Some pieces of music are virtually indestructible, and the overture to Leonard Bernstein's operetta "Candide" is one of them. It crackled like a mini-fireworks display at Wednesday evening's Minnesota Orchestra concert, a send-off event for the players as they embark on a tour to South Africa.
But first, the orchestra will stop off in London for a concert at the BBC Proms. Wednesday's concert at Orchestra Hall in Minneapolis gave local classical fans the opportunity to preview the all-American Proms program.
Music director Osmo Vänskä's "Candide" overture was a typically canny piece of conducting — bristling with energy, but with space for woodwind soloists to etch the detail that makes the music effervesce and bubble.
Next came Gershwin's Piano Concerto in F, with American-Israeli pianist Inon Barnatan as soloist. Barnatan lives in New York — as Gershwin did — and has the pulse and rhythms of the city in his musical circuitry. Jigging and swaying on the piano stool, Barnatan brought an improvisational freedom to the piano writing, flicking arpeggios lightheartedly and lingering affectionately on Gershwin's bluesy melodies.
Principal trumpet Manny Laureano played a keening solo in the slow movement. It was the perfect foil to Barnatan's spruce, elegant excursions on the piano, sparkling like a freshly poured cocktail.
The finale fizzed with energy, Barnatan rattling off Gershwin's toccata-like figuration with the alacrity of a champion speed-typist. He played a short encore to partly quell the excitement of a delighted audience — a freewheeling fantasy on Gershwin's "I Got Rhythm," dispatched with Lisztian flamboyance.
For lovers of rare repertoire, the real treat came after intermission, in the shape of Charles Ives' Second Symphony.
It's not a perfect work: Ives was a stubborn composer who liked setting his own problems and working out his own solutions. The results are often wrenchingly idiosyncratic.
