Concert review: Dallas Symphony Orchestra’s 2009 season opener

by Peter Simek of Renegade Bus

Those horns! Those memorable horns! The opening of Tchaikovsky’s fourth symphony, those measures of music announcing the arrival of the composer’s new symphonic form, blew through the rafters of Morton H. Meyerson Symphony Center Thursday night, heralding a new season of the Dallas Symphony Orchestra. The orchestra sounded fierce, robust, unabashed, confident, and deeply felt. At the helm: the maestro, the toast of the town, the man whose name need not be mentioned, it is uttered so frequently in cultural circles these days. There is so much enthusiasm for this squat, square-shouldered fellow with the gleaming scalp, built like a piece of Richard Meyer architecture. How can such sharp angles and structural linearity be so elegantly balanced, emotionally sure? He enters from stage left, struts to the podium, ascends with a skip and turns briefly to the crowd almost with a wink. The audience sighs, as if there was a little doubt in the room that such a beautiful, sophisticated thing could really be happening in such a city. Last season was not a dream; the maestro is still in town. And with the lift of the baton, it began.

The night did not begin with Tchaikovsky’s fourth. The prelude came as a pair of Samuel Barber pieces. Dallas Symphony President Douglas Adams explained that the Adagio for Strings would open the season as a tribute to the late David Davidson, the symphony’s long-time chorus master. Barber’s piece is such a moving piece of music, one would have to drop a violin mid-performance to mess it up. But the piece is ripe to display the maestro’s most audience-ready skills: his tremendous feel for pace and dynamic. He let the swelling, overlaying melodies of the strings rise, wail, and dip under each other. Each passage is stretched, wringing out the depth of its emotional intensity, before it is neatly rejoined to the package. Forgive the cross-genre association, but the Dutch conductor paces melodies like Frank Sinatra, always a little late, always a little more feeling than you thought possible, always flirting with and wooing listeners. Even in such a mourning movement as Barber’s Adagio, we swoon. He hurts us so good.

It was the second piece of the night that proved the weak link in the program. The Dallas Symphony invited violinist Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg to lead Barber’s Violin Concerto. Besides being a bit of a visual distraction – she sways and bobs ungracefully, as if the music has stricken her with seizure – Salerno-Sonnenberg’s violin chirped and chattered. Though no one could doubt her technical mastery – the difficult lines of Barber’s concerto fly off her violin’s fret board effortlessly – her presence was dampened, not so much dialoging with the orchestra, as fighting her way out of it.

No matter, the horns were coming, and after intermission, the season truly started.

Tchaikovsky’s fourth proved that the recent success of the Dallas Symphony is not the work of one man. It is a difficult piece, the long first movement almost works as a stand-alone tone poem, and the overall impression of the entire work is that it is a little front heavy. The symphony demands a deep orchestra; the development of its themes (often the repetitions and variations on a few choice melodies) emerges from the play between woodwinds and brass. Despite those classic Tchaikovsky moments of bombastic brilliance, it is a saddened, subtle work. The Dallas Symphony didn’t cheat its way out of that subtlety, and the performance revealed that maestro’s success has much to do with the depth of talent he has in his pit.

Particularly enjoyable on Thursday was the third movement’s long pizzicato section, which skips almost like a Russian dance before the fourth movement’s rising, booming reprise of the themes established in the first movement. Here was evidence of the maestro’s loose, musician friendly hand. The cellos in the back row leaned into the music, strings slightly buzzing, adding a rustic feel true to the spirit of the piece. The sense, again, is that the orchestra sounds this good because its leader is allowing them to have so much fun.