The Dallas Chamber Symphony continues to offer programs — and sonic experiences — nicely contrasted with offerings by our full-size symphony orchestras. And they sometimes remind us that even standard orchestral works like Schumann and Brahms symphonies were often premiered by chamber orchestras.
Tuesday night’s DCS concert, at Moody Performance Hall, had a French accent. Even contemporary British composer Thomas Adès' program opener, Three Studies from Couperin, was based on harpsichord pieces by the turn-of-the-18th century French composer François Couperin.
Strings for the Adès were divided left and right into two violin-viola-cello-and-bass ensembles, and backed by two flutes, a clarinet, a bassoon, three horns and occasional percussive thumps.
I confess that I’m allergic to modern pieces like this that “mess up” earlier compositions. This one struck me as particularly annoying, fragmenting, smearing over and cluttering up tidy little pieces, with dynamics going up and down and seemingly endless repetitions. Music director Richard McKay gave clear direction, but the effect was often of uncertain tuning.
Camille Saint-Saëns was a thoroughly skilled composer who could turn out well-crafted music that pleased the ear. Was he a “great” composer? Well, sometimes.
His Third Violin Concerto, in B minor, is somewhere down the list of the instrument’s top 100, but it gives the soloist ample opportunity to show off skill as well as subtlety. Kazuhiro Takagi, who’s served as the DCS concertmaster for a number of seasons, proved himself quite an accomplished violinist.
A surprisingly dark tone at the beginning soon opened up into clear, carrying sounds, allied to nimbly dispatching runs, sweetly soaring lines on high and well-tuned double stops. Takagi was no less persuasive in the lyricism of the middle movement.
McKay was a most responsive collaborator, giving the orchestral contributions shape and direction. But with string sections smaller than those of a typical symphony orchestra, in a hall about one third the size of the Meyerson Symphony Center, the orchestral scoring posed challenges not consistently resolved.
Pairs of horns and trumpets and three trombones were repeatedly too loud in balances. Even winds were sometimes too forward.
Overzealous trumpets and horns also tended to distort balances in Georges Bizet’s Symphony in C. Even oboe solos, while expressively played, sometimes bulged into brassiness. And the horns’ second movement entrance was fuzzy.
But McKay made the best of this most tuneful and often toe-tapping symphony, music all the more amazing as the work of a “mere” Paris Conservatory student. The strings played smartly and suavely, with impressive precision even at McKay’s daring tempo in the finale.
McKay’s spoken introductions often ramble, but this time he was nicely on point. But may we please have enough light to read the program book during the concert?
