Different as they were, the composers represented on Thursday's Minnesota Orchestra program -- Antonín Dvorak, Béla Bartok and Igor Stravinsky -- had at least two things in common: All lived for a time in Manhattan and, more consequentially, all turned to folk songs to invigorate their work. Bartok was the most systematic of the three, making repeated forays into the Hungarian countryside to record traditional melodies then verging on oblivion. Stravinsky, characteristically, was the cagiest, leaving it to future scholars to ferret out his extensive borrowings from Russian folk art.
About 40 years older than Bartok and Stravinsky, Dvorak (1841-1904) had a less studied relationship with the folk music of his native Bohemia. But he was no naïf, and in his 1878 Wind Serenade (which smuggles cello and bass into the 12-member ensemble) he artfully fused the open-air quality of the piece's 18th-century antecedents with the wistful effervescence of the best Czech folk tunes.
The gently melancholic Andante, part nocturne and part love song, is the serenade's heart. This is music that can hardly bring itself to end; closing gesture follows closing gesture, each more tender than the last. Thursday's performance, led unobtrusively by the multitasking Osmo Vänskä from the first-clarinetist's chair, was edge-of-the-seat beautiful, moments of imprecision notwithstanding.
The road from Dvorak to Bartok may seem long. Yet just beneath the sometimes-thorny harmonic surfaces of Bartok's Second Violin Concerto is thoroughly romantic, crowded with hair-singeing bravura passages, spiky dance rhythms redolent of Budapest cafés, and, in its middle movement, lullaby-like music of extraordinary luminosity.
German-born violinist Christian Tetzlaff, too seldom heard in our neighborhood, gave a brilliant, intensely physical account of the solo part. Tetzlaff is an iconoclast, not least in his choice of instrument: Having played a 1713 Stradivarius early in his career, he now favors a 21st-century violin made by Peter Greiner, a compatriot. And no wonder: Throughout a fiercely communicative reading, vigorously abetted by Vänskä and the orchestra, Tetzlaff's tone was radiantly colored.
No less polychromatic was the closer, Stravinsky's pivotal 1911 ballet score "Petrushka," in its 1947 revision. Predictably propulsive, Thursday's performance -- notable for sharply characterized episodes, stinging rhythms and the "terrific noise" the composer sought -- captured the ballet's burlesque chill.
Larry Fuchsberg writes regularly about music.
