Commitment to the new is back at Orchestra Hall.
After a three-year absence, the Minnesota Orchestra has relaunched its Composer Institute, a formerly annual program that invites four to seven early career composers to spend a week or two in Minneapolis and workshop a new piece with the help of the orchestra.
Founded by composer Aaron Jay Kernis in 1996, the program became increasingly public when longtime music director Osmo Vänskä started conducting annual concerts of the pieces being workshopped, something that his successor, Thomas Søndergård, has avidly embraced.
This year’s batch of new works was presented on Friday night in a general admission, choose-your-price concert that drew an impressively sizable crowd for an evening of new music, proving that artistic curiosity is alive and well and living in the Twin Cities. But it also provided insight into Søndergård’s sonic preferences, as well as what compositional traits most appeal to the institute’s director, composer Kevin Puts.
Let’s start with the latter. It was clear that the Pulitzer-winning Puts places a high value on the craft of orchestration, for all four composers displayed a solid command of how to assemble the kind of musical textures in which a listener can be submerged in the sound. That’s something of a trademark of Puts’ music, as evidenced by his gorgeous, richly layered score for the opera, “Silent Night” (premiered by Minnesota Opera in 2011).
And it’s clear that Søndergård’s tastes flow in that direction, as well, something we could have guessed from how well he and the Minnesota Orchestra have hit it off on full-voiced early 20th-century works by Richard Strauss and Maurice Ravel, two composers known for illustrious orchestrations.
All five pieces on Friday’s program used the orchestra well, starting with a 2022 Puts work, “Heartland,” that was commissioned by the Des Moines Symphony. That orchestra wanted something that evoked the Midwest, and Puts delivered with a piece that could easily be employed as the soundtrack for a documentary about American agriculture. I’ve heard a fair amount of Puts’ music but nothing that sounded so much like Aaron Copland’s big wide-open chords that sound like big, wide-open spaces.
From there, the concert grew increasingly intriguing. Benjamin Webster’s “Autumn Movement” was an atmospheric soundscape that wove some interesting textures but didn’t lay enough atop them for my tastes. And Puts was clearly looking for something discomfiting to break up all this orchestral splendor when he settled upon Elise Arancio’s “Bite Your Tongue” to be part of the program, a work full of big explosions and troubling tape loops.
