(fast-paced orchestral music) - [Announcer] Minnesota Orchestra together with Classical Minnesota Public Radio and Twin Cities PBS is Live with performances, interviews, and more, on television, radio, and online.

This is Minnesota Orchestra.

(peaceful music) (speaking in Mandarin) - That's hello in Chinese.

(speaking in Finnish) - That means hello in Finnish.

(speaking in Spanish) - We can use it to say hey, how's it going in Spanish.

(speaking in Korean) - That means hello in Korean.

(speaking in Estonian) - That is hello in Estonian.

(speaking in Mandarin) - Moi means hello in Finnish.

And as you know, I am originally from Finland.

(speaking in Korean) - That means welcome in Korean.

(speaking in Spanish) - That means welcome all in Spanish.

- (speaking in Finnish) means welcome in Finnish.

(speaking in Estonian) - That means welcome.

(speaking in Finnish) - It's great to see you.

(speaking in Mandarin) - That's welcome.

(speaking in Korean) (speaking in Mandarin) - That means so great to see you.

(speaking in Finnish) - Great to see you.

(speaking in Japanese) - That's good evening and welcome in my native Japanese.

To all of our friends in Minnesota, the U.S., and across the world, welcome to our globe trotting broadcast.

I'm your host and conductor Sarah Hicks.

And we're so thrilled you've joined us here at Orchestra Hall in Minneapolis for tonight's program, A Musical Passport.

Travel both widens our horizons and brings the world closer to us.

And while the pandemic has curtailed travel for many, many months, we can still explore those sites, sounds, people, and cultures around the world without ever having to leave our homes.

Tonight is an opportunity to satisfy our wanderlust with a musical trip around the world: From Italian overtures to Cuban airs, from Norwegian melodies to London symphonies.

If we can't go out into the world, music can bring the world to us in all its colors, rhythms, atmospheres, and perspectives.

So tonight we'll also be joined by our dear friend, the inimitable Rick Steves.

We'll take a little journey through poetry about travel read by members of the Minnesota Orchestra.

And of course, we'll hear music from around the world as well as music that was inspired by a composer's own travels.

Our next selection falls into that latter category, as the Taiwanese-American composer Chia-Yu gives us a musical impression of a trip to Europe.

We'll hear two movements, "Stockholm" and "London" from Chia-Yu's "Voyage for Oboe, Clarinet, and Bassoon."

(instruments tuning up) (flowing chamber music) (dramatic chamber music) - Hello, Minnesota Orchestra audiences.

I'm Rick Steves.

And it's such a pleasure to join you on this broadcast which is being produced by my friends at Twin Cities PBS.

The Minnesota Orchestra and I were planning to perform a joint concert this spring about the intersection of music and travel in 19th century Europe.

Now that concert's rescheduled for February of 2022, when we hope to be able to safely gather after beating this pandemic.

In the meantime, for this evening's program I'd like to share with you a thought about travel and music.

It was on my very first trip to Europe, 1969.

I was just a 14-year-old kid traveling with my mom and dad.

My dad was a piano tuner in Seattle.

And after awhile, he decided to import the best pianos in the world from Germany and from Austria.

And we traveled back to the old country to see the factories.

And we went to the Bosendorfer factory where they make the finest pianos in the world.

And they don't put them on a conveyor belt and mass produce them.

They used to brag that Yamaha produces more pianos in one month than Bosendorfer's produced in a hundred years.

At Bosendorfer they birth their pianos one at a time lovingly.

In fact, the factory was in an old monastery.

And in each cell, former cell, they were building a piano.

Each one had personality, terroir, the culture, the community, the heritage, the love of music carefully crafted into that musical instrument, like a fine wine.

Well, they lined up the pianos and my dad had me play each piano and then he assessed the personality of that piano in hopes of matching that piano's personality with the musical personality of his customer back in Seattle.

And then when he found the right piano for the right music lover in Seattle, he would actually sign the sounding board.

They'd put it in a box and ship it to the United States, and somebody who would get the piano of a lifetime.

