saying he is “over the moon to be here,” he announces that he will play “Clair de Lune” for us. Moving toward the piano, he adds, “It’s famous that music starts when words stop. I hope that the music will speak for me.”

Denève loves music that tells a story—and if it doesn’t, he’ll invent one for himself as he listens. “I feel that music is always telling us a mysterious tale, and it is only a matter of imagination to unveil it,” he explains in our first interview. “We humans need stories; it’s chaos otherwise. Why do we do this or that? Why are we here? Storytelling helps us feel that we belong to something, that we are a community.”

His own story? Born in 1971, to a family living in Roncq, in northern France. No lineage of famous musicians—although his father did play the tuba in the town band. Stéphane wasn’t a toddler on a prodigy track; his first ambition was to be a foreign correspondent, and his second was to run for public office. At one point he quit music to invent a video game. His mother, he says, wanted him to be a doctor.

Still, he took trumpet lessons, and at 10, he heard one of the nuns at his Catholic school playing the organ and was so enraptured, he began hiding to listen to her practice. When she discovered him, rather than scold, she helped find him a place in the conservatory in nearby Tourcoing. By 14, he was conducting its student orchestra.

As a boy, Stéphane saw plays by Shakespeare and Racine and came home elated, curious, even a little bit frustrated. How was it possible to connect that intensely, that lyrically, with a crowd of strangers? How could he do that?

In his teens, he studied with André Dumortier, an acclaimed Belgian pianist, practicing for hours every day, soaking up Dumortier’s aesthetic. At the Conservatoire de Paris, he won first prize, then became a pianist for the chorus of the Orchestre de Paris. The legendary conductor Sir Georg Solti spotted his talent and made him a conducting assistant. Solti was another huge influence, Denève says, capable of rapt concentration on the tiniest details and filled with “a kind of sacred fire.”

At 22, Denève conducted his first opera; he’s since led productions at the Royal Opera House, the Glyndebourne Festival, La Scala, Deutsche Oper Berlin, the Saito Kinen Festival, the Opera National de Paris… He’s also served as the music director of the Royal Scottish National Orchestra and the Brussels Philharmonic (he’ll continue with the latter through 2022). Reviewers have nearly always been kind to Denève; one critic described him as “one hundred percent in the moment of every moment.”

He’s recorded the music of Poulenc, Debussy, Ravel, Franck, Honegger, Prokofiev, and Connesson, and because Guillaume Connesson is very much alive, I emailed him in France to ask his verdict. A French professor translated his reply: “He doesn’t so much ply a craft, like so many classical musicians do; rather; he is living a love story with music.” Not the least bit narcissistic, Denève spends enormous amounts of time with a score, Connesson continued, “returning to the composer’s process of conception and writing in order to understand the sensitivity.” He doesn’t just reproduce a piece of music; he breathes life into it, giving “one of the greatest pleasures a composer can feel: the pleasure to hear the full force of your work, just as it was in my head as I was writing it, and sometimes even better!”

Denève counts among his friends the French pianist Jean-Yves Thibaudet, best man at his wedding; cellist Yo-Yo Ma; and violinists Joshua Bell and Gil Shaham (brother-in-law to Denève’s predecessor, David Robertson). Deborah Borda, president and CEO of the New York Philharmonic, says she usually visits guest artists once a week, but Denève she visits daily: “He’s filled with life, and we always have fascinating conversations. His concerts have a special buoyancy to them. He makes people around him happy.”

Whether she knows it or not, she’s tapped into something that isn’t accidental. Denève worries about whether the people around him are happy. “I suffer a lot,” he tells me, “when people feel bad.”

Powell Hall’s lobby smells like a florist’s shop, the dropped petals not yet swept up. Trays are being arranged for an appreciation lunch for the musicians. But first, they must rehearse.

Inside the hall, cello and bass cases litter the floor in front of the first row. Players scrape back their chairs and settle themselves, and there’s an atonal clash of sound that’s both painful and interesting. As it crests, I watch a woman sawing almost angrily on her viola, determined to warm it into beauty. Then, at an unseen signal, the instruments quiet. Denève strides onstage, his long legs clad in skinny black pants and topped by a black tunic that I earlier made the mistake of comparing to a chef’s jacket. He has it custom-made in Belgium, and, no, it was not inspired by the garb of a chef. Luckily, he’s too respectful of good food to take umbrage.

