It all came from folk music. Whatever genre you prefer, it evolved from something that required no electricity and maybe even no instruments, just voices and hand claps. Classical, jazz, pop, rock, R&B, hip-hop… All are rooted in musical styles developed around some rural bonfire or other.
Pekka Kuusisto seems deeply aware of that. The Finnish violinist has long been finding the folk in whatever he plays, be it a J.S. Bach partita or a freshly composed violin concerto. If you experience one of his performances with the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra, you might come away thinking Kuusisto capable of identifying the dance at the root of whatever rhythm they’re playing, as well as the culture that spawned it.
He seems an omnivorous student of folk forms and this weekend’s SPCO concerts might be the best example yet of his propensity for building bridges between styles, like 19th-century Norwegian composer Edvard Grieg and the fiddlers and banjo pickers across the Atlantic from him. At Thursday’s “happy hour” concert at St. Paul’s Ordway Concert Hall, Kuusisto collaborated not only with the SPCO, but with singer and multi-instrumentalist folk scholar Sam Amidon, together finding common ground between Norwegian fjords and the forested mountains of Appalachia.
For some, jumping back and forth between movements from Grieg’s “Holberg” Suite and Amidon’s haunting, atmospheric takes on old American folk tunes like “Saro” and “O Death” might be akin to mixing together two cuisines you’d normally like if served separately. And perhaps the bonds between the musical traditions would have emerged more clearly if applause didn’t greet the conclusion of each movement or song (13 ovations in 90 minutes was a bit much).
Nevertheless, I thought the combination worked, particularly when Kuusisto lent eerie high descants to “Sugar Baby” and Nico Muhly’s string arrangement cut to the sorrow of “Saro.” Yet the saddest, most soulful sound of the night came from the “Holberg” Suite’s mournful “Air.” And I’ve never heard that suite’s concluding “Rigaudon” done quite so country, thanks to some fine fiddling by violist Maiya Papach.
The concert’s centerpiece was a new arrangement of Gabriel Kahane’s “Orinoco Sketches.” It takes for its text the diary entries of Kahane’s grandmother as she emigrated from Germany to Los Angeles in 1939 and ’40. With Eric Jacobsen on the podium and Kahane as singer, pianist and guitarist, the four-movement piece at first seemed to over-compartmentalize its classical and pop elements, as if we were shifting between a concert hall and a piano bar. But it grew on me, reaching sweet fruition in a finale about a driving lesson on which Kathryn Greenbank’s oboe soared above Kahane’s electric guitar.
Throw in a little Jean Sibelius (a subtle, chilling take on his “Valse Triste”) and you have a concert rewarding for anyone willing to accept the unorthodox combinations. Especially with the addition of a violin concerto by contemporary Finnish composer Magnus Lindberg, a work not presented at Thursday’s only-slightly-abbreviated early-evening version of the program.
IF YOU GO
Who: The St. Paul Chamber Orchestra with violinist Pekka Kuusisto, conductor Eric Jacobsen, multi-instrumentalist and singer Sam Amidon and pianist, guitarist and singer Gabriel Kahane
What: Works by Edvard Grieg, Gabriel Kahane, Jean Sibelius and Magnus Lindberg
When: 11 a.m. and 8 p.m. Friday, 8 p.m. Saturday
Where: Ordway Concert Hall, 345 Washington St., St. Paul
Tickets: $53-$15 (students free), available at 651-291-1144 or thespco.org
Capsule: Appalachia and Norway grow closer by the song.
