An all-american concert fizzing with vitality
Prom 31
Minnesota Orchestra
Royal Albert Hall
Monday night’s Prom brought a visit from the very distinguished Minnesota Orchestra. It went through bad times not so long ago, with a bitter lockout that went on so long many thought the orchestra would not survive. But survive it did and Osmo Vänskä, its music director, stuck with it. The event was proof that it’s in fine fettle, with an all-american concert that fizzed with vitality.
Admittedly, one expects an American orchestra to deliver American razzmatazz with a special élan. But an American orchestra led by a Finnish conductor who, by his own admission, shares the taciturn quality of his countrymen, and is famous for his interpretations of that most darkly Nordic of composers, Jean Sibelius? That promised something more interesting, but in truth there wasn’t much scope for finding hidden depths in the concert’s first half. It began with Bernstein’s Candide overture, which whizzed by in a blur of noisy gaiety.
Then came Gershwin’s F major piano concerto, and here there was more room for reflectiveness. The hushed entry of the solo pianist Inon Barnatan was one of the evening’s highlights, curling upwards with a delicious mix of nostalgia, lasciviousness and grace. He was equally adept at projecting the music’s moments of big rhetorical grandeur, and the cheeky, ragtime-ish melodies that pop up unexpectedly. In the mad helter-skelter of the music’s final pages, he and Vänskä seemed to be in a race to the finish.
Charles Ives’s Second Symphony of 1902, which ended the concert, is on a different level of difficulty. Its transcendental vision of America as both racial melting pot and land of rugged God-fearing individuals is glimpsed rather than fully grasped, and the constant switchbacks between European symphonic earnestness and demotic American sturdiness are hard to bring off. Vänskä and the orchestra made the symphony speak as eloquently as any performance I’ve ever heard, partly by refusing to linger over the romantic moments, as Bernstein did in his recording. And yet Vänskä’s urgent approach allowed him to take time where it really mattered, as in the down-home Stephen Fosterish melody that comes back repeatedly in the second movement. All this set us up for the ending’s uproarious pile-up of marches and hymns, which swept away all uncertainties in a blaze of optimistic fervour.