Classical Smackdown

The Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra is celebrating its fiftieth anniversary boldly—by inviting the competition to the party. This month, the SPCO plays host to an international chamber orchestra festival featuring four top-notch chamber orchestras—the Chamber Orchestra of Europe, London Sinfonietta, the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, and the Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra—for four weeks of concerts that span a timeline from Bach to now.

Of course, the SPCO could have just published a commemorative coffee-table book or put together a retrospective recording. But by instead hosting an international chamber orchestra festival, the SPCO is trumpeting what the organization is now and what its aspirations are for the future. While unconventional, that choice is utterly consonant with the spirit of dynamism and reinvention that has driven the organization in the past several years. Among other things, the SPCO’s current vision has manifested itself in a neighborhood-based approach to audience expansion and a revolutionary artistic model that engages luminaries of today’s classical music scene as partners in artistic planning.

Three of those artistic partners, in fact, have relationships with the visiting ensembles. Pierre–Laurent Aimard frequently performs with the London Sinfonietta; Nicholas McGegan has been the Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra’s music director since 1985; and Douglas Boyd, now a guest conductor with the Chamber Orchestra of Europe, was a founding member as an oboist. Stephen Copes, the SPCO’s concertmaster, is a frequent guest concertmaster for the COE as well.

No matter how collegial the relationships are, inviting the competition into your living room is a gutsy move—sharing the spotlight with great ensembles inevitably invites comparison. But it’s a calculated risk. The SPCO appears confident that it will compare favorably with its out-of-town competition, and merely associating itself with such respected organizations is likely to polish the SPCO’s reputation even further.

“Looking way backward, I don’t think the perception was always that the SPCO was at this level,” reflects COE’s Boyd. “But it can now hold its head up. One of the tributes I’d pay to the SPCO, and its management in particular, is that it has internationalized the orchestra. I believe the festival will show SPCO on a level playing field.”

The festival format will not only reveal how the SPCO stacks up to a few of the world’s great chamber orchestras, but it will provide a rare opportunity for Twin Citians to experience the orchestras’ lush diversity.

Like the SPCO, the COE is a generalist ensemble that performs wide-ranging repertoire in historically appropriate styles. Based in London, it is a Pan-European ensemble bursting with the greatest solo and chamber players from across the Atlantic. The PBO, from San Francisco, and the OAE, from London, both specialize in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century music played on period instruments; the London Sinfonietta focuses on new music.

In addition to hosting, the SPCO will join forces with its guests. For instance, the SPCO and the COE will perform Bartok’s Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta. It was written for two chamber orchestras, but rather than creating a “battle of the bands,” as SPCO vice president of artistic planning John Mangum puts it, players from each orchestra will perform together. The SPCO will also team up with the London Sinfonietta to perform Beethoven’s Emperor Concerto, a majestic piece from Beethoven’s “heroic” period, written during the Napoleonic Wars. On the same program will be the U.S. premiere of Heiner Goebbels’ Songs of Wars I Have Seen, a piece commissioned for the London Sinfonietta that incorporates spoken text from Gertrude Stein’s writing in France during World War II.

Regardless of what the verdict is on SPCO’s place in the firmament of chamber orchestras, our community wins. As rich and vibrant as our arts scene is, it is isolated in flyover country. “We have our concert season and give great concerts every week, but there is no context,” says Mangum. “The context is what is coming this January.”

Jan. 8–30. Various locations, 651-291-1144