‘Liszt & Ligeti’ @ Dallas Symphony Orchestra
—Gregory Sullivan Isaacs
The Dallas Symphony Orchestra presented a rabble-rousing concert of Hungarian music at the Meyerson this past weekend, led by the energetic Spanish conductor Jaime Martín and featuring the astounding American piano virtuoso George Li. The program delivered one showpiece after another. They opened with an early non-avant-garde work by Gyòrgy Ligeti (Concert Românesc) followed by Franz Liszt’s finger-busting showpiece, the Piano Concerto No. 1 in E-flat major, S.124. The program ended with Béla Bartók’s astounding Concerto for Orchestra, Sz. 116, BB 123.
Martin is currently chief conductor of the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra. However, most conductors these days have multiple appointments; his resume also lists positions with the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra and Ireland’s RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra—among others. He is a highly competent and musically sensitive conductor. He knows the score on an intimate level, and has made a decision about how every note should go. As a result, he captured the attention of the audience from the first downbeat and held it through Bartók’s thrilling denouement.
Along the way, he proved to be a master of orchestral balance, allowing all the solo lines to soar above the sometimes complex sonorities, and never quite covering the pianist. His gestures were mostly held within the frame, saving bigger ones for appropriate moments.
Ever since Stanley Kubrick’s seminal 1968 movie 2001: a Space Odyssey, the spaced-out musical sound clouds of Ligeti marked him with the general public as one of the most incomprehensible composers of the baffling 20th-century era of musical experimentation. But, like all such composers, there are early works that are much more comprehensible, such as Ligeti’s Concert Românesc.
In a way, Legiti’s work is reminiscent of the Bartók masterpiece that closed the program. Both draw heavily on Hungarian folk music (via the Roma people), whose roots hark back to modal harmonies and the folk dance verbunkos, which alternates slow dotted rhythms with very fast and exciting passages. Martin’s performance involved the audience through the many changes in rhythm, texture, and mood.
Most of the principal instrumental players delivered impressive solo work in the Ligeti, especially concertmaster Alexander Karr. This is where Martin first impressed with his masterful control of dynamics and continuity.
When the very young-looking pianist George Li entered, we wondered if we would experience another whizzbang technical display that sacrificed the music in the service of displaying exceptionally nimble fingers. Surprisingly, such was not the case. Li gave an engagingly mature performance. He played all the runs and passage work as filigree between passages, rather than mere show-off moments. The second movement was entrancing, even though some of the rubato was occasionally stretched almost, but not quite, to the breaking point. (It is now a bucket list goal to hear Li play this same concerto in a dozen years or so.)
Bartók’s Concerto for Orchestra is certainly aptly titled. We always think of a concerto as a virtuoso work for an instrument and orchestra, but here the orchestra itself is the virtuoso instrument featured. Every single musician is challenged to play their equally difficult parts—and only a fine orchestra can pull it off.
Unlike the previous work by Ligeti, Bartók’s masterpiece was a very late work, In fact, the composer was close to death from leukemia when the conductor Serge Koussevitzky commissioned him to compose it for the Boston Symphony Orchestra. It was premiered on December 1, 1944, in Symphony Hall, and slightly revised by the composer a year later. It is Bartók’s most frequently performed work and a sure-fire audience pleaser. It is written for a huge orchestra, including winds in threes, a full brass section, an extensive percussion battery, and double harps. Further, as in the Ligeti, all the principal players are featured with solo as well as duet passages, including a humorous huge belch in the lower brass.
Martin and the orchestra delivered a near-definitive performance of this complex work. He confidently steered the multi-movement musical flow through constant mood and tempo changes, from the tentative and gauzy opening harmonies to the forceful and massive finale. His careful mindfulness of the composer's dynamic layout of the music, through multiple big moments, while keeping plenty of oomph for the last notes.
WHEN: May 26-28, 2023
