The Classical Review

The Grant Park Music Festival’s podium batting average is impressive, invariably managing to book fine guest conductors throughout its ten-week season

Even so, it’s not every summer concert in Chicago that yields someone of Osmo Vänskä’s stature at Millennium Park, and the Finnish conductor made his festival debut Wednesday night. (Credit Giancarlo Guerrero’s friendship with Vänskä for this unexpected pleasure. The festival’s new artistic director served as Vänskä’s associate conductor in Minnesota.)

Apropos, Vänskä’s 19-year tenure as music director of the Minnesota Orchestra was one of the most successful symphonic partnerships in North America, resulting in acclaimed recorded cycles of Sibelius, Mahler and Beethoven.

Beethoven’s Sixth Symphony remains the uber-summer concert work, the nature-loving composer’s day in the country ideally suited to al fresco music-making. Fortunately, the weather cooperated and it was surprisingly quiet downtown Wednesday evening, a couple isolated bursts of screaming sirens apart. 

Vänskä’s Beethoven bona fides were apparent from the very first bars, with the no-nonsense conductor leading a remarkably fresh and illuminating performance of this familiar music. Without doing anything outré interpretively or even particularly individual, Vänskä simply delivered a supremely realized and beautiful rendering of the “Pastoral,” with some of the finest playing heard from the Grant Park Orchestra this summer. 

The opening movement was firmly focused yet imbued with the requisite relaxed amiability. Even with Vänskä taking all repeats, nothing felt overextended, with his direction bringing out all the felicities of Beethoven’s scoring and varied tonal shifts. Likewise, the second movement was easy-going and mellow with the Grant Park wind principals bringing polished tone and big personality to their solos. Even the avian onomatopoeia in the cadenza came across as charming and delightful in the hands of flutist Jennifer Lawson (nightingale), oboe Mitchell Kuhn (quail), and clarinetists Dario Brignoli and Trevor O’Riordan (cuckoos).

Vänskä’s rustic festival was no gentle scherzo, but a vigorous, foot-stomping affair. (Clearly the pilsner had made several rounds with these partying villagers.) Unlike many a “Pastoral” these days, Vänskä refrained from going over the top in the thunderstorm, delivering a tempest that was vivid and effective without turning it into a timpani concerto or Mahlerian cataclysm. The beneficent finale provided just the right concluding glow with refined playing by the orchestra and Vänskä’s transparency allowing the subtle scoring of each variation register. The audience was unusually attentive and amplification was ideally judged throughout.

Beethoven on this level would be impressive indoors in the fall season but is a real treat during the summer months. Wednesday night’s program will have a rare Thursday repeat, so you have a second chance to catch it. 

Vänskä did not bring music of his native Finland on this visit but the program did travel to Northern European climes with the evening’s centerpiece, Max Bruch’s Scottish Fantasy. 

While Bruch’s Violin Concerto No. 1 in G minor is an omnipresent fixture in the concert hall, his Scottish Fantasy continues to be relatively neglected—perhaps because the German composer mines popular Scottish folksongs for all his thematic material. But even though the tunes are not his, the Fantasy is still a masterful work, chock full of engaging melody, artfully laid out for violin and orchestra, and fully redolent of its Caledonian inspiration.

Rarely will one hear a soloist so completely in synch with a work as violinist Paul Huang proved Wednesday night in Bruch’s Scottish Fantasy. Indeed, one would have to go back to the young Cho-Liang Lin’s 1987 recording with Leonard Slatkin and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra to hear such a richly expressive performance of this appealing score.

Huang’s playing was unfailingly incisive and technically immaculate in the virtuosic sections of the Scherzo and the playfully insistent, kilted-clans-going-to-battle finale. 

But what really came across was the well, fantasy, element in this Scottish Fantasy, with the soloist leaning into the Scottish melodies and making the most of its rhapsodic qualities. Huang’s freely lyrical performance served up a solo highlight, not just of the summer but of the year. His encore of Fritz Kreisler’s Scherzo–Caprice provided a nice extra dollop of bravura.

Vänskä’s alert and atmospheric accompaniment was on the same level, textured yet subtle, letting the melodies unfold without going over the top in tuttis. Harpist Julie Spring contributed a superb rendering of her bardic part, discreetly balanced by Vänskä. 

The evening began with Henry Dorn’s Transitions. As the composer explained in his spoken introduction, this intensely personal work was inspired by Dorn’s month-long stay with his mother in the hospital before she succumbed to cancer in 2017. 

“I try to capture not the beauty we often try to find in the passing of a loved one, but the tumultuous, ravenous nature of this illness,” Dorn wrote in his program note for the 2022 Minnesota Orchestra premiere. “It was there that I started to write notes and ideas I felt about the experience, her journey, her unspoken strength, and her quiet inner beauty.” 

Dorn packs a lot into the ten-minute span of Transitions. The opening section seems to chart the merciless violence that cancer inflicts on the human body, painted in harsh and jagged music for brass and winds and fast, unsettled string runs. The whirring ventilator, medical devices and hospital milieu are painted in somewhat whimsical Robby the Robot-type music. A hushed nocturnal section led by impressionistic piano offers a peaceful respite, with a stoic melody for English horn and later solos by violin and viola. The cancer music returns in even more relentless and violent fashion but a rising horn theme—his mother’s instrument—quells the chaos and provides an affirmative finale 

Transitions bears some resemblance to Richard Strauss’s Death and Transfiguration, minus Strauss’s finesse and philosophical depths. If Dorn’s finale feels a bit too pat, this is still a heartfelt work, with clear-cut themes, and crafted with skill. Henry Dorn is a composer we should hear more from in Chicago.

Vänskä and the GPO musicians provided ardent and virtuosic advocacy for Dorn’s music, with the conductor drawing contrapuntal clarity even in the most hectic passages.

Christopher Bell will conduct the Independence Day concert 6:30 p.m. Friday. gpmf.org