FORT WORTH — The first concert of the 2025-26 classical music season was presented Friday night by the Fort Worth Symphony Orchestra. Led by music director Robert Spano, at Bass Performance Hall, the program was as standard-rep as you could get: the Sibelius Finlandia, Grieg Piano Concerto (with Stephen Hough) and Brahms’ Fourth Symphony.
That’s not a bad plan to get an orchestra tuned and timed up after a summer break. The performances had plenty of personality, if not always the utmost polish. Balances were occasionally off, with flutes and horns sometimes too prominent.
The outer section of Finlandia was appropriately rousing, if at the price of horns and timpani being sometimes too aggressive. Winds could have been more cohesive in the famous central tune.
Pianist Hough is also a composer and writer of note, and clearly, he’d thought a lot about Grieg’s late romantic musical language and how it might be expressed.
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Someone wisely observed that the greatest performances have an illusion of spontaneity. Hough’s Grieg had it in spades, and yet you knew that every detail had been finely considered and calculated.
Rhythms were playfully teased or generously stretched. At the right times, there was playfulness, or dreaminess or grand proclamation. Yet everything came out of the music, not imposed from without. Everything had a structural and expressive sense.
The final seemed more deliberate than usual, but its Allegro is qualified with “very moderately.” A few fortissimos could have been less so on a piano with a sometimes steely treble.
Spano was the most sympathetic collaborator, precisely coordinating the orchestra with Hough’s expressive nuances. The orchestra played alertly and warmly, with particularly eloquent horn solos from Gerald Wood.
For an encore, Hough made sheer magic of the Notturno from Grieg’s Op. 54 Lyric Pieces.
We think of Brahms symphonies as plush, big-orchestra fare, and Brahms himself conducted performances with more than 100 musicians. But he also approved chamber orchestra performances of the First and Fourth symphonies — with full-orchestra complements of winds and brass, but reduced string sections.
The Dallas Chamber Symphony has presented enlightening performances of the Brahms Second and Third symphonies with just under 50 players, and has programmed the Fourth for May 2026.
In whatever performance configuration, these symphonies are so richly scored and elaborately textured that they need great cultivation of clarity. For a composer who never writes more than a simple fortissimo, for instruments far less aggressive than today’s, that requires keeping the music from getting too loud. Brahms, of all composers, benefits from a certain reserve.
With sensible pacings that balanced urgency with breathing room, Spano evinced a sure sense of the music’s structure and proportions. With dynamics carefully scaled from forte to pianissimo, I heard inner voices often lost in modern performances. But climaxes did sometimes get pushed to decibel counts better suited to Shostakovich than to 19th-century Brahms.
Details
Repeats at 7:30 p.m. Saturday and 2 p.m. Sunday at Bass Performance Hall, Fourth and Commerce, Fort Worth. $32.90 to $117.80. 800-665-6000, fwsymphony.org.