Brahms Piano Concerto No. 2 @ Dallas Symphony Orchestra
Photos by Sylvia Elzafon
—Wayne Lee Gay
Three works by American composers—two of whom were present in the audience on Thursday night—and one monument of the standard repertoire make for an intriguing but not entirely successful program for the Dallas Symphony Orchestra this weekend.
Music director Fabio Luisi owns an admirable record of introducing both rare works from the past and new music to the orchestra's repertoire. That's part of what makes an orchestra a living entity, rather than a reliquary for accepted masterpieces.
And this listener, for one, is glad to have heard at Thursday night's concert two new works, plus one artifact from the heady innovative modernism of the 1920s. Do I care to hear any of those works again? Actually, no.
Folk music and popular music has long been a source of inspiration for classical concert music—and a five-minute-long orchestral work inspired by "The Yellow Rose of Texas" might have seemed like a good idea. But Florida-born David Chesky's American Bluegrass Variations, dipping into fiddle rhythms and the afore-mentioned tune, drowns the melody in thick orchestration and complex counterpoint that never successfully evokes the raw energy and lean muscularity of bluegrass. Chalk this one up on the "worthy efforts" list.
George Antheil, colleague and associate of many of the leading lights of twentieth-century modernism (his friends included Gertrude Stein, Igor Stravinsky, Eric Satie, Pablo Picasso, and Ernest Hemingway), made his biggest splash and earned a footnote in the music history books with his Ballet mécanique of 1925, a work which included an airplane propeller as part of the ensemble. This concert includes Antheil's A Jazz Symphony from the same year. No airplane propeller, but banjos, saxophones, a xylophone, and a steamboat whistle join the orchestra. The result is noisy and unfailingly engaging, and beautifully performed by the orchestra—in other words, worth a live performances or two before returning to the shelf.
New Yorker Jessie Montgomery's Snapshots, a suite of four short movements, closes the first half of the concert with an addition to the current trend among American composers of focusing on richly colorful orchestration and a generally pleasant aura. Conductor Luisi and the orchestra maneuvered nicely through a work that might provide a useful curtain-raiser for orchestras, but doesn't seem a particularly meaningful addition to the repertoire.
Much-lauded Austrian pianist Rudolf Buchbinder, veteran of half a century on the concert stage and a renowned interpreter of the central European canon, joins the orchestra for Brahms' massive Piano Concerto No. 2. The orchestra and Luisi delivered Brahms' magical moments onThursday, but Buchbinder was clearly having an off-night, with weak technical moments and long stretches of emotional detachment.
Because of scheduling issues for Luisi, assistant conductor Maurice Cohn will be on the podium for the concerts Saturday and Sunday.
WHEN: October 12, 14, 15, 2023
WHERE: Meyerson Symphony Center, Dallas Arts District
WEB: dallassymphony.org
