The Minnesota Orchestra, under new Music Director Thomas Søndergård, performed at Hancher Auditorium earlier this month, on November 15th. The performance saw the return of the ensemble to the University of Iowa, as their last visit came in 1982. Before that, the Orchestra made regular visits through the decades prior, with a a partnership that dates all the way back to 1909.
An Evening of Musical Drama at Hancher
The old Hancher building, constructed in the early 1970s and taken out of commission due to the flood of 2008, was a larger room that tended to have some unruly echoes and reflections. The new Hancher Auditorium, which officially opened its doors in 2016, is a smaller room, and the intervening 50 years in acoustic design research is clearly audible. It has just enough echo and reverberation to feel live, without the smearing of sound. As much as any venue I’ve experienced, I feel like I could hear the orchestra perfectly.
The Minnesota Orchestra took to Hancher readily. The opening piece, Tori Takemitsu’s “Night Signal” for two antiphonal brass instruments filled the space with a round, satisfying tone. Takemitsu was known for his writing on music theory. This short piece uses thick brass chords that carry echoes of Debussy and Ravel, but also modern jazz. The performers played it the way it should be, absolutely reveling in the blend and clash of harmonies. Intellectually challenging but also deeply sensual. Brass players’ heads vibrate with the sound of their own instruments, and playing together they share that vibration, both with each other and the audience.
I spoke with the Minnesota Orchestra’s Assistant Principal Bassist, William Schrickel in advance of the November 15th Hancher Concert. Born in Sioux City, his family moved to Chicago when he was 10. He began his musical journey not too long after. “I started to play the bass when I was 13 years old, and it took me about a year and a half to get serious,” Schrickel told me. His commitment to his art became all-consuming early on. “I was a madman, and I practiced in the summers, I would practice seven to eight hours a day when I could. In school, I was not going to the class, because I was in my room, in my dorm, practicing the bass, annoying the people who live next door to me.” The orchestra was his first job as a musician at the age of 20, and he’s stayed there for 50 years. “Orchestral playing at the highest level, like the Minnesota Orchestra does, is the greatest example of teamwork in any undertaking that exists…When I go and hear other wonderful orchestras, I watch these 100 men and women playing at the top level. It’s, to me, a religious experience.”
Karol Szymanowski’s Violin Concerto No. 1 was next on the program. Though written in 1916, the work embraces what, at the time, was jarringly-modern tonality. Composed three years after Stravinsky’s “Rite Of Spring,” the Concerto is famously the first “modern” violin concerto. For all its dissonance and atonality it strikes the ear as lush and dramatic. Still “weird” enough to test the patience of listeners more accustomed to Beethoven, Brahms and Mozart, it never feels arbitrary or needlessly abstruse. “The writing…is really quite different than any other concertos that had been written up to that point. The orchestration is very shimmery. It sounds so different than most concertos that had been written previously,” said Schrickel…