Just as a painter would have trouble creating a masterpiece in a dark room, a composer can't be expected to write major works for orchestras without getting a chance to hear what those works sound like. The Minnesota Orchestra's "Perfect Pitch" program, a collaboration with the American Composers Forum, attempts to solve that problem. In nonpublic performances, the orchestra reads through a number of scores, allowing the composers to hear what they've written, and maybe correct some things. Occasionally, a work such as Philip Fried's "Elements for Orchestra" -- first played in "Perfect Pitch" -- graduates to the subscription series, as happened Wednesday night at Orchestra Hall in Minneapolis.
Fried, 44, a native of New York City who lives in Minneapolis and teaches at a St. Paul elementary school, writes big-scale, complicated, mostly non-tonal music -- that which used to be called "uncompromising." The complications were great enough, in fact, that only the third of the work's four movements was played Wednesday night. Of the four elements of antiquity -- earth, wind, air and fire -- the third movement discourses on water. The movement is also a portrait of Fried's wife, Janet, the composer tells us in a program note.
After an ominous rumble in the low woodwinds punctuated by delicate percussion, a brooding theme in the lower strings presents itself and is continued in solo instruments. Tense outbursts in the strings alternate with more subtleties from the percussionists. Fried orchestrates imaginatively. His emotional tone is expressionist anxiety. He packs a great deal of music into just six minutes. Unlike many composers today, he isn't desperate to please, perhaps because he has a lot to say.
Concertmaster Jorja Fleezanis and principal oboe Basil Reeve opened the program playing the solo parts in Bach's Concerto for Violin and Oboe in C minor. They played elegantly and with skill, capturing just the right plaintive tone in the slow movement. The evening's other guest soloist, the young American mezzosoprano Michelle DeYoung, sang Wagner's "Wesendonck-Lieder" and returned after intermission for Mozart's concert aria "Ch'io mi scordi di te." Her Wagner, with its ringing top notes, was deftly colored, confidently shaped and clearly enunciated, as was her Mozart, which music director Eiji Oue conducted from a piano. After a bright playing of Haydn's seldom-heard but wonderfully witty Symphony No. 31 in D Major, "Hornsignal," Oue concluded the evening with a grand reading of Liszt's "Les Preludes."
