St. Louis Symphony Orchestra cellist Caroline Kim packs her instrument following a March 16 concert at Powell Hall as the orchestra launches its 2023 European tour. Photo by Jon Gitchoff.
“By the end of the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra’s concert Thursday night, stagehands had rolled giant instrument cases into Powell Hall’s lobby, preparing to fill them with precious cargo once the last note sounded,” writes Daniel Durchholz in Friday’s St. Louis Post-Dispatch (3/17). “The cases were packed with everything the orchestra would need for its European tour, which takes the SLSO to five cities in four countries over eight days…. The cases were … flown on a cargo plane to Luxembourg [and] trucked … to Austria’s Vienna Konzerthaus, for the tour’s debut March 23. The other venues and cities the SLSO will play are Centre for Fine Arts in Brussels; the Netherlands’ Muzikgebouw Eindhoven and Amsterdam’s Concertgebouw; and Audiotorio Nacional de Música in Madrid. ‘I’m so proud of the orchestra. I think it’s a really great ambassador to show what the city really is,’ SLSO music director Stéphane Denève said in a recent interview. ‘It’s … a very important thing—for the orchestra, for the institution, because we are an international orchestra, we are at that level. And we have to show it, simple as that.’ Considerably less simple, however, are the months and even years that went into planning the tour.”
