Sibelius, Grieg, & Coleridge-Taylor @ Dallas Symphony Orchestra
—Wayne Lee Gay
American-born conductor Ryan Bancroft, one of the rising stars of classical music, makes his Dallas debut this week, conducting the Dallas Symphony Orchestra in an opulently romantic and engaging program combining longtime standard works with a recent rediscovery.
Anglo-African composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor (named for but not related to the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge) drew considerable attention early in the twentieth century for his Longfellow-based cantata The Song of Hiawatha, once widely-performed on both sides of the Atlantic but now generally forgotten. The recently recovered full score of Coleridge-Taylor's ten-minute-long Solemn Prelude from 1899 opens the concert, revealing the dramatic but dignified aura common to the composer's late Victorian British contemporaries. (DSO audiences will hear more from that strain in a few weeks in the form of Elgar's Enigma Variations and Hubert Parry's Blest Pair of Sirens.)
Conductor Bancroft immediately demonstrates an imaginative intellect and an assertive—but never effusive—podium presence, along with a tendency to pull the orchestra up to full volume. Indeed, the one weak moment of the entire concert occurs in the opening measures, when Bancroft allows the balance of brass and strings to muddle the texture.
There are no such issues in the ensuing performance of Grieg's Piano Concerto, featuring soloist Paul Lewis in this enduring audience favorite. British-born Lewis, now a citizen of the Republic of Ireland, is only now, at age 50, appearing in Dallas for the first time. With brilliant technique and commanding insight on display, Lewis is clearly an artist from whom we should hear more in these parts.
Conductor and pianist share a grand dramatic vision of Grieg’s oft-performed work: after Lewis's delivery of the lightning-bolt introduction, Lewis and Bancroft present the opening theme with a sense of serenity, framing and preparing for the dramatic passages that follow. Lewis asserts a pronounced rubato, particularly in the more lyrical passages and in the grand cadenza that rounds out the first movement.
The same carefully plotted contrast of gentle lyricism and muscular drama contained in Grieg's rich flow of melodies continues through the prayer-like middle movement and into the Finale, in which Lewis makes the piano alternately sing and glow.
After Norwegian composer Grieg's work, conductor Bancroft and the orchestra turn to another quintessential example of Nordic romanticism, Sibelius's Symphony No. 2 in D from 1902. Bancroft's fearless willingness to amp up the volume generally works to positive effect here, particularly memorable in the unison violin statement of the second theme in the first movement. After the whispered pizzicato in the lower strings that opens the second movement, Bancroft once again demonstrates his dramatic flare in the heart-stopping pauses that characterize the movement. Breakneck velocity alternates with moments of reflection in the third movement, rising to somber grandeur, after which Bancroft serves up the final movement with the requisite combination of power, grandeur and momentum.
Whether one chooses to hear Sibelius' Symphony No. 2 as a passionate expression of the long winter nights and endless forests of Finland, or simply as a skillfully crafted study in symphonic form, Bancroft and the DSO provide a memorable presentation of this early twentieth-century masterpiece, to crown an appealing all-romantic program.
When: Repeated January 13
Where: Morton H. Meyerson Symphony Center
