Berlioz and Strauss @ The Dallas Symphony Orchestra
—Wayne Lee Gay
This weekend, Dallas Symphony Orchestra music director Fabio Luisi demonstrates his knack for inviting the thoughtful listener to observe context within a program—this time with the juxtaposition of two contrasting works from the dark years of Germany in the 1940s.
Composer Gottfried von Einem remained embedded within Germany’s musical establishment during the Nazi regime. His work to save the lives of Jewish musicians during the Holocaust earned him the posthumous honor from the state of Israel of “Righteous Among the Nations.” His nine-minute Capriccio for Orchestra, an energetic showpiece, opens this weekend’s concerts. The work premiered in Berlin in 1943, but its jazzy cheerfulness, high spirits, and sometimes passionate melodies contradict its origin in the midst of one of the darkest chapters of human history.
The brass exclamation that opens Capriccio introduces an impressive array of orchestral techniques; brass is prominent, but never overpowering. Old-fashioned counterpoint (landing on a muscular fugue) mixes comfortably with moments that recall Gershwin; orchestra and conductor Luisi hold this gorgeous mosaic together beautifully.
Von Einem’s older contemporary Richard Strauss, already a venerable international figure when Hitler took over, collaborated and kowtowed to the Nazis. He clearly wished to protect Jewish friends and relatives but emerged from the ruins of wartime Germany impoverished and somewhat discredited. Renowned for tone poems and operas written four decades earlier, Strauss created, as one of his final works after the war, the 18-minute Duett-Concertino for Clarinet and Bassoon with String Orchestra and Harp, here performed by Dallas Symphony principal bassoonist Ted Soluri and principal clarinetist Gregory Raden.
Strauss’ lavish chromaticism and lush orchestration, which had been on the cutting edge early in his career, had been abandoned by the leading composers of the day by 1946, when Strauss composed the Duett-Concertino. But from the perspective of 2022, the stylistic arguments of the past are irrelevant, and we can appreciate the output of opposing stylistic parties with equal admiration.
The all-too-seldom performed Duett-Concertino is richly multi-layered: the orchestration and compact three-movement structure suggests the concertos of the age of Bach; and by the composer’s admission, the music is descriptive of “Beauty and the Beast” and various other fairy tales and parables of an unattractive male who wins the heart of a beautiful woman—and transforms into someone beautiful himself. In this case, the clarinet plays the role of the beautiful woman, while the lower bassoon is the outwardly ugly male. Strauss’ famous whimsicality mingles well, as in so many other instances, with extraordinary sophistication of technique.
Soloists Soluri and Raden both produce a gently lyrical timbre suited to Strauss’ melodic late Romanticism, together with impeccable technique; the bassoon monologue in the Andante, backed by shimmering strings, is a moment of pure magic in Soluri’s rendition.
After intermission, Luisi and an impressively enlarged orchestra tackled Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique, a seminal work from 1830 that to this listener has too often in the past promised more than it delivered. The 27-year-old composer set his personal nightmare to music here, including sociopathic infatuation (based on Berlioz’s real-life crush on the Irish actress Harriet Smithson), seduction, murder, a march to the scaffold, and a witch’s sabbath. Composed just a few years after the classical monuments of Beethoven and Schubert, Symphonie fantastique pushes symphonic structure and technique, and even the idea of what a piece of music can do, past all previous boundaries.
In this performance, Luisi and orchestra display this gallery of musical effects convincingly and brilliantly. Berlioz did not aim for the solemn profundity of Beethoven, Brahms, or Tchaikovsky, but rather sought to explore the possibilities of musical effect—to play with the mind of the listener. (Symphonie fantastique, with its detailed musical description and hallucinogenic quality is almost like the score of a movie that never got made; Berlioz would have made a fortune as a film composer in Hollywood had he been born a century later.)
Surprises abound in this two-hundred-year-old masterpiece, and Luisi and orchestra revel in it all. For instance, in the glittering orchestral arpeggio—decades ahead of its time—that occurs and reoccurs in the first movement, is that irony or horror triumphant that puts the main theme of the “March to the Scaffold” in a majestic B-flat major? Are we almost tempted to celebrate with the demons in the jubilant devilish dances of the Finale?
Friday night’s performance made a believer out of this Berlioz skeptic. And an uproarious ovation from the audience indicated I wasn’t the only one.
WHEN: April 9 & 10
WHERE: Morton H. Meyerson Symphony Center