Now, 50 years later, I still have one of those great old world, handcrafted pianos myself.

And I play it, mindful that people in both hemispheres and across the centuries have found great joy and great inspiration in music.

In the same way, I love the idea that I can enjoy an orchestra in Vienna, in Berlin, Tokyo, Seattle, or Minnesota, and it reminds us of our shared heritage and our shared love of the arts.

Classical music, live classical music is a blessing for any culture and for any society.

It's not a luxury.

It's important for our spirit.

It's important for the weave of what makes our cultures so rich.

It allows us to celebrate the arts and to celebrate how with cultural institutions like your orchestra we can embrace life with style and with gusto.

I hope to see many of you next February in-person at Orchestra Hall.

Until then, please enjoy this concert as your musical passport to a different place.

Thanks.

(rhythmic music) (languid music) (lively music) - [Marcia] We travel to discover more about ourselves, each other, and the world, and to connect through music.

Touring has been integral to the Minnesota Orchestra since its early days as the Minneapolis Symphony Orchestra.

The ensemble played its first regional tour in 1907 and debuted at Carnegie hall in New York City in 1912.

That indomitable ensemble was nicknamed the orchestra on wheels, and traveled by railway more than any other orchestra in America.

Even a 1918 train wreck couldn't keep these musicians from a concert engagement.

Before turning 50, the orchestra had performed more than 3,000 concerts in more than 400 cities across the U.S., Canada, and Cuba.

A special invitation to perform in Cuba in 1929 marked the first time the Minneapolis Symphony traveled across international waters launching a tradition of touring abroad.

Our musical predecessors traveled by steamship to Havana and performed two sold out concerts and added a third.

The applause was deafening and the packed audience formed a colorful sea of waving hats, handkerchiefs, and programs.

That was how the Minneapolis Tribune described the orchestra's Cuba debut on February 3rd, 1929.

The very next year, the ensemble returned to Cuba with three more performances for 2,500 people.

In 1957, the orchestra embarked on a historic State Department sponsored tour of the Middle East, that featured performances in Iran, Iraq, and Pakistan.

Later destinations included Hong Kong, Australia, Puerto Rico, and Japan.

Since 2004 music director Osmo Vanska has led our orchestra on five major European tours featuring performances in historic venues in Amsterdam, Berlin, Helsinki, London, and Vienna.

In 2015, the Cuban Ministry of Culture invited the Minnesota Orchestra to return to Cuba as part of the annual International Cubadisco Festival.

We became the first U.S. orchestra to perform in Cuba following the 2014 normalization of relations between the two countries.

It was thrilling to return to Havana nearly one century after the first performances, and to reestablish cultural ties.

We participated in musical exchanges, playing side-by-side with high school and university students and learning from each other.

Some colleagues played into the night with extraordinary Cuban musicians at Havana Cafe.

When we opened our final concert with the Cuban National Anthem followed by the American Anthem, it was powerful.

A feeling of unity.

The New York Times declared this trip to Cuba put Minnesota Orchestra at the cultural vanguard.

In 2018, we were humbled to travel to South Africa to offer music for Mandela as part of celebrations to mark the Centennial of Nelson Mandela's birth.

Presented by Classical Movements, the five city tour featured performances in Cape Town, Durban, Pretoria, Soweto, and Johannesburg, drawing together South African and Western performers, students, and music.

We were the first U.S. orchestra to tour the country.

We believe that sharing music, culture, and goodwill across international borders is a way to share our common humanity.

(thrilling music) (orchestra members applauding) - Just as music takes us on journeys outside of ourselves, poetry can also help us explore and understand the world around us.

Over the next several selections we'll hear three members of the Minnesota Orchestra read excerpts from three poems that approach travel from different perspectives: A poem about a harrowing journey; a poem that leads us through the landscape of an orchestra; a poem that celebrates the sheer exhilaration of movement.

Let's take a listen.

- "Ships That Pass in the Night" by Paul Laurence Dunbar.

