A Season of Music

It's far too soon to start imagining that winter is almost over, but as light returns to the morning sky, it's tempting to review a few of the musical events that helped us through the dark evenings, and also to celebrate the variety of organizations and venues that continue to bring great shows to town.

Fred Hersch 

Jazz pianist Hersch can drive and swing with the best modern trios, and has long since earned his reputation as one of the post-modern greats at the keyboard, but he's even better known as an extraordinarily thoughtful soloist whose spontaneous contrapuntal lines would often be worthy of being published as "classical" compositions. He arrived at the Dakota downtown with guitarist Julian Lage, and that worried me a little. Would the younger artist be capable of contributing to the flow consistently, fashioning an evening to compare with the one pianist Brad Mehldau and reedman Joshua Redman gave us a few years ago in the same club? The answer is an astonished yes. It was a remarkable night, with Lage's tastefully electrified licks offering a perfect foil to Hersch's rich but sometimes delicate elaborations.

The duo gave us one long set, then signed a few CDs and disappeared into the night. That's a much better option, for my money, than two short sets with a tedious intermission in between.

Duruflé Requiem

The Oratorio Society of Minnesota chorus presented a program of French sacred music in the magnificent Basilica of St. Mary in downtown Minneapolis on a cold November evening. Short works by Fauré, Franck, Widor, Dupré, and Honegger made up the first half; the second was devoted to Duruflé's beloved Requiem, which I'd never heard before. Sweet and slippery French harmonies throughout, several soloists who knew how to fill the lofty interior of the basilica, and a chamber orchestra and pipe organ also helped to maintain an atmosphere of beauty, reverence, and occasionally, of awe.

JazzMN Orchestra

Billed as the Midwest's premier big band, the JazzMN Orchestra filled cavernous Chanhassan Dinner Theater with its joyous blare—which is half the fun—in a December "Christmas" concert that mostly steered clear of cloying holiday classics or spruced them up in spiffy jazz arrangements . The ensemble playing was crisp and the soloists were uniformly top-flight, with the exception of the guitarist, who perhaps had gotten a new fuzz-tone device as an early Christmas present. Vocalist Yolande Bruce, of Moore by Four, appeared on stage for a few numbers, but the band was doing just fine without her.   

Le Vent du Nord

For my money, the best slice of the Celtic music pie is the one performed by musicians from Brittany and Quebec. Irish music, even when played at breakneck speed, can fall into a yutty-tutty regularity that begins to numb the mind. French tunes in a similar vein are almost invariably more complex and interesting rhythmically, and the harmonic coloring also tends to have more variety and appeal. Whatever the case may be, Le vent du Nord took the stage at the Cedar Cultural Center intent on delivering a rousing and varied show, and under the impetus of an electric bass, a mean hurdy-gurdy, two stellar fiddlers, an accordion, and rich vocals throughout, they produced a display of music that I'm tempted to rank in my all-time top ten.

Giulio Cesare in Egitto

The Minnesota Bach Ensemble presented a concert version of excerpts from this Handel opera at Antonello Hall on a Sunday afternoon recently. I've always liked the hall, which is rich in wood paneling and so small that no seat is more than a hundred feet from the stage, behind which there are gigantic windows looking north past a few brick buildings toward the Mississippi River. The windows had been covered with white panels, alas, but the orchestra was sharp, and the three vocalists were distinctively different yet uniformly appealing. Linh Kauffman, a soprano that we've seen in several other recent productions, sang the part of Cleopatra, while the roles of Julius Caesar and Sesto were taken by two mezzos, Christina Christensen and  Spaniard Nerea Berraondo. Jacob Miller's narration strung the arias together and gave me a vague sense of what was going on, but it hardly mattered: it was mostly about the music.

We took Washington Avenue home, marveling at the big city lights beaming from buildings that used to house hardware stores and bicycle-repair shops, heated up some left-over chicken with lemon slices and oil-cured olives, turned off the lights, and dropped a few CDs into the CD-changer by Natalie Dessay, Theresa Berganza, and Lisa Saffer singing (what else?) some of Handel's Italian arias.    

Russian Renaissance

The Schubert Club has done a good job of booking unusual groups to fill out its Mix program, and Russian Renaissance is no exception. The group's instrumentation is drawn from traditional Russian folk instruments, including the triangular balalaika that we've all seen in films, the oval domra, a big button accordion, and the huge bass balalaika, which measures almost four feet on a side. The playing is energetic and precise, so much so that two years ago this quartet won the $100,000 grand prize at the M-Prize Competition, the biggest jackpot in the world of chamber music.

The concert was held in a cavernous "hall" lined with rugged exposed brick in the former Allied Van Lines building, which is located in one of the few parts of the warehouse district that still has warehouses in it.  

All of that being granted, I must admit that I left the concert with mixed feelings. The performances were tight, yes, and the play-list was varied. But too much of the program was given over to the furious diddling that produces the balalaika's trademark tremolo effect. The slower, more atmospheric pieces tended to be more satisfying. The group was adept at producing the abrupt stops and starts required to bring drama to the tangos, but it didn't dwell long enough in those languorous spaces that provide that genre's sensuous ground. I was intrigued to see compositions by famed French accordionist Richard Galliano, Belgian guitarist Django Reinhardt, and Argentine bandoneon-player Astor Piazzola on the program, but in each case, the balalaika version didn't quite measure up to the originals running through my head.

It was an unusual and entertaining evening, just the same.