Out of the Past

Minneapolis was recently ranked as the happiest city in the United States by the London-based Institute for the Quality of Life. It's hard for me, or anyone, to say for sure if that's true, but it brings to mind the slogan that was briefly popular when the eyes of all baseball fans were turned toward the Twin Cities during the 1991 World Series. "We Like It Here."

I prefer this slogan, anodyne though it is, to the more recent saying associated with the Timberwolves playoff run, "Bring y'ass," which was even embraced briefly by the people at Explore Minnesota. How times have changed.

But sometimes the days and weeks slip by, with remarkable events occurring so often that you hardly remember them. Here are three that I wouldn't want to forget:

A few weeks ago we paid a visit to the Ted Mann Concert Hall to hear the Oratorio Society, with some help from the University of Minnesota Chorus and Orchestra, perform a massive work called The Three Holy Children. I'd never heard of it, nor of the Anglo-Irish composer who wrote it, Charles Stanford. It was only performed once, in 1885, and considering its obscurity, I would have taken it to be a hobby-horse of the Oratorio Society's talented and energetic director, Matthew Mehaffey—appealing to archivists and fanatics but not the general public—except that a friend of ours who sings in that choir assured us it was worth a listen. She was right.

During a lengthy but informative spiel before the concert, Mehaffey explained that an archival discovery did underlie the performance, and went on to describe the painstaking work that was required to turn the score into serviceable singing parts. But if the piece is so great, why was The Three Holy Children performed only once before vanishing from view? Because oratorios were a dime a dozen in those days, and very costly to produce. There was little motivation to do the same one twice, and by the turn of the century the genre was dwindling in popularity.

Final question: Who the heck was Charles Stanford? Turns out he was an eminent composer, conductor, and educator in his day, and numbered Gustav Holst and Ralph Vaughan Williams among his pupils. A dyed-in-the-wool Brahmsian, he found little to like in the modernist tendencies stirring at the time, and the younger generation, once fledged, seldom gave him a backward glance.

Though lengthy, the oratorio was, in my view, richly varied and uniformly splendid. It was like listening to a long-lost companion piece to Brahms' Requiem, gentler perhaps but hardly less rich in melodic and harmonic interest, and free of the weird and ghastly swoops and ostentatious harmonic clashes that mar so much modern liturgical music.

The three holy children mentioned in the title, in case you're interested, are Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, who were tossed into the fiery furnace by Nebuchadnezzar during the Babylonian Captivity. It's one of the few Old Testament stories that kids like. Bing Crosby, Louis Prima, Sonny Rollins, and many others recorded a different version of the tale that ran to two minutes rather than two hours. That version was introduced in the 1930s. Here's a video of Louis Armstrong doing it in 1951. But with all due respect, the Oratorio Society does it better.

A few weeks later we stopped in at a photo exhibit called "Portraits: Past & Present," at a smallish gallery called Praxis in the Seward neighborhood. The pictures were taken by students of retired Star Tribune photographer Richard Sennott at a commercial photo studio of Gust Akerlund in Cokato, a small town roughly an hour west of Minneapolis on Highway 12. 

The studio first opened its doors in 1904, when people in London might still have been humming snatches of The Three Holy Children—though probably not. Gust Akerlund retired in 1950, but the studio is still open for business, still using natural light, and still equipped with some of the original backdrops. The Cokato Museum in now in the process of digitalizing many of the 14,000 negatives Gust took during his long career—workers, salesmen, carnival performers, funerals, weddings, family portraits.

In 2009 Sennott did a photo shoot at the studio for the Star Tribune. He recently took a group of students out to photograph some of the same people, fifteen years later, at the 74th Cokato Corn CarnivalIt struck me as a relaxed, warm, friendly, and good-natured show. I enjoyed chatting with the director of the Cokato museum, Johannah Ellison, sharing with her how much I enjoyed the exhibit of canned corn labels at her museum (it's true!), and also the stuffed bobwhite in the wildlife diorama. It was also fun to chat with Cokato's long-time professional story-teller Bob Gasch. Half a century ago I heard Bob recite "The Cremation of Sam McGee" at a training weekend when I was a canoe guide.

I eavesdropped on two old codgers—probably from Cokato—as they discussed the recent drought, the price of corn, and whether the gigantic ball of twine on display in Darwin, a few miles down the road from Cokato, is really the largest in the world, or only the largest one made by a single person.

And Hilary and I especially enjoyed running into her cousins Laura Sennott and Dan Olsen. Dan's wife and two daughters had flown south to a Caribbean meditation retreat. Dan wasn't in the mood, and decided to come west instead from his home in Boston to do some fishing with his sister and brother-in-law up on Cross Lake. Good idea.

A third event anchored in the past comes to mind: a performance by La Grande Bande at the Black Forest of cantatas by Bach and Handel and shorter pieces by Corelli and others. It was billed as "Summer and Songs" with a meal provided by the Black Forest. We went with friends, and also enjoyed talking with the two young university professors who joined us at our table, but the opening peroration read from a sheet of paper by harpsichordist Michael Thomas Asmus was somewhat boring, and one of the violinists—there were only two—was slightly out of tune for much of the performance. It didn't help that to get a beer you had to leave the room and walk through the courtyard to the bar, then wait for the bartender, who seemed to be new at the job,  to tend to your order.

But the voices of soprano Catherine Sandstedt and baritone Andrew Kane saved the day.

Le Grande Bande is based in Gaylord, an hour southwest of town, though many of the musicians in the troupe are from the Cities and elsewhere. The size of the group varies with the repertoire being performed. The pieces we heard were memorable--especially the one featuring a hunting horn--but I think we'd have better luck with a larger ensemble.