Out in the sky the great dark clouds are massing; I look far out into the pregnant night, where I can hear a solemn booming gun and catch the gleaming of a random light, that tells me that the ship I seek is passing, passing.

My tearful eyes my soul's deep hurt are glassing; for I would hail and check that ship of ships.

I stretch my hands imploring, cry aloud, my voice falls dead a foot from mine own lips, and but its ghost doth reach that vessel, passing, passing.

O Earth, O Sky, O Ocean, both surpassing, O heart of mine, O soul that dreads the dark!

Is there no hope for me?

Is there no way that I may sight and check that speeding bark which out of sight and sound is passing, passing?

(zestful music) (ebullient music) (sprightly music) - "Overture" by Linda Pastan.

This is the way it begins; the small sure voice of the woodwind leads us down a path brocaded with colored leaves, deep into a forest we almost remember.

And though the percussions have no exact equivalent, soon we will find ourselves thinking of weather, a cold front rumbling in, or of applause, not for the self but for someone we watch bowing at the edge of a pond whose waters, like a cello's darkest waters, part letting the melody slip through.

This theme presents itself so shyly that when it returns full grown, though it plucks the live nerve of recollection we will hear it as if for the first time.

Make no mistake, this is only music, shading with evening into a minor key.

Whole flocks of birds rush up spreading their night wings as the harpist, that angel who guarded the gates in strict black, sweeps her arm from E to G to high C, and the bowing stranger lifts his wand, letting the curtains part.

(lively music) - "Random Notes on Asphalt" by Rosa Alice Branco, translated by Alexis Levitin.

To fly along grazing the earth with the grooves of the ground vibrating to the very guts, the blood pulsing through one's legs swept away, the feeling of the road spreading through the body, inscribing on it the rhythm of the heart.

It isn't just the music of the car on asphalt, it's the entire body shaken by the axis of the world in one's waist, making the heart-beat pound.

When you down shift you power-up, when you accelerate I settle on the moment like a bird who has ended the winter and everything incites it to the bursting forth of leaves.

A little jerk and the body gives itself to seat.

Accomplices, we leap through gravity, your knowledge, my initiation in velocity.

You lean toward me to be assured it's not too fast.

I know it isn't, but speed from now on is read in the gleam of my eyes and only measured by the arc of a smile, just as joy can be a broken speedometer, or a CD cover that has lost Chopin for a good cause.

Music, we know, is in the notes you draw forth from the pedals between furious keys and a tenderness of senses, the battery fully charged with random notes.

(resolute music) - Music of Mozart written for a premiere in Prague and intended to showcase the brilliance of the Bohemian wind players there, renowned throughout Europe for their skills.

And we close the evening with another Austrian composer, Haydn, and a symphony written during one of his two residencies in England, when his work was very much influenced and shaped by the concert culture of London.

Crossing borders, even in the 18th century was clearly transformative.

Travel takes us literally outside of ourselves and outside of our own experiences.

It takes us to others on their own turf in their own terms so we understand their beliefs, their experiences, their hopes, and dreams.

The foreign can become familiar.

Strangers can become friends.

And sometimes even more.

My father's own travels to Tokyo led him to a chance encounter with my mother, which led to marriage and eventually to me.

So I guess you could say that I am personally grateful that travel bridges the spaces that separate us.

And with music, the bridge of all gaps, we can all connect with each other and revel in our diversity, our differences, our uniqueness, all the while sharing that deep and abiding humanity that's at the core of every one of us.

Thanks so much for joining us on this musical adventure tonight and for being a part of our world.

(jubilant music) (lilting music) (speaking in Japanese) (speaking in Korean) (speaking in Estonian) (speaking in Mandarin) (speaking in Finnish) - Bye bye.

(speaking in Mandarin) - That's please take care.

(speaking in Finnish) - See you again soon.

(speaking in Spanish) (speaking in Mandarin) - That means goodbye and wish you luck.

(speaking in Korean) (speaking in Finnish)