“Good morning, bonjour,” he says briskly. “Something important”—they are changing the order of rehearsal. “So voilà. ‘Eine Kleine Nachtmusik.’” That simply, they begin.

Even when Denève’s hands describe soft curves, those curves are precisely shaped, and the movements of his white baton are easy for a musician to follow. He throws his imagination and his entire body into conducting: One minute he’s a mischievous grandfather, beckoning children into a wondrous secret room; the next, he hunches like a comic villain, quieting the music into suspense. He straightens into an aristocrat, one hand raised elegantly to bring up the volume. Then he’s an impatient peasant woman, cranking her arms forward to build urgency.

He lets the sound swell, then urges them softer—softer than they have ever played before. As they learn this new restraint, they sound a little held-back. The next time through, they own it.

“We’re going to have to have an extreme amount of control over our instruments,” Cally Banham, solo English horn, predicts. “Our envelope’s going to get bigger—the expanse of our range and the amount of control at the soft and the very effervescent ends.”

When I ask Denève about his affection for extremes, he answers with a verbal shrug: “Who likes tepid water? Music allows me to express the extremes of life without boundaries. I don’t have to temper it with any social normality.” The phrasing stops me for a second—what does it mean to temper with social normality? Maybe his exquisite manners exhaust him, I think. Or maybe, when he’s conducting, he needn’t be concerned about anyone’s individual unhappiness, because he is expressing something big enough to change everyone’s mood.

After “Eine Kleine,” questions pop: A cellist wants to know about an accent on 41, a violinist about a page turn. They feel comfortable with Denève, who’s been asked back as a guest conductor almost every season since 2003.

“This orchestra has great DNA,” he tells me. “Sometimes you have this kind of thing you say because it sounds good, but this is actually real. I came back always with pleasure, because I knew the music-making would be very dedicated. I can always try something, and if it’s a bit crazy, I will see some smiles, but it’s an orchestra that always tries first.”

(Banham puts it this way: “Nobody ever, ever phones it in. It’s like a code of honor that you have to put your heart into it, no matter how you feel or what you’re dealing with at home.”)

“It can be very hurting,” Denève continues, “when you feel a resistance, you feel people don’t want to try.” He loathes pettiness, “wasting time with irrelevant and small problems,” and he hates it when a musician “shuts off,” freezing a disagreement instead of starting fresh. “I can’t work without friendly feelings.”

Rehearsal resumes, the orchestra gliding into Brahms’ Symphony No. 2—which they’ll be recording as well as performing. “Not too tense,” he warns as they begin. Half a minute later, he stops them: “Forgive me. We have to be more compact. I’m afraid about the length of the notes. I would like to make a bigger difference between…”

Concertmaster David Halen, whose job is to make sure the orchestra understands the conductor’s direction, is already nodding. Denève is thrilled that Halen is so sensitive and that they are so often on the same wavelength. “Another thing,” Denève continues. “Can we just wait a little bit for the fourth bar of the G?” Every second receives minute attention, yet he urges the musicians to “be a little bit more free. Don’t get too predictable.” In his mind, discipline and abandon are partners, not opposites.

They move to “The Lark Ascending,” by Ralph Vaughan Williams. Denève wants the phrase for the cellos to diminish in volume each time, “otherwise it is too mechanical… I would like that to be joy. It’s only four bars, and it is full of joy.” He asks them to play a more tender passage “like you discover a new baby and don’t want to wake the baby.”

He bends toward the string section, his back rounded by the desire to come close, to express, to connect. Denève is the same off the podium, which makes him a fundraiser’s dream: He eagerly meets with donors. It would have been so easy to stay in Europe, where symphonies receive government subsidies, and “you can be in your ivory tower just thinking about music. But in America, where these institutions are only supported by individuals, you feel there is passion. People actually ask you why you do something; they want to understand; they want to be a part of it. I love to invite people into my home, and this is the same thing on a bigger scale.”

This is not the sort of profile you can sink your teeth into: There are no colorful storms of temper, no scurrilous bits of gossip. You’d think, from his love of extremes, that Denève would at least have a mercurial personality. But his wife’s nickname for him is Sunshine.

“I have a great appetite for life,” he says, “and I always prefer the glass to be half full!” A man who speaks with exclamation points, he is often described as unusually warm, open, empathetic.

