Elgar, Saint-Saëns, and Richard Strauss @ Fort Worth Symphony Orchestra
—Wayne Lee Gay
Miguel Harth-Bedoya, who served for twenty years as music director of the Fort Worth Symphony, returns to the orchestra's podium as guest conductor this weekend for a beautifully successful all-romantic program; cellist Sterling Elliott adds an impressive performance as the concert's featured soloist.
One might be tempted to object to a program of works made up entirely of music written within a twenty-five-year period of the late nineteenth century; however, Elgar, Saint-Saëns, and Richard Strauss complement one another nicely under Harth-Bedoya's sure guidance. The concert contains two of the great apotheosis moments of the romantic repertoire: the emergence of the final theme in Struass's Tod und Verklärung (Death and Transfiguration) and the "Nimrod" section of Elgar's "Enigma" Variations. Rather than wiping each other out or creating a sense of too much of a good thing, these similarly emotion-drenched musical monuments anchor the program very well.
Conductor and orchestra open with Strauss's tone poem, in which Harth-Bedoya lovingly shapes the somber themes that float above the throbbing strings. Twenty-first-century listeners may be either intrigued or put off by Strauss's unabashed attempt, at age 25, to describe death (complete with ecstatic arrival at a light-filled afterlife), but the effect can be breathtaking, and Harth-Bedoya skillfully manages the young composer's polished orchestration and late romantic harmonies. Strauss recycled the soaring final theme near the end of his career in his “Four Last Songs” of 1948, and Hollywood composer John Williams borrowed the tune for the "love theme" in the 1978 film Superman. In this performance, it's the main thrill in a convincingly moving interpretation of the original tone poem.
Still in his early twenties, Virginia-born and Juilliard-trained cellist Elliott appears well on his way to a major career. He exerts a uniquely gorgeous tone—somehow warm and assertive at the same time—and combines it with a fleet dexterity and an ability to make the cello sing. Saint-Saëns' Cello Concerto No 1 in A minor is a showpiece with a refined sensibility, featuring moments of introspection amidst a texture of intricate virtuosity. Elliott, with firm support from Harth-Bedoya and the FWSO, pulls it off beautifully. There are no dull moments in this succinctly-structured work, but the middle movement, in which the cello stretches rapturously over a menuet that looks back to the eighteenth century, is the highest of many high points in Elliott’s performance.
While Strauss unabashedly used a Wagnerian vocabulary to explore death and immortality, his British contemporary Elgar used the same musical language to describe the joy he experienced within his circle of friends, bringing a hearty, open-air British accent to the rich chromatic harmonies and orchestrations. Harth-Bedoya lovingly freshens the work, masterfully underlining inner melodies. Individual players handle the numerous obbligatos neatly. Elgar left plenty of clues about the friends he described in each of the variations, but the content stands on its own without extra-musical ideas in Harth-Bedoya's reading.
The strength of the Fort Worth Symphony as it now stands owes much to Harth-Bedoya's twenty-year tenure as music director, which ended in 2020 (with final concerts cancelled because of the pandemic). He currently maintains an international career of guest conducting appearances while directing orchestral studies and the symphony orchestra at Baylor University.
WHEN: Repeated Saturday and Sunday (May 6 & 7)
WHERE: Bass Performance Hall
WEB: fwsymphony.org
