Elgar’s ‘Enigma’ Variations @ Dallas Symphony Orchestra
Courtesy of Dallas Symphony Orchestra
—Wayne Lee Gay
Something that would have been unheard of fifty years ago (and impossible a hundred years ago) happens this weekend at the Dallas Symphony: a concert with a female conductor, a female soloist, and two works by female composers. Estonian conductor Anu Tali is on the podium to conduct, while American pianist Anne-Marie McDermott appears as soloist.
The concert opens very promisingly, with the Dallas premiere of Estonian composer Alisson Kruusmaa's Five Arabesques for string orchestra from 2021. For this decades-long audience member, the performance of the Kruusmaa work on Friday night marked one of those rare occasions in my life when I felt myself immediately and enthusiastically enthralled by a living composer of whom I was not previously aware.
This very brief set—totaling twelve minutes in performance—displays a voice of remarkable originality, subtlety, and invention. Extended unison lines, gentle motifs tossed from section to section, hymn-like sonorities alternating with ghost-like echoes—all these elements enter that part of a listener's brain previously reserved for Mozart's most magical moments. There's more than just compositional skill and technique going on here, and this listener wants to hear more from this composer. (The composer was, by the way, present for Friday night's performance.)
American composer Amy Beach (born Amy Cheney in New Hampshire in 1867 and known for most of her lifetime as Mrs. H.H.A. Beach) deserves adulation in the history books as a pioneer female composer in the large forms of symphony and concerto—and for that matter, as a pioneer American composer bringing the European tradition to these shores. And pianist McDermott certainly deserves credit for the sheer stamina and technical polish in her performance of Beach's 35-minute Piano Concerto.
Beach taught herself out of standard treatises on counterpoint, form, and harmony, and her knowledge of those skills shows throughout this ambitious work. She also was undoubtedly a pianist of considerable skill (she concertized extensively during the first decades of the twentieth century), since she herself played the concerto. However, in spite of occasional nearly grand ideas and a few intriguing moments, this Piano Concerto simply fails to deliver anything more than a hodgepodge of passable ideas that never go anywhere. Orchestration is generally interesting but occasionally, at least in this performance, muddy and overwrought. One keeps waiting for that thrilling moment, that amazing apotheosis, that big tune that seems to be just around the corner—and it never happens.
It is fortunate that Beach's major works have been recorded and thus preserved for the curious of this and later generations; her courage and determination at least deserve some limited presence in the concert repertoire—but little more. This weekend’s concert program marks the first live performance of the work in Dallas, and most probably its last.
Elgar's Enigma Variations closes the concert. The leading composer of Edwardian England, Elgar was largely ignored by the American musical establishment for much of the twentieth century, except for the Enigma Variations (and, for better or worse, the Pomp and Circumstance March No. 1, better known as the music played at your high school graduation). Recent years have brought into the standard repertoire his Violin and Cello Concertos, his two symphonies, some of his tone poems, and his visionary oratorio The Dream of Gerontius—all of which have been performed in Dallas in recent years.
Conductor Tali unfortunately aims far afield of the target in the Enigma Variations, blasting into the grander moments with misplaced bombast, and seeming overly intense in the more lyrical sections. She waves her arms energetically, but not necessarily meaningfully. Each variation is a tribute to one of Elgar's friends, a family member, or in one case a beloved pet. Tali, however, runs roughshod over the joys of these relationships described so profoundly in Elgar’s masterpiece of late romanticism.
WHEN: November 1-3, 2024 (repeating Saturday and Sunday)
WHERE: Morton H. Meyerson Symphony Center, Dallas
WEB: dallassymphony.org
