Minnesota Orchestra ode to American composers has great moments amid odd pacing

There's an old Firesign Theater comedy bit in which a classical concert announcer introduces a piece as "a rousing salute to reality." I felt like I was at such a concert Friday night.

Conductor Ken-David Masur and the Minnesota Orchestra delivered a program perplexing in its pastiche of excerpts and miniatures. I guess you could call it an American sampler, but, just as a box of chocolates doesn't pass for a meal, I left Orchestra Hall feeling that it didn't give me enough of anything to be satisfying.

The theme was "American Musical Heroes," and the concert was dedicated to those frontline workers who have kept at it during COVID-19, with the orchestra's musicians buying tickets for many who live and work around their downtown Minneapolis home. The concert also doubled as a commercial for the neighborhood, clearly imploring a broadcast TV audience to set down the remote and return to the hall.

In that regard, pianist Jon Kimura Parker pulled double duty as soloist and one-man tourism bureau. In a video projected onto the expansive, cube-laden wall above the stage, Parker chatted up one of downtown's street corner ambassadors, went lawn bowling on the Brit's Pub roof, and played Elton John's "Bennie and the Jets" on Peavey Plaza's upright piano.

But his greatest contributions came in the flesh, as he performed a crowd-pleasing showpiece of Olympian athleticism, William Hirtz's "Wizard of Oz" Fantasy for Solo Piano. Throw in one movement from George Gershwin's Piano Concerto in F, and Parker was clearly the star of the show.

Yet notice that I said "one movement," and you get a sense of the evening's flow or lack thereof. It was like speed dating with 20th-century American composers, most dips into their oeuvres in the six- to eight-minute range. There were familiar voices like Gershwin and Samuel Barber, but also too seldom-heard ones like Amy Beach, Coleridge-Taylor Perkinson and William Grant Still.

Leading off was one of those big-shouldered fanfares on demand that John Williams composed for a past Olympics, but could have accompanied the triumphal finale of any number of "Star Wars" or Steven Spielberg epics. Trumpeter Manny Laureano rose to the occasion with gold-medal-worthy solos.

The oldest piece on the program was the opening movement of Amy Beach's "Gaelic" Symphony from 1894. Beach was a late romantic who sometimes sounded like an early one, with echoes of Felix Mendelssohn and Robert Schumann coursing through a movement buoyed by Celtic dance themes.

Of the pieces performed sans Parker, the standout was the slow movement from Perkinson's Sinfonietta No. 2. It was a sweet piece for strings, a tender, wistful movement with a tear in its eye. After a playful pizzicato-propelled movement from the same work, solemnity returned with Barber's Essay No. 1, which gave a sense of the orchestra's skills at getting listeners to lean in for emotionally involving quietude.

Pity poor William Grant Still, whose slow movement from his Second Symphony had to follow Parker's wild ride of "Wizard of Oz" themes — a work created specifically to show off his virtuosity — and precede the concert-closing opening of the Gershwin concerto. (Yes, closing with an opening gives a sense of the arc-less evening.)

When the orchestra fell away and allowed Parker time alone with Gershwin's conflicted spirit, it was lovely, but Masur soon pushed the fortissimos into the red and drowned the pianist entirely. Like so much of the program, it felt like the composer was interrupted before being allowed to express the point of their piece.

Rob Hubbard is a Twin Cities freelance classical music critic. He can be reached at wordhub@yahoo.com.