Symphonic Dances @ Dallas Symphony Orchestra
—Review by Wayne Lee Gay
For the second week in a row, the Dallas Symphony Orchestra presents an engaging mix of twentieth- and twenty-first-century fare for a thought-provoking and consistently intriguing evening.
French-born guest conductor Stéphane Denève (currently music director of the St. Louis Symphony) opens with Dallas' first taste of the music of contemporary French composer Guillaume Connesson. Here, Connesson is represented by "Celphaïs," the ten-minute opening movement of the composers symphonic triptych Citės de Lovecraft of 2017. Inspired by American author H.P. Lovecraft's Dream Cycle, "Celphaïs" evokes a fabulous imaginary city via pungently rich orchestration and a constantly shifting chromatic structure. Connesson channels the great orchestrators of the French tradition—Berlioz, Debussy, Ravel—while creating a new chapter in the lineage of musical impressionism. With Denève advocating from his position at the helm of a great orchestra in the American heartland, one can expect that Connesson's music may become more well-known in the years ahead.
While Lovecraft's fantasies inspired this opening work, another American literary landmark provides the text of the second work on the agenda, Samuel Barber's Knoxville: Summer of 1915 (composed 1947), which sets the text of the James Agee poem of the same name. Although widely recognized as a masterpiece, the work has never been performed by the Dallas Symphony until this weekend's concerts.
It is, however, a stunningly worthy performance, with Trinidadian-born soprano Jeanine de Bique navigating the immense interpretive and vocal demands of the work with style and technical perfection. Her brilliant vocal quality has brought De Bique fame as an interpreter of baroque music; here, she channels that intensity into this heart-rending description of a summer evening seen through the eyes of a small child. Agee melded the inherently innocent narrative into a deeply poetic statement—not only of pure, unsentimental nostalgia, but also of loss and sorrow. Barber's score captures the understated profundity of the words with a gentle music that unfailingly enhances the text. De Bique, the orchestra, and conductor Denève join in a moving performance that derived its intensity from a steady, polished delivery.
After intermission, Denève and the orchestra return with another masterpiece of the twentieth-century repertoire, Rachmaninoff's Symphonic Dances of 1940. As René Spencer Saller's erudite and entertaining program note points out, audiences immediately loved it, but critics were cool. As is often the case, the critics missed the point and the audiences were right. Nearing the end of his life, after years of exile, Rachmaninoff here retained the late Russian romanticism to which he was the principal heir—the tradition of Borodin, Tchaikovsky, and Rimsky-Korsakoff—while drawing on compatible elements of modernism. He thus created, in his final major work, a music combining the passions of the past with the urban energy of the twentieth century (including an extended saxophone solo, a decidedly modern touch but with the flavor of Russian folk music).
Once again, Denève guides the orchestra expertly through a complex score, while creating a compellingly unified momentum. Strings were already in good form from last week under principal guest conductor Gemma New; Denéve brings the brass up to that level of perfection as well.
Last week's performances were not part of the official subscription season, so Denéve takes on the task of opening this week's performances with the traditional playing of “The Star-Spangled Banner,” here in a particularly grand orchestration. The orchestra men this year are wearing solid black business suits, with black shirts and black ties, a solid step up from the anachronistic white-tie-and-tails of years past.
When: September 23 and 24
Where: Morton H. Meyerson Symphony Center
