Music review: DSSO plays American rhapsodies in season opener
DULUTH — This city isn't typically steeped in Yankee Doodle sentiment, maybe because we're so close to the border that if you go to the top of Enger Tower and sneeze, someone in Ontario will say, "Gesundheit."
On Saturday night, though, when conductor Dirk Meyer struck up the Duluth Superior Symphony Orchestra for a rendition of "The Star-Spangled Banner," audience members in Symphony Hall leaped up and sang their hearts out. It set the mood for an evening dedicated to American music ... or, at least, music inspired by America.
To open the concert the DSSO, for the first time in its 93-year history, performed Antonin Dvorak's "American Suite." Meyer led a bright, inviting reading of the 1894 piece by the Czech composer identified in the concert description as "the 'father' of American music."
Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong and Madonna all might have something to say about that characterization, but Dvorak's folksy Romanticism did set the stage for U.S. composers like Aaron Copland to explore American identity through the European classical tradition.
Following that performance, New York pianist Jeffrey Biegel took the stage for the Minnesota premiere of Peter Boyer's "Rhapsody in Red, White & Blue." Biegel is in the midst of a multi-year undertaking to play Boyer's piece with an orchestra in every state of the union.
That's a lot of effort for a piece that, while commissioned to celebrate the centennial of George Gershwin's "Rhapsody in Blue," doesn't play it nearly as cool. The 15-minute composition for piano and orchestra bursts with the kind of chest-swelling energy you'd expect from a tribute to the American flag, sentimental and cinematic.
The puppy-dog energy of Boyer's piece was a marked contrast to Biegel's pricklier take on Gershwin's "Rhapsody," drawing on the 1924 piano score rather than the more commonly heard edit from 1942. Biegel told the audience that he wanted to underline Gershwin's Impressionist influences, and Saturday's performance was a reminder of why you don't hear a lot of Claude Debussy during Independence Day pops concerts.
Biegel's deeply invested performance, unafraid of provocative silences, complemented the warm orchestral accompaniment under Meyer's baton. It was a "Rhapsody" to remember, the concert closer following a palate-cleansing performance of Samuel Barber's stormy "Symphony in One Movement."
The printed programs included a note of welcome from a familiar face assuming a new role. J. David Arnott, who plays viola in the orchestra, has been appointed the DSSO's new executive director following the departure of Brandon VanWaeyenberghe for the Boise Philharmonic.
"You will see me in the lobby before concerts," Arnott wrote, "and you may even see me pushing a piano now and then, and I'm for sure not ready to give up my seat in this fine ensemble."
