Season's end felt more like a vibrant beginning

Summer has come a little early to Orchestra Hall. Though nominally concluding the Minnesota Orchestra's subscription season, this week's Osmo Vänskä-led program of music by two Russians and a cosmopolitan Russian exile felt more like the opening of Sommerfest. The bustle Thursday evening on Peavey Plaza reinforced the illusion.

Written for the choreographer George Balanchine by the poker-playing Igor Stravinsky, "Card Game," first staged in 1937, seems like frivolous entertainment for the cognoscenti.

(In the same year, in Stalin's Soviet Union, Dmitri Shostakovich's Fifth Symphony, which conjures a life-or-death struggle, had its much more momentous premiere. What a difference!)

A veritable treatise on rhythmic displacement -- pity the dancers! -- "Card Game" is ingenious and allusive in the composer's best neoclassic manner. But like Stravinsky's earlier "Soldier's Tale" and his later "Rake's Progress," the work sketches a story of good and evil, in which the malevolent Joker is defeated in the last of the ballet's three "deals."

In a reading full of delicious detail, Vänskä found unaccustomed touches of ominousness. The conductor seems unusually responsive to Stravinsky's idiom, which in less sympathetic hands can sound brittle; I'd love to hear him tackle the glorious "Symphony of Psalms."

Tchaikovsky's "Capriccio italien" makes no pretense of formal subtlety. It's a picturesque montage that lives in the moment, and it wants a wide-screen, technicolor performance that pulls no punches. Vänskä's propulsive account, if sometimes more fierce than festive, filled the bill, though I would have welcomed a bit of unapologetic excess à la Leopold Stokowski.

Rimsky-Korsakov's "Scheherazade" was the second LP I owned. I wore out both the disc and the piece, which now strikes me as overlong and repetitive. But I haven't forgotten how it felt to lose myself in this music. And even in my disenchantment, I find much to admire, including passages that approximate the sound/world of Stravinsky's "Firebird."

Color-driven and color-saturated, "Scheherazade" survives as a showpiece for virtuoso orchestra. Vänskä and his gang seized upon it with relish. Concertmaster Jorja Fleezanis made a beguiling storyteller; oboist Basil Reeve, clarinetist Gregory T. Williams, bassoonist John Miller Jr. and cellist Anthony Ross, among others, gave lessons in tonal allure.

The magic was marred only by an overeager listener, bent on registering his approval before anybody else, who sabotaged the quiet ending, earning a withering glance from a visibly disgruntled conductor.

Larry Fuchsberg writes often about music.