Conductor Andrew Litton’s desire to popularize the Minnesota Orchestra in the eyes and ears of less refined and well-heeled folk has been evident in the seven years he has served as artistic director of the orchestra’s Sommerfest program. As a series of events that promote diverse musical genres, cheaper tickets, crowd-pleasing classical fare and less stuffy venues (literally, since some of the shows are outdoors), Sommerfest is the musical equivalent of summer reading lists for the beach.
In this week’s concerts Litton will first explain and then conduct Dmitri Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 11. He’ll spend a good 10 minutes before the performance laying out the symphony’s folk-music roots on the piano and presumably some of the history behind the piece. It is a great idea.
While not so ham-handed in its message as, say, “Fanfare for the Common Man,” the Shostakovich makes a strong brief on behalf of the proletariat. The composer weaves no fewer than nine folk songs associated with various revolutionary movements in Russia into the symphony’s four movements. The work itself, subtitled “The Year 1905,” depicts the bloody massacre arising out of a peaceful protest by Russian citizenry against the policies of the Tsar, and is also believed to be Shostakovich’s protest against the Soviet Union’s crushing of the rebellion in Hungary in 1956, which occurred a year before the symphony’s world premiere.
The music itself is very accessible, its emotions bared in neon, like a film score. The ominous first movement leads to carnage in the second (depicting “Bloody Sunday”), with plenty of crashing percussion and frenzied strings and low-end (tuba and trombone) brass. The third movement is the quiet lamenting; the fourth, more marching and violence up to the inevitable climax. (Here is a video clip of the conclusion of that final movement.)
Before the Shostakovich, pianist William Wolfram will perform Franz Liszt’s Concerto No. 2 in A Major for Piano and Orchestra. Like Litton, Wolfram is a familiar face to orchestra patrons, having performed here more than 50 times over the past 15 years. He is also currently in the midst of recording Liszt’s ample piano music for the Naxos label.
As a highly lauded pianist himself in his day, Liszt is renowned for composing works large and small that pushed the boundaries of the instrument, making it an orchestra unto itself. But unlike his first piano concerto, the piece Wolfram will perform this weekend is less virtuosic and more concerned with the thematic complexity of recurring motifs, plus well-integrated exchanges between pianist and orchestra. It will be a nice aperitif before the Shostakovich.
“Litton Explores Shostakovich,” with conductor Andrew Litton and pianist William Wolfram at Orchestra Hall, Thursday, March 26, at 7:30 p.m., tickets $25-$72; and Friday, March 27, at 8 p.m., tickets $25-$83.
