All the music on this week's Minnesota Orchestra program, led with élan by Osmo Vänskä, was written in a 19-year period, within 250 miles of New York City. And all of it -- even Bartok's Concerto for Orchestra, the work of a Hungarian exile who found little to admire in this country -- speaks of, and to, the American condition.

Samuel Barber's Overture to "The School for Scandal" (1931-33), which opened the program, is a tremendously assured student work, an early example of the composer's individualistic traditionalism. It argues that the European cultural past still belongs to us, and we to it. Wednesday's account, a local highlight of the Barber centenary, captured the music's quicksilver play of moods, its subtlety and sweep.

Brash and bluesy, charged with the energy of jazz-age Manhattan, Gershwin's Concerto in F for piano and orchestra (1925) is America in a different key. Above all, it's got rhythm. Meant to capitalize on the success of "Rhapsody in Blue," it has lived in the shadow of the earlier piece, though in some ways it's the stronger of the two.

European pianists of the more elevated sort have looked down their noses at this concerto and at Gershwin generally (though there's a rather startling 1993 live recording by Russian keyboard lion Sviatoslav Richter).

Happily, French pianist Lise de la Salle, this week's soloist, is unencumbered by the prejudices of her elders. Not only does she match the almost manic drive of Vänskä and the orchestra, but she's also keenly attuned to the concerto's poetic side, underlining its kinship with Ravel's Concerto in G (which pays its own kind of homage to "Rhapsody in Blue").

At 22, De la Salle has the aura of a much more seasoned performer. Digital prowess notwithstanding, hers is not the self-presentation of a virtuoso; there's an air of self-possession about her that suggests a serious musical mind at work amid the cascades of notes. And if you think a Frenchwoman (or a Finn) can't swing, you'd better think again.

Bartok lived his last half-decade in New York, as much adrift there as Gershwin was at home; he once spent three hours lost in the subway system. Yet the 1944 Concerto for Orchestra -- given an exacting, sometimes wrenching performance Wednesday -- seems to recount a partial coming-to-terms with his immigrant experience, if not with the industrial civilization that has this week deposited a layer of toxic sludge on his beloved homeland.

Larry Fuchsberg writes regularly about music.