Review: Bach goes big in Minnesota Orchestra's rewarding program

Israeli mandolinist Avi Avital was soloist.

By Rob Hubbard For the Minnesota Star Tribune

December 5, 2024 — 3:33pm

The world's most popular classical composer has to be Johann Sebastian Bach. Tastes may diverge, but everyone from scholars to casual classical fans seems to agree that he's the emotionally eloquent genius who made everything after him possible.

Meanwhile, the Minnesota Orchestra is the state's most popular presenter of classical music. Yet rarely will you find Bach on a Minnesota Orchestra program. That's because the early-18th-century German wrote most of his music for smaller groups, often for a single instrumentalist.

But this week's Minnesota Orchestra concerts are a celebration of Bach that goes from intimate to expansive. Nine works are on the program, seven of them by Bach and two inspired by his music. If it's an authentic 1700s sound you seek, go catch a concert by Lyra Baroque or the Bach Society of Minnesota. In the orchestra's performance, Bach's music is seen through a 20th- and 21st-century lens, his music rearranged under the influence of romanticism and adventurous instrumentation.

It added up to something tremendously rewarding at Thursday's midday concert at Minneapolis' Orchestra Hall. Led with a balance of grace and gravitas by Canadian conductor Jordan de Souza, the concert blended respect for the composer and imaginative explorations of what he might have done with an orchestra of almost 100 musicians at his disposal.

That applies to the concert's second half. The first was faithful to the sound of its time, save for one change: As far as we know, Bach never wrote a piece specifically for the mandolin. Israeli mandolinist Avi Avital has been performing and recording pieces the composer wrote for harpsichord and violin, with a concerto originally composed for each on this weekend's program.

It proved a fine fit for the music, complemented by 22 string players from the Minnesota Orchestra and harpsichordist Dean Billmeyer. After opening the concert in the first balcony with a slice of a Bach violin partita, Avital took to the stage for a mandolin transcription of a concerto best known in its keyboard incarnation, the slow center movement proving captivating.

Avital's subsequent take on a version of the A Minor Violin Concerto was most memorable during the sprightly and spirited opening movement and the muscular rock-and-roll-esque strumming on the finale.

The concert's first half focused on what happens when Bach's music meets a mandolin. The second half was about what happens when it's unleashed by a full orchestra. After a modernist collage by American composer Betsy Jolas ("Letters From Bachville"), three works originally written for organ were heard in the orchestrations of Edward Elgar, Leopold Stokowski and former Minnesota Orchestra music director Stanislaw Skrowaczewski.

The latter's version of the popular Toccata and Fugue in D Minor helped open Orchestra Hall in 1974, and Thursday's performance served as a reminder of what a masterful orchestrator the maestro was. Each collection of instruments did its best imitation of a set of organ pipes. The performance was as much of an adrenaline rush as Gustav Mahler's arrangements of Bach orchestral suites were rapturously beautiful.