For an orchestra that’s been playing to too many empty seats in recent years, Friday night’s opening concert of the Dallas Symphony’s classical season seemed an odd mix.
Social media ads made a big deal of Emanuel Ax playing Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 3, and the program opened with Samuel Barber’s aptly flashy Overture to The School for Scandal. But the second half of the concert, at the Meyerson Symphony Center, was devoted John Adams’ 44-minute Harmonielehre, not exactly easy listening.
Connoisseurs of the American composer’s oeuvre consider the 40-year-old triptych one of his masterpieces. But its busy overlays of pulsings, throbbings and twitters, with occasional brass blasts — and free-range quasi-melodies — are a lot to digest. And it does go on.
It would be worth programming later in the season, but for opening night?
News Roundups
It seemed doubly unfortunate to open the season without the orchestra’s music director, Fabio Luisi, who isn’t booked here until Oct. 2. But guest conductor David Robertson led clearly and authoritatively, and the orchestra played impressively well after two months away from classical concerts.
For my money, Adams’ program notes explaining inspirations behind the three movements do nothing to elucidate the music. The untitled first movement, longest of the three, is mainly mobile, with shifting meters and accents. Melodic impulses, including a horn solo beautifully played by principal Daniel Hawkins, surface from the chatters and gurglings before the movement ends in a great surge of energy and volume.
The second movement — titled, for what it’s worth, “The Amfortas Wound” — builds from hushed basses and cellos, the latter initiating lyric inclinations passed around the orchestra. A tartly harmonized quasi-chorale for winds is answered by brasses. A crescendo to a loud, dissonant climax is followed by a decrescendo into a more reflective epilogue.
In “Meister Eckhardt and Quackie,” sonic glows and glistenings give birth to a lullaby of harmonies slowly gliding by. The music becomes more agitated, the pulsings more urgent, building to a heroic, brassy end.
Keeping all those repetitive and shifting rhythms together is no small task, but Robertson’s incisive beat and cues kept the orchestra alert and responsive.
The Barber was quite brilliantly dispatched, the violins tautly coordinated and finely polished in ways they haven’t always been in recent seasons.
The Beethoven amply displayed Ax’s nuanced command of tone and shape. But, with strings only slightly reduced, the orchestral sound was often too heavy and too loud for music conceived for smaller ensembles.
A rather deliberate first-movement tempo fell shy of Beethoven’s “allegro con brio” marking. The concerto as a whole felt monumental when it wanted to be eager, comfortable when it wanted to be urgent.
The audience loved it, though, and Ax supplied Liszt’s gentle arrangement of Schubert’s Ständchen (Serenade) as an encore.
Details
Repeats at 7:30 p.m. Saturday and 2 p.m. Sunday at Meyerson Symphony Center, 2301 Flora St. $37 to $184. 214-849-4376, dallassymphony.org.
Dallas Symphony changes drinks policy for classical concerts
The orchestra announced the change in a quippy Instagram video this week. “No more ‘where are my glasses?’ moments!” the caption read.
North Texas Giving Day sees record participation as nonprofits face funding challenges
Over 3,600 nonprofits are participating in the 17th annual event to support the region