Don't call it Sommerfest, but there was a throwback feel to Friday's opening night of "Summer at Orchestra Hall."

Just as at that downtown Minneapolis classical music festival of yore, there was food ideal for outdoor noshing — now including picnic baskets with bottles of bubbly — pre-concert music for your dancing pleasure, and, speaking of dancing, the Peavey Plaza fountain waters were doing so again.

The concert programs look largely as they did when the summers took on a Viennese focus, save the waltzes. The orchestra used to play a lot of Beethoven in summer, and the festival is something of a belated 250th birthday celebration, making up for what the pandemic prevented two years ago. During the second half of July, there's Beethoven at almost every concert, including three of his nine symphonies.

Yet Friday's star wasn't a symphony, but a piano concerto. The orchestra's creative partner for summer programming is pianist Jon Kimura Parker, and he offered a performance that eclipsed all around it, an extraordinarily imaginative interpretation of Beethoven's Third Piano Concerto that was bold, sensitive and exhilarating.

It was the centerpiece of a program that featured a very intriguing new work by American composer Carlos Simon and, yes, a Beethoven symphony (his second). But it would be Parker's pianistic prowess that dominated the proceedings.

Not that Simon's piece, "Fate Now Conquers," wasn't a fine complement to the rest of the concert. Written for a Beethoven-sized orchestra and inspired by a letter the composer wrote late in his life, it's a work of intensity built from the kind of short phrases that composer favored. It proved powerfully dramatic, especially during a gripping cello solo by Anthony Ross.

On the podium was a conductor who's been creating a major buzz in Europe over the last decade, England's Nicholas Collon. He emphasized economy of movement, never getting particularly animated or visually engaging.

But he proved a fine collaborator for Parker during the piano concerto, making sure that the soloist's lines sang out clearly. And what lines they were. If the score called for any phrases to be repeated, Parker always changed things up the second time around, whether he was bringing out the left hand in more pronounced fashion, stretching pauses or softening his attacks.

The latter approach led to the concert's most memorable moment, when Parker reintroduced the concerto's opening theme in a first-movement cadenza, but did so in the form of a sweet, soothing lullaby. It stood in marked contrast to the fleet, thunderous passages near the work's conclusion, every note ringing out clearly under the pianist's fingers.

During Osmo Vänskä's recently concluded 19-year tenure as music director, the Minnesota Orchestra established an international reputation for crisp and bouncy Beethoven symphonies. But Collon and the orchestra didn't have enough of either quality on the Second Symphony on Friday. Transitions were lethargic when they could have popped, the dynamics relatively unvarying.

While the orchestra's signature string sound was there, and the winds were sweetly sonorous, there was a paucity of adrenalin to what can be a very exciting symphony. Not until the work's final minutes did I feel that the conductor and musicians had climbed aboard the same roller coaster. Here's hoping that the next fortnight's performances of the Fifth and Sixth symphonies pack more potency.

Minnesota Orchestra

With: Pianist Jon Kimura Parker

What: "Summer at Orchestra Hall"

When: Through Aug. 7

Where: Orchestra Hall, 1111 Nicollet Mall, Mpls.

Tickets: $32-$95, available at minnesotaorchestra.org

Friday's concert can be streamed for free through July 25 at minnesotaorchestra.org.

Rob Hubbard is a Twin Cities classical music writer. Reach him at wordhub@yahoo.com.