Minnesota Orchestra strikes a hopeful note as it prepares to bring back audiences

REVIEW: Friday's live broadcast had a palpable sense of energy, anticipation.

By Rob Hubbard Special to the Star Tribune

March 20, 2021 — 2:40pm

The emptiness is almost over. The seats at Minneapolis' Orchestra Hall have been vacant for over a year but will be occupied again come June.

If you feel a sense of excitement about that announcement last Tuesday, you're not alone, judging from the energy that surged through Friday's live broadcast from Orchestra Hall.

Perhaps it was the fact that esteemed French pianist Jean-Yves Thibaudet was visiting for the first time in 10 years. Or that the orchestra was returning to one of the Beethoven symphonies that put it back on the international radar 16 years ago.

In any case, it was a performance overflowing with a sense of spring, an at-long-last embrace of optimism.

It followed the orchestra's recent pattern of starting concerts with a small ensemble — a warmup band, if you will — and getting gradually larger. In this case, the beginning was bittersweet, the slow movement of George Walker's First String Quartet evincing a wistful melancholy in the hands of four orchestra musicians.

While the ensemble's March 5 livestream felt like its first full-fledged orchestra concert in many a moon, Friday's performance of Maurice Ravel's Piano Concerto in G demonstrated for the first time since the pandemic began last March what a splendid sum of its parts this group is.

With music director Osmo Vänskä on the podium, the Ravel concerto was almost as much of a showcase for the orchestra as for Thibaudet's sensitive, scintillating playing. The pianist segued smoothly between the agitated and jazz-flavored, the florid and furious. But he proved most deeply involving on the three-minute soliloquy at the slow movement's start, perhaps the most beautiful three minutes of music Ravel ever composed. And that's saying something.

His solos weren't the only arresting ones. Bassoonist Fei Xie swung like a jazz saxophonist, harpist Kathy Kienzle came out of retirement to produce some transporting moments, and Marni Hougham's English horn offered comforting tones above Thibaudet's gentle cascades down the keyboard.

This was a concert that grew progressively lighter in tone, concluding with Beethoven's Fourth. Although it doesn't omit his trademark raging at the furies, it's as breezy and bouncy a symphony as he ever created. And Friday's performance possessed much of the high-contrast dynamics and captivating catharsis that Vänskä and the orchestra brought to Beethoven back in 2004-07 when it recorded his complete symphonies.

If you catch the concert online, hook up your best speakers so you can appreciate the whispered pianissimos Vänskä used to lay the groundwork for sparkling woodwind solos or slow builds back to full-tilt explosiveness.

The orchestra will continue presenting livestreamed concerts every fortnight or so throughout the spring, so you can commune with the ensemble via Twin Cities Public Television, Minnesota Public Radio or whatever device you desire. And even if you're not among the lucky few when audiences return to Orchestra Hall in June — attendance initially will be capped at 400 in a room built for 2,000 — those concerts also will be broadcast.

As for the visual presentation, there were some fine decisions Friday, such as having the camera slowly pan out during Thibaudet's meditative middle movement of the Ravel concerto. Could some quick cutting between dueling musicians have ramped up the drama on the concerto's finale? Sure, but the music alone made this a very involving evening, one filled with a hopeful spirit.

Rob Hubbard is a freelance classical music critic. • wordhub@yahoo.com