Review: Thomas Søndergård leads Minnesota Orchestra in beautiful program of contrasting themes

Had he not chosen to pursue music as a profession, Thomas Søndergård could have been a dancer.

The Minnesota Orchestra's new music director designate has chosen for his only visit of the 2022-23 season a program full of ballet music premiered in pre-World War I Paris. And Thursday morning's performance showed him to be as lithe, lively and graceful as ballet dancer Rudolf Nureyev might have been if you had handed him a baton and confined him to the spatial limits of a conductor's podium.

But lest you think that everything is beautiful at the ballet, you should know that this concert program is something like "Beauty and the Beast." Yes, the complete ballet music from Maurice Ravel's "Mother Goose" was given a sumptuous interpretation, lush yet delicate. But the second half was given over to Igor Stravinsky's "Rite of Spring," and there's a reason so many Parisians freaked out when that was premiered in 1913. It's relentlessly intense and aggressive, spiked with dissonance and violence.

It was given a volcanic performance by Søndergård and the orchestra, one that demonstrated the strong chemistry the conductor has established with his new colleagues, a relationship built upon remarkable demonstrations of trust and a clearly collaborative spirit.

Yes, he danced divinely, but was never a showboat. In fact, Søndergård's leadership was marked by an economy of movement. Sometimes he chose to stand motionless and let the musicians show how acutely they were listening to one another, most notably at the opening of "Rite of Spring."

The dancing began on a concert-opening, spring-inspired work of a radically different tenor — Lili Boulanger's "D'un matin de printemps (Of a Spring Morning)" — Søndergård wafting like a windblown willow, his movements fluid but his engagement with the music palpable. The orchestra responded with a crisp, energetic reading.

If the almost capacity crowd at Orchestra Hall needed any assurance that this conductor won't try to make major changes in this orchestra's full-bodied sound, the performance of Ravel's "Mother Goose" provided it. This was the complete ballet music, which is almost twice as long as the more familiar suite, and it presented multiple opportunities for the orchestra and individual soloists within it to shine, particularly among the woodwinds.

When Søndergård turned to the violins during the gradually building beauty of its finale, "The Enchanted Garden," we saw in profile how gentle this conductor can be, his hands seemingly sculpting the transporting passages.

Yet it bears remembering that Søndergård wasn't always a conductor: His orchestral career began as a percussionist, his specialty being the timpani. And "Rite of Spring" was given a very percussive performance, not just in its emphasis upon that section of the orchestra but in showing how Stravinsky was asking each of the approximately 100 musicians onstage to be a percussionist in their own way.

The brass blared, the strings were struck, the woodwinds cried out and the fortissimos almost shook the walls. This was a "Rite of Spring" of particularly rapt intensity and full of explosive attacks and contrasting quiet sections that ratcheted up the tension. It left the impression that Søndergård will be a leader willing to emphasize the beast as much as the beauty.

Minnesota Orchestra

With: Conductor Thomas Søndergård

What: Works by Lili Boulanger, Maurice Ravel and Igor Stravinsky

When: 8 p.m. Friday and Saturday

Where: Orchestra Hall, 1111 Nicollet Mall, Mpls.

Tickets: $40-$114, available at 612-371-5656 or minnesotaorchestra.org

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