FORT WORTH — If you’re a Dallas lover of orchestral music and haven’t heard the Fort Worth Symphony anytime recently, may I recommend a westbound trip? Even this very weekend.
You’ll almost certainly be amazed at the high current standards of the Fort Worth orchestra. Bass Performance Hall may be architectural kitsch, a free association of Viennese Secession, art deco and 19th-century music hall, but it’s acoustically excellent. (It would be even more so if they’d withdraw those sound absorptive curtains on side walls, walls meant to be uncovered for orchestral performances.) And, unlike in the Dallas Arts District, there are bunches of modestly priced eateries within an easy walk.
The orchestra put on a many splendored show Friday night, in a challenging Austro-German program including Strauss’ Alpine Symphony.
If nothing succeeds like excess, Strauss’ nearly hourlong tone poem is a winner. It is fun, in its over-the-top way.
It calls for a huge orchestra, including reinforced wind and brass sections, organ (an electronic substitute in Bass Hall) and even a wind machine. Restless and often busily layered, the music evokes a morning awakening, a hike up an Alpine mountain, natural wonders seen along the way, a thunderstorm and finally a sunset and night.
Principal guest conductor Kevin John Edusei must have rehearsed fastidiously, and his generously expressive conducting effectively balanced detail and sweep. The music’s complexities were impressively managed, its lyric effusions lovingly shaped. Every section of the orchestra did itself proud. My reservation, and I’ve felt this before with Edusei, was that every climax was as loud as every other, so there was no way to build the sonic momentum.
In the concert’s first half, Alexander Zemlinsky’s 1934 Sinfonietta posed its own challenges. A student of Bruckner and in turn the teacher of Schoenberg, Zemlinsky (1871-1942) was known in his day as a conductor as well as composer. Today he’s mainly seen as a transitional figure in the shadows of such contemporaries as Strauss, Mahler and, yes, Schoenberg.
Early on, Zemlinsky composed in a ripe post-romantic style. The Sinfonietta combines a certain harmonic fluidity from that past with neoclassical energies. Each of its three movements alternates cheeky, rowdy modernism with more reflective sections. It’s audibly pretty tricky, but Edusei and the orchestra made a strong case for the piece.
Opening the concert, Mozart’s Don Giovanni Overture didn’t quite create essential tension in the introduction, but the allegro was boldly shaped and aptly effervescent.
The concert was prefaced by a friendly video introduction by principal trombonist Joseph Dubas, projected on a big screen over the stage. With screen and projection facilities on hand, I wish the Strauss had been performed with supertitles identifying the sections of the score. Program notes which could have been half as long were printed in minuscule type.
Details
Repeats at 7:30 p.m. Saturday and 2 p.m. Sunday at Bass Performance Hall, Fourth and Commerce, Fort Worth. $26 to $99. 871-665-6000, fwsymphony.org.
