Thursday's concert by the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra, in the somewhat harsh acoustics of Apple Valley's Shepherd of the Valley Lutheran Church, felt like a multi-century symposium on the vitality and viability of the Western classical tradition. Led by Pablo Heras-Casado, a batonless young Spaniard of boundless animation, the works on the program -- by Beethoven, Prokofiev, Richard Strauss and Chinese-American composer Chen Yi -- seemed to chatter convivially, if inconclusively, in tones sometimes sober, sometimes ironic or nostalgic.
Chen Yi's Prelude and Fugue, given its world premiere Thursday, has the virtues one has come to associate with her music: an extrovert energy, a keen ear for instrumental color and a fusion (or hybridization) of disparate styles that is both distinctive and assured. Not easy to follow on first hearing, the piece processes Chinese folk music (which Chen initially encountered as a teenager swept up in the Cultural Revolution) through Western orchestral machinery -- machinery that stretches audibly in the course of 14 dense minutes.
One can, I think, question the utility of Chen's project: Does this sort of pressurized marriage of East and West really breathe new life into either? But cultural globalization, like its economic sibling, is an irresistible tide, and Chen is one of its most prolific and inventive practitioners. She was in the audience Thursday; a few words from her would not have gone amiss.
In 1942, the 78-year-old Richard Strauss, struggling to protect his Jewish daughter-in-law and her two sons from the Nazis, returned to a form that had last drawn his attention 60 years earlier.
Call it escapism, but Strauss' Second Horn Concerto, which ushered in his "Indian summer," is a jewel -- even if it strikes terror into the hearts of horn players. The tranquil passage linking the first and second movements is almost unbearably beautiful; the horn-oboe duet in the Andante is a wistful reminiscence of Strauss' "Der Rosenkavalier."
Bernhard Scully, in his second season as the SPCO's principal, was the excellent soloist in a performance more fresh than ripe. Though a bit cautious in the daunting Rondo, he sounded exultant at big moments.
Heras-Casado and the orchestra missed some of the burlesque bite in Prokofiev's "Classical" Symphony, but caught the Gavotte's ungainly grace and the Finale's winking frenzy. In Beethoven's Eighth, conductor and players were fast out of the gate, making up in drive for what they lacked in whimsy.
Larry Fuchsberg writes frequently about music.
