It's a demanding piece that asks the flutist to pack a lot of notes into 18 minutes of music, and Kuenzel made it marvelously musical. The Nielsen concerto is far more playful, finding principal flutist Adam Kuenzel in animated conversation with musicians throughout the orchestra. Dotted with exceptional solos (particularly by concertmaster Erin Keefe), it was a deeply involving work. It's a layered piece of intensity and beauty that may only ask for four different instruments - violins, violas, cellos and basses - but separates them into 19 groups that often chase one another up and down scales, trading themes and brief rhythmic flurries. A week after premiering fresh works by seven composers at its annual Composer Institute concert, the orchestra continued to display its acumen with 21st-century music on Chinese-French composer Qigang Chen's work for string orchestra, "L'Eloignement."
The most intriguing piece may have been its newest. Their Tchaikovsky was all id, devoid of artifice and affectation and eminently enjoyable.Īdd to that a knock-it-out-of-the-park performance of Danish composer Carl Nielsen's Flute Concerto - a work rooted in romanticism but on the road toward modernism - and you have a fine showcase for this orchestra's ability to adapt to any guest conductor. Leading the Minnesota Orchestra in a mostly romantic-era program, she amped up the energy and the musicians responded with a performance that sounded as if straining the boundaries of emotional expressiveness. Zhang got what she asked for Friday night at Minneapolis' Orchestra Hall. That's an understandable approach for the music of Peter Tchaikovsky, the Russian romantic who filled his scores with such surges of sound and emotion that they beg for more and even more passion and power from an orchestra. Throwing her whole body into leading an orchestra, she's a relentless mass of movement, one who swirls and sweeps her way around the confines of the podium, like a roiling pot dancing on the stove and about to boil over. Conductor Xian Zhang reminds me of that torrential tempest that blew through the Twin Cities on Wednesday night.
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