The Minnesota Orchestra has played the heck out of Germany on its eight-city European tour, with weekend concerts in Dusseldorf and Stuttgart, and a show Monday night in Frankfurt. After opening the tour in London, the orchestra also played Berlin and Cologne last week.
German critics, who seldom hesitate to characterize the United States as a musical backwater, have so far given the Minnesota Orchestra and guest soloist Joshua Bell warm reviews, even if those arrived with some backhanded compliments.
Berlin's biggest daily paper, the Zeitung, praised Bell's performance of Samuel Barber's Violin Concerto as "spellbinding" and noted his "bewilderingly beautiful way of matching the colors of the orchestra." It even said that the performance "spurs one to further consideration of Barber's concerto, composed in 1939, which in America stands at the center of the violin repertoire, but here is barely taken seriously."
Commenting on "Slonimsky's Earbox," the John Adams piece that is being played at every stop on the tour, a critic in Cologne said, "the perfectionism of the orchestra players was given full due; the precision-machinist Osmo Vänskä had everything fine-tuned and changed flexibly from full power to a soft interlude."
The tour ends Thursday in Vienna. At a rehearsal Saturday, the musicians interrupted Vänskä with an impromptu rendition of "Happy Birthday," which appears to have pleased and embarrassed the music director, who turned 56 that day. (The moment is caught on a video at the orchestra's tour website: minnesotaorchestra.org/etour.)
Claude Peck • 612-673-7977
