The Minnesota Orchestra's 10-day, 8-city European tour ended Thursday night with a show at the famed Musikverein concert hall in the music capital of Vienna, Austria.
The musicians flew back to Minneapolis on Friday.
Freelance photographer Greg Helgeson, who traveled with the orchestra, said the Vienna performance "went very well, with big applause and two encores."
The program in Vienna included two works by Americans -- John Adams' "Slonimsky's Earbox" and Samuel Barber's Violin Concerto -- as well as Symphony No. 2 by Sibelius. Violinist Joshua Bell was the soloist in the Barber. The touring musicians racked up an impressive series of very positive reviews from critics in England and Germany.
A reviewer for a Bonn newspaper referred to the "splendidly rich" orchestra, while a writer in Stuttgart, where the orchestra played last Saturday, said the technically difficult Adams work was "no problem for the top musicians from Americas' Upper Midwest."
The entire tour was underwritten by an anonymous donor. Though no dollar figure was disclosed, a similar tour by the orchestra in 2004 cost $1.4 million.
The musicians appear again at Orchestra Hall on March 12 with a 2009-10 season-preview concert, and on March 13-14, with a performance of Mahler's Symphony No. 4.
CLAUDE PECK