“With my wife, when we watch a movie, I know exactly if she’s moved, if she’s crying, without looking,” he says. “She will say, ‘How did you know I changed subjects in my head?’ I say, ‘I feel your energy.’

“I feel I’m very normal,” he adds quickly. “It’s just that I have a natural care for people to feel good. I suffer so much if there is a dinner and I know somebody is not in a good mood.”

The paradox is that conducting turns his own emotional life into a roller coaster, the music reaching the most extreme highs and lows of human experience. “Luckily, I have in my life stability,” he says. “I’m very lucky to be happily married and to have a daughter who is nice.”

Before they anchored his life, he found it “very hard to be alone after a performance. You have this applause, and then you are alone in your hotel room. I would go into the hotel bar just to be around people. I don’t have any addictions—I never put a cigarette between my lips; I never took drugs; I enjoy a bit of wine. But I have been addicted to human presence.”

Like most of us, Denève is over-busy these days, and off the podium, he can be preoccupied, those exquisite manners turning perfunctory. He catches himself quickly, though, zapping back to the moment like a stretched bungee cord that’s suddenly released. The only thing he wants to screen out is background music: “I can’t help but listen to it carefully—so I suffer in restaurants when the music is too loud. I am the nightmare of many restaurant managers!”

Denève doesn’t even own a stereo; he only listens to music in working sessions, and then it’s coming through earphones on his computer. “Music is always singing in my head,” he explains, “so I don’t need to listen to it. I prefer the silence when I am alone.”

Surely there’s more than background music that throws him off his game?

“People losing their smiles and being negative does scare me,” he says. “I want people around me to be happy.”

Bernard describes him as “someone who brings a lot of joy to the stage. He makes you forget how challenging life is and connect to what matters.” She pauses, then smiles. “He has in some ways a very therapeutic presence. He’s amazingly anchored in the moment. What he wants is for you to love the music. He wants to remove the barriers that people so often self-impose.”

As Denève was conducting the Russian National Orchestra in the Napa Valley, the power went out. In the velvet dark, the musicians continued playing, their conductor’s sweeping invisible gestures stirring a slight breeze. They played for “what felt like an eternity,” he says. “Then I turned and said to the audience, ‘The musicians are not only playing with their hearts; they also play by heart!’”

On the face of it, the blackout was a catastrophe, yet it’s such moments of communion that he seeks. He considers orchestral playing and conducting “the only tangible proof of telepathy”—although, to the orchestra’s relief, he doesn’t rely on that. His guidance is always clear, even when he’s asking them to create “unreal musical colors that one can only imagine.” He’s asked them to play “unheard emotions,” even “a very loud silence.”

“It is possible,” he insists. “It is just a question of energy. We all know that a  silence can be neutral, relaxing, or heavy and tense. Even more so in music.”

Rehearsing the film score for Alexander Nevsky with the symphony chorus, Denève wants anything but silence. His hand karate-chops toward the strings, telling them to punctuate hard, to play as though they are afire with Russian patriotism. As he speaks, he lifts his tunic, unselfconscious, to hike up his pants. “Where is Amy? Ah, yes.” He waves at chorus director Amy Kaiser, who’s gone up in the balcony to listen. “Was the balance OK?” he calls.

“It’s terrific,” she calls back.

“So there were no problems? I feel useless!” He resumes conducting, looking around periodically to gauge her reaction. He’s worried about losing the chorus as the orchestra builds. Kaiser asks the singers to be crisper and louder, while Denève says, “As much as I love the drama, timpani, let’s try to see how we can accommodate.” Showing them how to build inexorably to the climax, he staggers in slow motion off the podium. Then, the explosion. He looks up at Kaiser again. “OK? You can live with that? I mean, the last two, three bars, I want to go for it, so…” She nods, and he turns back: “Arise, people of Russia!”

He doesn’t want the chorus to sound staccato or singsong. “You have to convince us that we have to rise. It’s like being at a party and convincing someone to get up and dance. Allez!”

People are listening intently, heads tilted, faces soft, like grad students with a beloved professor. He demonstrates the guillotine, a sharp cutoff of sound. A minute later, he’s saying, “Now let’s try to create more atmosphere. There’s too much energy, just energy everywhere. Just a little bit more frozen in the attitude.” For the thunderous crescendo, he gropes for an analogy: “You know this big thing that…caterpillar?” They giggle. “Compressor? I don’t know. It’s big and—” Several people grasp his meaning at once, and their scattered voices call out triumphantly, “Steamroller!”

