Power and splendour at the UP Music Festival

This article was originally posted on the Artslink website.

At a time when diplomatic relations around the world seem at risk, the visit of a foreign artistic group to our country for a goodwill tour of concerts is particularly welcome; even more so when that group is a rapidly rising part of its country’s – and the world’s – artistic pantheon.

It has been reported that the Minnesota Orchestra is the very first full American symphony orchestra to perform in South Africa. As unlikely as that sounds, their performance at the University of Pretoria on Thursday, 16 August, as part of the music department’s annual music festival, evaporated any considerations of first-time feats and brought our attention solely to artistic accomplishments.

After a spirited playing of both the South African and United States national anthems, the Minnesota Orchestra music director and Finnish conductor Osmo Vänskä launched into the tone poem En saga by Sibelius, a composer whose work he’s become lauded in America for performing with this orchestra – and it turns out that that laud is entirely justified.

The players of the Minnesota Orchestra play with fierce precision, and Vänskä brought a suitably assured style to their performance. Each bar was played with close and sensitive attention to every aspect of Sibelius’s score, and each nuance of expression shed new light on the deeply felt emotional content.

Sibelius wrote En saga during a particularly painful period in his life, and declared that it isn’t the depiction of a literary narrative, but rather “is the expression of a state of mind”. That intensity of emotion is immediately clear, and Vänskä and the players managed to deliver it in its full intricacy and richness, while the music’s specific emotional state remained mercurial.

What struck me in particular was the driving rhythmic impetus that Sibelius devised and that the orchestra rendered as a living force, through the accented melodic motif that passes from one section to another over and over again while the syncopated accompaniment slots in between the main beats. This compelling force was present in every piece played on the programme, and its roots became evident when the orchestra began Sibelius’s Dance Intermezzo, the first encore of the evening: Vänskä and the Minnesota Orchestra approach their work like dancers, seeking to drive the emotional response through their skilled delivery of well-considered details, and to express the substance of the work at hand through long arcing lines of movement.

The performance’s pinnacle was the last programmed item, and the most thoroughly roasted chestnut in the orchestral repertoire, Beethoven’s redoubtable fifth symphony. The opening motif, ripped from the string section as soon as Vänskä and stepped back onto the podium, sent audible titters of exhilaration across the auditorium.

From the first movement, it became obvious that the Minnesota Orchestra and Vänksä’s Beethoven was a Beethoven not of mere effects and gimmicks, but of ideas. With motifs and phrases bouncing swiftly from one section to another, it sounded like Beethoven’s frenzied dialectical exploration of vast thoughts, perhaps of the thundering Fate his symphony is supposed to portray and then triumphantly overcome. The movement built in ferocity right to the final chords, with the tightening of tension and developing of ideas continuing right through the coda.

Links between the movements that had never been apparent to me before became startlingly clear. Not in the sense of repeated thematic material or of melodic or rhythmic designs (though there are many who would point to and argue for evidence of Beethoven’s deliberate repetition of specific material, such as the opening motif, throughout the symphony); but in repeated states of feeling and the recurrence of ideas that continues from one movement to the next.

If E.M. Forster had heard what I heard last week, he would have written in Howards End of shipwrecks and floods in the second movement as well as the first, of a goblin who prefaces his quiet walk across the universe with a nervous reconnaissance. The “gods and demigods, colour and fragrance” of the final movement would be foreshadowed a number of times, and his Helen Schegel would be well assured of heroism’s return.

As the Minnesota Orchestra’s brass section sat up to prepare for the transition to the final movement, so did I – and I was not disappointed. The trumpets and trombones’ announcements truly were gusts of splendour, and probably accounted for half of the audience’s delight during the ovations that followed Beethoven’s interminable coda.

That same brass section provided the Minnesota Orchestra’s parting shot in their final encore, Sibelius’s tone poem Finlandia. While everyone on stage played with great power and enthusiasm, I remember the trombones best, whose rumbling lower registers seemed to shake the foundations of the building. No concerns or worries of geopolitical volatility could hold back the experience of such musical might.

Note: Here’s a clip of Vänskä conducting the Minnesota Orchestra in the conclusion of Sibelius’s popular Symphony No 2, at their home venue: