Pianist Jon Kimura Parker delights in the Minnesota Orchestra's summer festival concerts

It was an unusual response to a job offer.

"Really? Are you sure you don't want a conductor?"

That's what pianist Jon Kimura Parker said when the Minnesota Orchestra proposed that he become its artistic partner for summer programming. After all, conductors had been overseeing decades of the orchestra's Sommerfest concerts. But Parker was assured that this would be a team effort.

"The artistic advisory committee is incredible," Parker said of the programming committee, made up of orchestra musicians. "I feel like I'm not going to be making any decision that the orchestra won't like."

The offer came in 2019, and Parker happily accepted. But his first summer at the helm was to be 2020, and the pandemic scuttled most plans, including celebrating the 250th anniversary of Beethoven's birth with several concerts of the composer's music. In 2021, summer concerts were ready for audiences again, but were spread out over the course of the summer.

While the Sommerfest moniker has been retired, "Summer at Orchestra Hall" will bring a lot of the festival feel back to the south end of downtown Minneapolis, beginning Friday evening and running through Aug. 7. The fountain is flowing again in the hall's adjoining multi-tiered park, Peavey Plaza, and audiences relaxing beside it can enjoy pre- and post-concert food and drink while listening to local musicians offering jazz, blues, folk and world music.

It's the kind of atmosphere for which Parker hungered when he took the job. And now he'll experience two more summers of it, as the orchestra announced Wednesday that his contract has been extended through 2024.

"The one thing I remember very clearly about Sommerfest back in the '90s was the energy," Parker said from his summer home on Orcas Island, just south of his hometown of Vancouver, British Columbia. "In addition to being performed at the orchestra's home hall, what made it very different from the summer concerts of other major orchestras was Peavey Plaza. There was a lot of activity, and it felt more summery. And the programs were a little more relaxed in content.

"So I might have some nostalgia for that because I participated in it for so many years," he said. "Programming-wise, the only thing that I brought forward from that was the Grand Piano Spectacular, because I just thought that was so great."

That format rises again when three other pianists join Parker to play multi-piano arrangements of mostly familiar classical works on July 21.

Three Beethoven symphonies will be performed over the course of the festival's four weekends, in addition to Parker soloing on the composer's Third Piano Concerto on Friday night and playing the "Moonlight" Sonata July 22-23.

"Yes, we do have Beethoven on several programs, but I thought that variety would be really key within the context of Beethoven," Parker said. "For example, we honor the idea of the 'Pastoral' Symphony [July 22-23] by having other works on the same program inspired by nature."

Collaborations with other local arts groups are part of the programming, as well. Saturday's International Day of Music offers 12 hours of free music on five stages in and around Orchestra Hall, culminating in the full orchestra performing its first Peavey Plaza concert since 2008.

"Now that Peavey Plaza's revitalized, we can do outdoor performances," he said. "We can collaborate with the City of Bells on 'The Great Gate of Kyiv.' We're going to have five churches with bells ringing simultaneously. I can't wait! I've never experienced that.

"And these collaborations with various groups around the Twin Cities are going to be great. Back in the pre-Zoom days, we had a day where we had to go into the atrium at Orchestra Hall because there were so many people. We had the BRKFST Dance Company, the Moving Company, Heart of the Beast [Puppet and Mask Theatre], other dance groups, the painter Jimmy Longoria was there.

"I would sort of jump from table to table and have conversations with everybody about: How can what you do and what we do have a meeting point? And that was the beginning of all these collaborations happening."

The hip-hop-oriented BRKFST Dance Company will perform to an arrangement of Beethoven's "Grosse Fuge" July 28-29 and the Moving Company will present the theater piece "Immortal Beethoven" on July 30 inspired by the composer.

Parker gave much of the credit for the imaginative programming to Kari Marshall, the orchestra's director of artistic planning, and Grant Meachum, director for "Live at Orchestra Hall."

"It's a very complicated dance between program ideas, guest soloists, guest conductors, guest composers, everything," Parker said. "And we are going through a really critical music director search. Guest conductors — while it's above my pay grade to know who's a candidate right now — presumably some of them are. So you want to give them a chance to shine."

It all adds up to a very busy four weeks.

"But it's a good busy. ... It's busy in a positive way that you just feel that it's all going to work out. And everybody's on your side," Parker said. "I just feel like the collective esprit de corps of the orchestra is so positive and so encouraging and so wanting things to work. I just feel very energized by it."

Summer at Orchestra Hall

With: The Minnesota Orchestra.

When: Friday through Aug. 7.

Where: Orchestra Hall, 1111 Nicollet Mall, Mpls.

Tickets: free-$95, available at minnesotaorchestra.org.

Rob Hubbard is a Twin Cities classical music writer. Reach him at wordhub@yahoo.com.