Fort Worth Symphony adds Bruce Wood Dance for brilliant ‘Alice in Wonderland’

FORT WORTH — That’s the most fun I’ve had at a symphony concert in I don’t know when.

Fort Worth Symphony music director Robert Spano has made a point of enhancing some concerts with visual components. On Friday night’s FWSO program, Lewis Carroll’s fanciful Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland was brilliantly and wittily brought to life with dancers from Bruce Wood Dance Dallas.

The music was a suite from British composer Joby Talbot’s 2010 score for a full-length ballet originally choreographed by Christopher Wheeldon for London’s Royal Ballet. The 40-minute suite presented at Bass Performance Hall was choreographed by Joy Bollinger, with dazzling costumes by Tommy Bourgeois and deft lighting by Krista Billings.

The orchestra, led by Spano, performed upstage with stand lights, with dancing on a forward stage extension. Minus dancers, Mozart’s Prague Symphony was presented on the concert’s first half.

News Roundups

Talbot, best known for movie and TV scores, has been well represented around here. The Dallas Opera commissioned and premiered his operas Everest and The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, and the FWSO previously did his Guitar Concerto.

Talbot’s Alice favors shifting minimalist patterns of pulsings, tinklings, offbeat punctuations and up-and-down melodic gestures. But they’re overlaid in sometimes complex textures.

The orchestration, done in collaboration with Christopher Austin, makes much of bright, shiny colors and tangy effects, with generous applications of tuned percussions — even a howling ram’s horn. Some wordless vocalises were supplied by offstage singers from the Austin choral ensemble Conspirare.

Costumes were obviously inspired by John Tenniel’s beloved Alice illustrations. Stephanie Godsave looked very much like Tenniel’s Alice; Lauren Hibbard was immediately recognizable as the White Rabbit and the virtuosically athletic Cole Vernon as the Mad Hatter. A number of playing-card characters were represented, notably Megan Storey’s imperious Queen of Hearts (though far slenderer than Tenniel’s!) and Seth York as the Knave of Hearts.

Weaver Rhodes and Elliott Trahan were fore and aft of the enormous — and surprisingly nimble — Cheshire Cat, with gleaming eyes and teeth. Mackenzie Meldrum and Geneive Robinson were wittily done up as flamingos.

Spano and the orchestra made a delightful case for the music. I can pretend at no authority on dance, but the choreography was unflaggingly imaginative — and quite demanding — and its execution validated the high reputation of the Bruce Wood company. The whole experience was delightful start to finish, although I did wish for supertitles to identify the nine movements.

Mozart’s symphonies were mainly composed for what we’d consider chamber orchestras, but Spano favored a big-band approach to the Prague. Violins played with impressive precision and tonal finesse, but trumpets were repeatedly too loud, as were horns a couple of times. (Eighteenth-century trumpets were much gentler than modern ones, just adding a slight gleam in orchestral ensembles.)

All three movements were smartly paced and shaped, but the music wanted a lighter touch and more transparency.

Details

Repeats at 7:30 p.m. Saturday and 2 p.m. Sunday at Bass Performance Hall, Fourth and Commerce streets, Fort Worth. $39.50 to $146.30. 817-665-6000, fwsymphony.org.

Fort Worth theater shelves play due to ‘recent high profile events’