Review: Christian Reif opens Brainerd’s Lakes Area Music Festival with a resounding Beethoven’s Ninth

With each passing summer, the Lakes Area Music Festival seems more of a magnet for outstanding classical musicians. The Brainerd-based gathering now draws performers from dozens of such first-rate American ensembles as the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra and the symphony orchestras of Atlanta, Houston, Milwaukee and St. Louis, not to mention the Minnesota Orchestra.

The festival opened Sunday afternoon with one of the more ambitious undertakings of its 16 summers, and that’s saying something when you consider that it stages an opera every year. Almost the entire concert was devoted to one of the classical canon’s most epic works, Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, which marked its bicentennial in May and requires an orchestra, large choir and four vocal soloists. Written three years before the composer’s death, it’s among the most powerful grand finales any artist has ever left to us.

Which makes it an unusual choice for a festival’s opening concert, as the Ninth is the kind of work you usually save for last. But, considering that every seat was sold in the 1,200-capacity Gichi-ziibi Center for the Arts — and that all were standing and cheering at its conclusion — the start-with-a-bang strategy may serve the festival well. Word will surely spread that there’s some outstanding music-making going on in the north country.

The concert opened with a fanfare-ish feel on Jimmy López Bellido’s 2020 work, “Rise,” a muscular, percussive piece created as something of a warmup act for Beethoven’s Ninth that was suitably turbulent and dramatic.

But if the festival’s music director, German conductor Christian Reif, approaches other pieces over the next few weeks with half the intensity and interpretive imagination he brought to Beethoven’s Ninth, concertgoers should have a memorable experience. Seldom will you encounter a conductor so deeply invested in a performance. It felt as if Reif was trying to communicate the most important message he’ll ever deliver.

He was dripping with sweat when the first of the work’s four movements concluded. Yet his energy level only seemed to rise, as did the orchestra’s. The vivacious second movement was tremendously exciting, the dipping and darting staccato notes tossed vigorously from one section of the orchestra to another, each exchange precise and pithy.

With so much adrenaline pouring forth, Reif and the orchestra seemed to have difficulty slowing down enough to really let the third movement’s beautiful melodies breathe and sing. But all was forgiven come the finale, when one of America’s most celebrated singers in the classical realm, bass-baritone Davóne Tines, rose to deliver the most compelling introduction and opening theme to the “Ode to Joy” I’ve ever encountered. In Tines’ hands, it felt every bit the commanding wakeup call Beethoven seems to have intended.

Scintillating singing also abounded from the other soloists — soprano Kearstin Piper Brown, mezzo Clara Osowski and tenor Miles Mykkanen — as well as from the combined forces of the VocalEssence Ensemble Singers, the Legacy Chorale of Greater Minnesota and the Brainerd Area High School A Cappella Choir.

In a symphony full of rapid transitions between very loud and extremely soft, Reif and the musicians executed them in breathtaking fashion during the work’s final minutes, the segues astoundingly smooth. Each musician lent an eloquent voice to Beethoven’s crowning triumph, resulting in one of the most thrilling experiences I’ve had in a concert hall this year.

When: Through Aug. 18.

Where: Gichi-Ziibi Center for the Arts, 602 S. 5th St., Brainerd, Minn.

Tickets: $10-$50, available at 612-371-5656 or lakesareamusic.org.

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