When they resume playing, they capture that force.

Backstage before an all-Prokofiev concert, musicians mill about. Denève is in white tie, the tailcoat’s aplomb at odds with his restless pacing. I ask whether he suffers stage fright.

“Actually, no, I’m kind of impatient—I want to go.” He recalls an unfortunate student at the Paris conservatory who boasted that he had no stage fright. “Don’t worry,” his teacher said acidly. “It will come with talent.” Denève laughs. “So maybe I’m stupid? But the fact is, it’s a blessing.” He mentions a singer, kindly omitting the name, who vomits before every performance. “It’s not like I am better or worse. I’m just as nervous about doing well, about not disappointing people. But I can’t wait!” One knee jiggling, he raises his long baton (they come in different lengths, like Harry Potter wands) and swoops it through the air like a baton twirler fronting a marching band.

The harpist, Allegra Lilly, comes up snuffling a little (how do they all keep from sneezing and coughing onstage?) but happy to see him. It was the French repertoire that gave the harp its voice in the orchestra,” she’ll tell me later. Being French himself, she says, Denève “has a romanticism in his approach that lends itself beautifully to those gauzy, lush sounds…the glissandi, the beautiful rolled chords. He does a lot with soft sounds and soft gestures; there’s so much color to be found just in that range. He’ll take the time to shape just one phrase; he’ll just say one sentence, and it all makes sense.”

When he walks onstage, Denève tells the audience that acclaimed pianist Yefim Bronfman “will play for us an unplayable concerto,” Prokofiev’s rapid-fire Piano Concerto No. 2. “I can tell you, it’s impossible, but nevertheless, he will do it.”

And so he does—“not one wrong note out of a million,” Denève enthuses to St. Louis Public Radio at intermission. After the radio interview, the two men step into the elevator together, Denève excited about the supper they’re having after the performance and Bronfman asking how to dress: Is it a nice place? The everyday world clicks back into place.

On a Sunday afternoon, about 20 little girls, refugees from Syria, take turns peering through glass doors into Powell’s gilded lobby. Welcome Neighbor STL volunteers found them all fluffy pastel Cinderella dresses (searching “flower girl dresses” on Facebook Marketplace did the trick), plus slippers and, of course, tiaras. Now they are princesses, entering a symphony hall that was modeled on the Palace of Versailles.

As they line up to meet Denève, one child, too young for irony, wiggles her foot out of her patent leather shoe, accidentally kicks it, and wails that she’s lost her slipper. Another announces to no one in particular that she is not a damsel in distress. A third reaches the maestro and stumps him with a question about the violin. Laughing, he finds a volunteer who plays violin, and he and the little girl listen together.

Introducing the concert, Denève is expansive. “Before the show, I saw a lot of beautiful princesses all around here, and I hope you will enjoy the beautiful music of Mr. Prokofiev.” He’s missing his own young daughter, Alma, who’s now 11. And he’s missing his Swedish wife, Åsa Denève, who’s with Alma in Glasgow.

“Åsa used to travel with me all the time,” he sighs. “Now, because of Alma’s school, she cannot do that. It’s another six, seven years where we have to dedicate her time to Alma. Luckily”—he brightens—“we can Skype. We laugh a lot together. She’s very funny and kind.” She’s also a planner; he’s the one tossing in surprises, brainstorms, monkey wrenches. For all her cool deliberation, though, she is “very instinctive” in the way she interacts with the world, he says: “She was an only child, and her parents had a kennel of Labrador retrievers and a stable of horses.” Her connection with nature refreshes him: “I love her point of view.” He knew they’d be together, he adds, the minute he saw her. “I was very impressed by her eyes.”

So he’s also a romantic outside the world of music?

He seems reluctant to claim it. “I’m sentimental, maybe. What the word really means is complicated. If I am romantic, then it is that I have a passion for the energy of the other. I’m caring for the feeling, and I like to create a certain sense of harmony and beauty. I try to see the beauty in things, in the relationship between things. I see that things go beyond the facts, and we can build this very refined, atmospheric meaning.”

