Osmo Vanska conducting Minnesota Orchestra at the Proms Saturday.

Star Tribune photo by Jeff Wheeler.

The Minnesota Orchestra has left London to play in Edinburgh (Sunday night) and Amsterdam (Monday night), but London critics have begun to assess the band's weekend Prom's concerts, which included two big symphonies (Bruckner's 4h and Beehoven's 9th) and concertos by Shostakovich (cello) and Berg (violin).

The Telegraph newspaper of London published a long feature about Osmo Vanska and the Minnesota Orchestra before the Proms gigs. And it now has issued a four-star review as well.

A British arts-reviewing website called TheArtsDesk.com has posted two reviews, each very favorable, though the critic here goes on about how little he likes the Shostakovich First Cello Concerto, which at the Proms featured cellist Alisa Weilerstein.

The Sunday Times of London reviewed the concert, praising Vanska's detail-oriented approach to musicmaking, but faulting it for curtailing "free-spirited spontaneity." Since the Sunday Times is a pay site, we reprint that review below.


Richard Morrison / The Sunday Times
Last updated August 30 2010 12:01AM

For better or worse, this is a real marriage of conductor and orchestra. Not all bands take to Osmo Vänskä, mainly because he believes, like Edison, that genius — in music-making, as in other areas — is 1 per cent inspiration and 99 per cent perspiration. In Minnesota, where the Finn has been since 2003, he has found a band that seems to thrive on the hard graft that he demands.

What's gained is exceptional rapport and polish. Not a bar of Bruckner's 70-minute Fourth Symphony passed without us feeling that Vänskä and his players were unanimously recreating an interpretation that had been prepared with meticulous attention to detail. And the interpretation itself was convincing, shaping Bruckner's huge paragraphs into great arches and delineating detail with clarity.

What's lost, occasionally, is free- spirited spontaneity. The exultant brass refrain that breaks through the scherzo's galloping fanfares, the waves of exultation at the end of the first movement: these all fell a fraction short in passion — as though the players felt unsure if they were allowed to display unfettered joy. And Vänskä's hearse-paced second movement, though beautifully phrased and played (especially by the violas in their sinuous exposed lines), was a strange way of interpreting Andante, quasi Allegretto.

Yet everything that Vänskä does is imbued with such integrity and intensity that you are drawn into the music despite reservations. I felt the same about the concert's first half. It opened with a rarity: Samuel Barber's Music for a Scene from Shelley, an early work that hovered between Debussy and Sibelius in its atmospheric evocation of Prometheus Unbound.

Then Alisa Weilerstein gave a riveting performance in Shostakovich's First Cello Concerto. It's as hard for cellists to shake off the shadow of Rostropovich here as it is for tenors to banish the sound of Peter Pears when singing Britten. Yet the young American not only chose a radically different path through the music — more soft-edged in timbre, less overtly freighted with emotion, and certainly less angry — but traversed this epic work with suppleness and authority.

Rostropovich made the cadenza sound like an elegy for a nation. That sort of interpretation isn't available to soloists of Weilerstein's generation. They haven't lived the history or felt the tragedy. All they can do is respond to the notes, which Weilerstein did with superb musicality and close support from Vänskä and his orchestra.