“Shostakovich & R. Strauss” @ Dallas Symphony Orchestra
Conductor Marc Albrecht; cellist Daniel Müller-Schott
—Wayne Lee Gay
Art and international politics meet in this weekend’s concerts from the Dallas Symphony Orchestra at the Morton H. Meyerson Symphony Center, with German guest conductor Marc Albrecht and German cellist Daniel Müller-Schott appearing together on a program featuring works by German, Korean, Ukrainian, and Russian composers.
Ukrainian composer Myroslav Skoryk’s “Melody” was a latecomer to the concert lineup, added after the commencement in February of the ongoing attack on Ukraine by Russia. A native of Lviv who died there in 2020 at the age of 81, Skoryk spent most of his life in Ukraine with interludes in Moscow and Australia. Significantly, he and his parents were exiled to Siberia under Stalin in the 1940s, when Skoryk was a teenager. The “Melody” is a four-minute work performed here by a quartet of principal string players from the orchestra. It was originally written as part of a movie score and has since been adapted into numerous transcriptions for various instrument groups. Elegiac in mood, brief, and unmistakably Slavic in character, the work provides an appropriate symbol of Ukrainian nationalism in this dark period. At the concert, a moment of silence follows the work.
While the presence of Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich’s Cello concerto No. 1 on the same program is entirely coincidental (its inclusion on this week’s concert schedule has been set for over a year), it could hardly be more thought-provoking and striking in these circumstances. At the same time that young Skoryk was forcibly removed to Siberia with his parents, Shostakovich came under soul-destroying condemnation from Stalin’s apparatchiks in the Soviet musical establishment. Though Shostakovich often during his career appeared to be a loyal Communist party front man, the tone of irony is retrospectively obvious in much of his earlier work. In his later works, sorrow, rage, and occasional moments that celebrate simple humanity are drawn together by intense compositional craftsmanship.
The composer’s anger, sorrow, and craftsmanship are all evident throughout the Cello Concerto as performed by cellist Müller-Schott and conductor Albrecht. A militant theme, presented vigorously by Müller-Schott, opens the first movement against a delicate orchestral backdrop, managed superbly by Albrecht and the orchestra; from this bitter opening, the succinct and lively movement propels gradually to an energetic folk-like dance. The Moderato middle movement likewise rises patiently to a passionate climax, with Müller-Schott employing a stunning mastery of cello timbres and dynamic levels. A soft but ominous timpani roll, like distant thunder, announces a darkly eloquent cadenza for cello alone—a section which can certainly be heard as a plea against Soviet tyranny before launching, with a dizzying spiral main theme, the cathartic Finale.
This is not a concerto designed merely to show off the beauty of the cello, or the technical prowess of the soloist, but it does both in the hands of an artist of the level of Müller-Schott. The emotion-laden performance of this dark score drew a well-deserved and enthusiastic response from Thursday night’s audience.
Between the works by Skoryk and Shostakovich, the concert features the Dallas premiere of Korean-born German resident Unsuk Chin’s glittering Frontispiece. The program note aptly points out that Chin spent her childhood in the dictatorship of South Korea in the early 1960s, an intriguing link to Koryk and Shostakovich—though that particular dictatorship was empowered and enabled by the foreign policy of the United States.
Fleeting moments of opulent romanticism interspersed with a plethora of ear-catching orchestral effects keep Frontispiece interesting for its eight-minute length; the composer herself cites references to Bruckner, Richard Strauss, Scriabin, Brahms, Ives, Tchaikovsky, and Boulez in the work. A prime example of the richly coloristic, eclectic style that has dominated symphonic composition in recent decades, Frontispiece premiered in Hamburg in 2019; whether it will endure remains to be seen, of course, but for now it is definitely an entertaining item worthy of attention.
The program (which, incidentally, is made up entirely of twentieth- and twenty-first-century works) concludes, after intermission, with Richard Strauss’ Symphonia Domestica, a 44-minute-long hyper-romantic musical depiction of family life as experienced by the composer. (Early on, he admitted inspiration from his own life with wife Pauline and first-born son Franz, though he later downplayed the direct connection.)
Admittedly, the score of Symphonia Domestica, beautifully executed by the Dallas Symphony and conductor Albrecht, is rich with effective harmony, orchestral color, and melody, as well as humor and passion. And there is plenty of honest realism in the score, from the noisy interruptions of an infant to a touch of what has been called “a borderline pornographic sex scene” after the baby falls asleep.
Somehow, the same gestures with which Strauss elsewhere depicts the depravities of Salome, the horrors of Elektra (and the meaning of life, death, and time in various tone poems) feel overblown in reference to comfortable everyday bourgeois family life. Maybe he had a point about the profundity of normality. Maybe he miscalculated. It’s still fascinating, still a work worth hearing and experiencing, even if it ultimately overreaches.
WHEN: March 19, 20
WHERE: Morton H. Meyerson Symphony Center
