Oue’s Minnesotans Range From Tangos to Tchaikovsky

What is it with orchestras these days?

The San Francisco Symphony, the envy of orchestras everywhere for its success under its new music director Michael Tilson Thomas, is entering into the third month of a malignant strike. The Vienna Philharmonic, the world’s most refined orchestra, continues to insist upon sexist and racist hiring to protect its traditional sound. And last season the Minnesota Orchestra made Eiji Oue its music director.

Oue, who appeared with his orchestra Saturday night at the Orange County Performing Arts Center, is the first conductor to come along in quite some time whose chief selling point is flashiness. His hire reportedly was the fallout of sheer orchestral pique at its previous music director, Edo de Waart. Apparently the musicians wanted a conductor as different from the deeply musical but sometimes dour De Waart as could be found. Insiders in the music world scratched their heads and predicted disaster with the flamboyant 39-year-old Oue.

Flamboyant Oue most certainly has turned out to be even beyond anticipation. But a disaster? Hardly.

The native of Hiroshima has done everything from posing for a tacky limited edition Wheaties box to appearing almost daily at schools to promote his orchestra. And it has worked. Even this year’s terrible winter has not kept Minnesotans from filling the hall for all his concerts.

Musically, Oue has made the orchestra--one with a long and very distinguished history--into an extremely high-powered machine. And it hardly seems coincidence that the orchestra has become the favorite of audiophiles, and that its first recording under Oue, “The Rite of Spring” on the Reference label, has been nominated for a Grammy for its very much in-your-face Grammy sound.

And there--in our faces--is just where Oue put the orchestra and kept it all evening Saturday. Had the original touring program been maintained, there might have been opportunity for a little more finesse and restraint, since between some tango music and Tchaikovsky’s Fourth Symphony there was to have been a substantial Mozart piano concerto. But the soloist, Peter Serkin, tore a retina and had to cancel. His last-minute replacement was Jean-Yves Thibaudet, who substituted Rachmaninoff’s considerably more gaudy Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini.

To Oue’s credit, the Minnesotans play under him with enough virtuosity to make his more extravagant urgings exciting, and they demonstrate an easy flair one would not have expected from an orchestra that has been honed by more introspective European masters.

Also to his credit, Oue does have ideas about this music that are individual. His first nature may be to whip things up to fevered pitch as often as he can get away with it; he does so with great sweeping arm gestures that seem like a wild Prospero setting some huge natural phenomenon into motion. But his second nature seems to be to clean up texture and rhythm so everything sounds fresh and unexpected.

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In the Russian music that made up most of the program, that meant that everything also sounded as if there were no tradition whatsoever, no national sound, to be dealt with. The Rachmaninoff and the Tchaikovsky were turned into sound spectaculars. Thibaudet, a Frenchman dapper of look but restrained emotionally, emphasized percussion and glitter at the keyboard, and it was a novel thought to approach this worn music without the vain soul searching that it can inspire.

Nor was Oue at all seduced into the melancholic Russian soul of Tchaikovsky. His was a Fourth Symphony without tragedy. Literal to the score, long-lined melodies were parsed not for some unwritten goal but fragmented into correct rhythms. Inner parts often were not accorded hierarchies, and accompaniments became equal to main lines. It was almost as if Oue were a conductor from a later century who had discovered this score and, not knowing what it was, assumed it must be of the late 20th century and should be played like Xenakis.

Oue opened the program with a 10-minute suite of tangos, “Valentino Dances,” from Dominick Argento’s recent opera “The Dream of Valentino.” These are not the sophisticated new tangos but retro tangos with intentionally bombastic Hollywood orchestrations, and the soloist William Schimmel, an extravagant accordionist, offered a degree of goofiness that suited the music at hand and also set the proper tone for what lay ahead.