Review: South African cellist Abel Selaocoe and the SPCO transform the classical concert experience

You can throw your typical classical concert structure out the window when Abel Selaocoe comes to town.

The South African cellist has been helping create something else entirely each time he visits the Twin Cities to renew his relationship with the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra. Among the orchestra’s four artistic partners — who each visit a handful of times each season — Selaocoe is the most intrepidly unpredictable.

In addition to offering an excellent interpretation of some plum from the cello repertoire, he will almost invariably start singing in the South African language of Sesotho, sometimes growling into overtones reminiscent of Tibetan throat singing. He might also engage the SPCO musicians in some rhythmic clapping and get up and dance a bit. And you can set the planned program aside while they improvise their way into some decidedly unclassical genre.

So there’s no such thing as a typical Selaocoe concert, and that’s proven exciting enough to spawn a local following that never misses him. Call them Abel-heads, I guess. There were plenty at St. Paul’s Ordway Concert Hall Friday night when Selaocoe launched a three-night stand, and the most enthusiastic among them responded to his efforts with four standing ovations. And deservedly so, for this was among the most exciting local classical concerts of the post-pandemic era.

The program said to expect a concert that bounded back and forth between the baroque and contemporary periods. Marin Marais’ 1701 work for viola da gamba, “Les Voix Humaines,” found Selaocoe casting a soaring vocal line atop his cello’s tones before he leaped to his feet to lead the orchestra in a fit of rhythmic clapping and something of an offbeat bluegrass hoedown akin to Dave Brubeck’s jazz take on the genre, “Unsquare Dance.”

And the audience’s role wasn’t merely that of interested observers. Selaocoe divided the crowd into sections to sing rounds during an improvisational reverie while he delivered an anthemic vocal line above it. Throughout these twists and turns, Steve Kimball proved magnetic while commandeering an exotic assemblage of African percussion.

Yet Selaocoe can do marvelous things with more conventional repertoire, as he demonstrated on a passionate and precise interpretation of baroque composer Giovanni Platti’s D-major Cello Concerto, most memorably during a mournful middle movement that proved the saddest music of the night.

After intermission, he was joined by the SPCO’s Richard Belcher for four movements from a suite for two cellos and string orchestra by Italian composer and cellist Giovanni Sollima, referred to by Selaocoe as “the Jimi Hendrix of cello.” Called “When We Were Trees,” it proved a fascinating combination of conversation and jam session, alternately mystical and explosively aggressive.

Selaocoe’s last solo turn came on Fred Thomas’ lovely string orchestra arrangement of the Sarabande from J.S. Bach’s Sixth Cello Suite. Then it was back to modernism with a hypnotic piece of minimalism from Polish composer Wojciech Kilar, concluding a richly satisfying musical odyssey.

With: Cellists Abel Selaocoe and Richard Belcher

What: Works by Marin Marais, Selaocoe, Giovanni Platti, Giovanni Sollima, J.S. Bach and Wojciech Kilar

When: 7 p.m. Sat., 2 p.m. Sun.

Where: Ordway Concert Hall, 345 Washington St., St. Paul

Tickets: $16-$68 (students and children free), 651-291-1144 or thespco.org

Classical music writer Rob Hubbard can be reached at wordhub@yahoo.com.