The Minnesota Orchestra, under new Music Director Thomas Søndergård, performed at Hancher Auditorium earlier this month, on Nov. 15. The performance saw the return of the ensemble to the University of Iowa, as their last visit came in 1982. Before that, the Orchestra made regular visits through the decades prior, with a a partnership that dates all the way back to 1909.
The old Hancher building, constructed in the early 1970s and taken out of commission due to the flood of 2008, was a larger room that tended to have some unruly echoes and reflections. The new Hancher Auditorium, which officially opened its doors in 2016, is a smaller room, and the intervening 50 years in acoustic design research is clearly audible. It has just enough echo and reverberation to feel live, without the smearing of sound. As much as any venue I’ve experienced, I feel like I could hear the orchestra perfectly.
The Minnesota Orchestra took to Hancher readily. The opening piece, Tori Takemitsu’s “Night Signal” for two antiphonal brass instruments filled the space with a round, satisfying tone. Takemitsu was known for his writing on music theory. This short piece uses thick brass chords that carry echoes of Debussy and Ravel, but also modern jazz. The performers played it the way it should be, absolutely reveling in the blend and clash of harmonies. Intellectually challenging but also deeply sensual.
Brass players’ heads vibrate with the sound of their own instruments, and playing together they share that vibration, both with each other and the audience.
I spoke with the Minnesota Orchestra’s Assistant Principal Bassist, William Schrickel in advance of the Nov. 15 Hancher concert. Born in Sioux City, his family moved to Chicago when he was 10. He began his musical journey not too long after.
“I started to play the bass when I was 13 years old, and it took me about a year and a half to get serious,” Schrickel told me.
His commitment to his art became all-consuming early on. “I was a madman, and I practiced in the summers, I would practice seven to eight hours a day when I could. In school, I was not going to the class, because I was in my room, in my dorm, practicing the bass, annoying the people who live next door to me.” The orchestra was his first job as a musician at the age of 20, and he’s stayed there for 50 years. “Orchestral playing at the highest level, like the Minnesota Orchestra does, is the greatest example of teamwork in any undertaking that exists…When I go and hear other wonderful orchestras, I watch these 100 men and women playing at the top level. It’s, to me, a religious experience.”
Karol Szymanowski’s Violin Concerto No. 1 was next on the program. Though written in 1916, the work embraces what, at the time, was jarringly-modern tonality. Composed three years after Stravinsky’s “Rite Of Spring,” the Concerto is famously the first “modern” violin concerto. For all its dissonance and atonality it strikes the ear as lush and dramatic. Still “weird” enough to test the patience of listeners more accustomed to Beethoven, Brahms and Mozart, it never feels arbitrary or needlessly abstruse. “The writing…is really quite different than any other concertos that had been written up to that point. The orchestration is very shimmery. It sounds so different than most concertos that had been written previously,” said Schrickel.
A romantic poem by Tadeusz Miciński inspired the concerto:
…Now we stand by the lake in crimson blossom
in flowing tears of joy, with rapture and fear,
burning in amorous conflagration.
Though not explicitly a text for the concerto, the passion of the poem is evident. It sounded like film music to modern ears, leaning on surprise and dissonance to heighten drama. Music before the turn of the 20th Century always seeks to resolve to the root key, on even measure boundaries. This concerto moves constantly in unexpected directions.
Other performances I’ve heard seemed fragmented and arbitrary. The conductor, Thomas Søndergård, collaborated with the orchestra, giving the piece a feel of coherent narrative, that flowed as though they were singing a song together.
This idea of dramatic narrative in Szymanowski’s work contrasts with Hector Berlioz’ Symphonie Fantastique. It’s a more explicitly “program music.” Berlioz wrote an essay detailing the dramatic action of each movement, and wanted it printed in the program for listeners to contemplate.
It’s the story of a man poisoning himself with opium over unrequited love, and what could be more 19th Century Romantic than that? The music stands on its own, independent of the story, but it’s fun to know the movement Marche au supplice (March to the scaffold) is his opium reverie about killing his beloved, and subsequent decapitation. Brass chords with crashing percussion echoes the sound of the lovelorn hero’s head bouncing down the steps from the scaffold.
The performance seemed less concerned with Berlioz’ overwrought story, focusing more on the purely musical sonic drama. Søndergård and the orchestra made it sound immediate and exciting, collaborating with Hancher’s great acoustics as the concert hall itself became a character in this drama.
The audience responded at the end with a standing ovation, with cheering, equal to the drama of the music performed. Maestro Søndergård had a rare treat for just this occasion, a rollocking performance of Emmanuel Chabrier’s “Espana.” This perfectly capped the concert of French and French-influenced pieces.
The morning after the concert, the conductor and musicians of the Minnesota Orchestra taught master classes to University of Iowa music students. “It’s really important to engage these students, because they’re the ones who are going to be replace us… anything that we can do to make a bond between the students, the audience in the hall, and the players, it’s sort of required. It’s a joy to do that,” said Schrickel of the residency events.
Thomas Søndergård and the VP of Artistic Planning for the orchestra, Erik Finley, spoke before the students, reflecting on the previous evenings performance. “Many musicians said last night that they really enjoyed the hall. They could hear each other in a different way than they can at home. If there’s anything that I like them to do, is to listen more to each other. It sounds weird, but the less I have to work for things to connect, the better it is.”
Isaac Thompson spoke about the process of choosing the program for the concert: “How can we design a French or all French-influenced program without every composer being French? Takemitsu was very much influenced by Messianne and Debussy.” Szymanowski was Polish but very influenced by French composers. Berlioz was a pillar of French music in the 19th Century. “The simplicity of the Takamitsu, is a nice way to start with a program that ends with a piece that’s absolutely over the top.”
In a conducting master class, Søndergård worked with a student of conducting at Iowa. Søndergård had the student repeatedly conduct and gave constructive criticism. To my eyes — as someone who has played in orchestras — the student was very precise in his motions and cues to imaginary violin and cello sections. Søndergård told him, “[your] Movements need to be bigger.”
A big theme of his teaching was connecting. “Can you connect with the sections? You stay a little bit in your book [the score], and you know it really well, but the connection with the musicians?” He emphasized reaching from the podium to the players, not just giving cues and keeping time, but interacting, communicating. He had the student try conducting just with gestures, without conducting the beats of the measure.
I can’t speak for the workshop participants, but if I was a student conductor, Søndergård’s tutorial would make me a better, more expressive conductor. Most of the communication between a conductor and symphony takes place in rehearsals, where a conductor can tell players what he or she wants from them. During a concert, where you’re all performing together, that communication continues, but without words. All a conductor has is gestures, facial expressions and eye contact. In a sense, the more explicit communication of rehearsals becomes implicit in the concert.
Classical music may seem elitist and rarefied but in the end it is about connection and communication. E.M. Forster famously said “only connect,” which means that the connections — between musicians, between conductor and orchestra, between the orchestra and the audience — is the one crucial thing.
The Minnesota Symphony were impressive in how they connected with the audience, students and the community. People I spoke to after the concert often asked “When are they coming back?” This kind of artistic communication and engagement is rare, nothing to take for granted. I and everyone involved in the weekend’s events, want more.
