Advertisement

SKIP ADVERTISEMENT

Minnesota Orchestra, in Groundbreaking Cuba Tour, Sells Out House

Audience members gave a standing ovation to the Minnesota Orchestra at a  concert in Havana on Friday.Credit...Lisette Poole for The New York Times

HAVANA — The Teatro Nacional, a 2,056-seat theater on the Plaza de la Revolución, was sold out. Two dozen photographers and videographers swarmed the aisles. The Minnesota Orchestra’s concert here Friday night was greeted not only as a rare chance to hear an orchestra from overseas, but as a symbol of the rapprochement between the United States and Cuba.

The concert, the first by a large United States orchestra here in more than 15 years, was greeted with several standing ovations — and huge cheers when the Minnesotans teamed up with the Cuban pianist Frank Fernández and two local choirs to perform Beethoven’s “Choral Fantasy.”

“They played beautifully — they send you to the clouds,” Graciela Fonseca, 73, said after it ended, adding that she viewed the concert as a sign of friendship between the two nations.

It was not your typical concert at Orchestra Hall in Minneapolis. Tickets here cost around 50 cents, with students paying only half that — part of an effort to make cultural events accessible in a country where salaries are low, said Rafael Vega, the director of the theater, which also presents ballet, concerts, plays and comedy. The concert sold out quickly.

As crowds gathered outside the theater, vendors sold cookies, chips, and candy from a line of shopping carts, lending a festive, populist feel to the concert. The theater looks out on the broad plaza, where Fidel Castro used to hold rallies. One side of the plaza is dominated by an enormous metal stencil-like portrait of Che Guevara that spans several stories on the side of the Ministry of the Interior building, and the other by a monumental memorial to José Martí, who was killed fighting for Cuban independence from Spain in the 19th century.

Other aspects of Friday night’s concert would have been more familiar to Minnesota audiences, or really any concert hall these days: A cellphone went off during a quiet passage in the Funeral March in Beethoven’s Symphony No. 3, the “Eroica.”

Image
The Minnesotans played an all-Beethoven program, conducted by Osmo Vanska.Credit...Lisette Poole for The New York Times

The Minnesotans played an all-Beethoven program — not counting the sprightly Finnish polka that the orchestra’s music director, Osmo Vanska, who is from Finland, chose for an encore. The “Eroica” was a nod to history: The first time the orchestra played in Cuba, in 1929, when it was known as the Minneapolis Symphony, it closed its concert with the work.

The tour was designed not only to highlight the thaw between the nations, but also the thaw within the orchestra: It resumed playing together only last year after a bitter labor dispute led to a lockout that silenced it for 16 months. Now the orchestra is working to recapture what was lost: Mr. Vanska, who resigned during the lockout and expressed support for the musicians, came back; Carnegie Hall concerts that were canceled have been rescheduled, and the orchestra plans to resume recording its Grammy-winning survey of Sibelius symphonies.

Of course, even as it embarks on its ambitious Cuba tour, the orchestra faces challenges back home — attendance this season has dipped below the pre-lockout levels, and though it has made up the difference through increased donations, the ensemble still has work to do to bring concertgoers and subscribers back.

And the travails of the Cuban economy still make life difficult for musicians here. As the Minnesota musicians played with students in a number of settings this week, they marveled at the high quality of their play in spite of poor instruments. The Minnesotans brought small gifts for the students, who have trouble obtaining basic items: rosin for the string players, who rarely get to change the horsehair on their bows, and mouthpieces for the brass players.

The Cuba tour generated a great deal of excitement in Minnesota: The orchestra hung a huge banner announcing the tour outside its concert hall, and the performances here are being broadcast in the United States on the radio and streamed live on the Internet — where some fans annotated it minute by minute on Twitter. “I’m crying with pride,” Emily E. Hogstad, a musician and blogger who follows the orchestra closely, posted on Twitter. “I didn’t know you could CRY WITH PRIDE.”

During intermission, Carlos Manuel Menéndez, 79, an economist wearing a white guayabera shirt, stood near the stands in the theater lobby offering compact discs by the Cuban pianist Chucho Valdés, the composer Leo Brouwer, and others. Mr. Menéndez said he was enjoying the performance.

He said that he regularly attended concerts by the National Symphony Orchestra of Cuba, which toured the United States in 2013, and that he had often heard the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra when he used to travel to Germany. In recent years, he said, some foreign ensembles, including the Mahler Chamber Orchestra, had played in Cuba, but he lamented that the embargo had kept American orchestras out — something he hopes will change now.

“I hope there’s more to come,” he said.

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section A, Page 19 of the New York edition with the headline: Minnesota Orchestra Gets a Big ¡Bravo! in Havana. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

Advertisement

SKIP ADVERTISEMENT