Careful with words, he spurns technical terms at rehearsal: “Music is too ambiguous. If we share this ambiguity with a sensation, a comparison, it’s much more efficient, because then people feel that—and if they feel it together, it’s magical. It’s like when you drink a great wine and someone says, ‘Drink again. Do you feel this special berry?’ And you concentrate yourself to try to feel it, and then it means something much, much deeper.”

Earlier this year, Denève attended a Baptist service on the North Side, and he wound up staying for the entire hours-long service. “I didn’t realize how much there was actually of just a comfort feeling that was the focus of the entire Mass somehow.” (His background is Catholic.) “The message that was repeated again and again was ‘You are not alone. Somebody cares for you.’ I’ve been going to Mass in Europe, where there was very much a kind of feeling of ‘OK, take care of what you do, you have to be good,’ and there was a kind of threat in that. Here, there was a joy and a very simple attitude to just say, ‘There is somebody helping you, somebody there for you.’ And this beautiful faith shared with joy of music in a very extroverted way. People exposed their emotions so openly. It was quite moving, actually. I stayed the entire time because I felt good.”

One thing Denève does regret in the States is the high price of symphony tickets; he’s relieved that they’re more affordable in St. Louis than they are in most cities with comparable orchestras. Economic inequity troubles him, and he’s wary of the habits he’s been able to acquire: “You get used to a certain comfort, and if you lose it you can feel very…downgraded. And then you realize it’s not the end of the world. The instant reaction of being annoyed by the lack of standards is wrong, but I’m guilty of that.” He sighs, shakes his head. “I say to my wife so often, ‘My God, life is good. We are so lucky. We are so privileged.’”

Asked what gives him joy, he says, “I’m at home, and my wife made a special meal—even if I have had it so many times, the pleasure is repeated—and then we are on our terrace, and we look at the beautiful wall of trees, the big weeping willow. I cannot blame people for complaining if they have a life that is certainly less comfortable and satisfied than mine, but I think it’s always good to concentrate on the pleasures of life without comparing too much. In the media, you see a life you cannot access, and that can create wanting more, and the frustration is building. I love to speak to people who have a kind of earthy happiness. You feel this kind of truth in some people. It’s a balance. They know that family is important, that having a pet is important, that eating even a simple but good thing is important.”

Media can tug us away from that kind of contentment, he adds. “The anxiety that television creates in order to move your interest, the sense that there is this terrible thing that could happen to you. And you know what? Most of the time, no, and the numbers can show it. But people get so much information all the time, and often it’s sensational, shocking, violent information that creates a feeling of anxiety.”

Perhaps because concerts have become such a rare respite—“You have people who come in a big number and just sit in silence for two hours and watch musicians play music”—he pays inordinate attention to programming. Selections aren’t just dropped into convenient slots. Rather, he thinks of each piece of music as a little planet: “I try to imagine what density it has, what color, and then what other planet can interact with it.” Sometimes the connections are obvious—works by a single composer—or whimsical. Sometimes the inter-relationships run deep below the surface, and he’ll explain them as he goes—not in a pre-concert lecture but from the stage, to everyone.

Though he once directed the Center for Future Orchestral Repertoire, Denève does not automatically love what is new. Cold, abstract contemporary music is as off-putting to him as it has been to many St. Louis audiences. With exuberant relief, he remarks that “in the past two decades, there is now a lot of great new music being written! A much more beautiful, tuneful, accessible music than we saw in the second half of the 20th century.” To introduce it effectively, he’s learning to read his new audience: “Even if I turn my back, I can feel if they are listening or not,” he assures me. “It’s actually a very clear feeling. Soon, even if someone blindfolds me, I will know I am in St. Louis.”

The next step is to build “a simple trust between the audience and me that every piece I conduct is a piece I love for the right reasons, for emotional reasons, and that I believe people can like as they like the masterworks of the repertoire. And therefore we could together build the repertoire of the future. This is crucial for me, that we find the real masterworks of today.”

Beyond programming, even beyond music, Denève is counting on his status as “a foreigner, with a genuine candor,” to let him hear the truth of St. Louisans’ lives. “I am looking indeed to be inclusive. I want everybody to feel good and to not be left out.” Like the earnest politician he once considered becoming, he intends to listen first, and then, once he feels he has enough understanding, “find some new initiatives and ideas to bring people together. Music is the shortest way from one heart to another, because it doesn’t go through words, which can be misleading. I am open to advice and have much to learn—but I am full of hope.”