There’s a venerable tradition of concert works contrasting small groups of instrumentalists with larger ensembles. Examples are as varied as Handel’s concerti grossi and Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos, Beethoven’s Triple Concerto and Vaughan Williams’ Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis.
A world premiere at Friday night’s Dallas Symphony Orchestra concert featured the orchestra’s four principal wind players. (A personal conflict prevented my usual Thursday night review.) American composer Sean Shepherd’s Quadruple Concerto shared the program with an Adagio for small orchestra by Robert Xavier Rodríguez and Mendelssohn’s Scottish Symphony. Music director Fabio Luisi conducted.
The DSO has a history of excellent wind principals, and Shepherd conceived this DSO commission specifically for the excellent incumbents: flutist David Buck, oboist Erin Hannigan, clarinetist Gregory Raden and bassoonist Ted Soluri.
Now in his mid-40s, with compositions programmed by major orchestras and festivals, Shepherd was educated at Indiana University, the Juilliard School and Cornell. Twenty-five minutes long, his new piece is in three movements: “Strolling Treble,” “Heavy Machinery” and “Ganymede.”
The first two titles are obvious; the third is named for the beautiful prince in Greek mythology, although what it has to do with the music isn’t obvious. The titles suggest a slow-fast-slow sequence, but rarely is the music less than restless.
Within a sizable orchestration — including other winds, horns, trumpets, trombones, tuba and quite a range of percussion — the four solo winds are rarely as boldly spotlighted as in a typical concerto. They’re sometimes generative forces, as when opening flute flourishes prompt oboe and bassoon to spin out flourishes of their own. Much of the time they’re more participants in complex interactions in busy beehives of orchestral activity.
Complex interactions in elaborate orchestral textures — that seems a signature of much newer orchestral music these days. Shepherd’s new piece gave this first-time listener a lot of activity to digest. It gave the four soloists music alternately flashy and more lyric, and these DSO stars met every demand for brilliance and suavity.
With authoritative direction from Luisi, the rest of the orchestra seemed in sure command of the complexities. The composer ed the performers onstage to share in the applause.
The Rodríguez piece was a lovely amuse-bouche. A longtime professor at the University of Texas at Dallas, Rodríguez has had works performed by orchestras, opera companies and chamber ensembles around the country. This Adagio was his first orchestral work, penned when he was a student at the University of Texas at Austin. Premiered by the DSO in 1967, it suggests Copland in dreamy mode, but it’s beautifully wrought, and it was beautifully played.
As with Luisi’s Brahms, the most extrovert parts of Mendelssohn’s Scottish often struck me as too loud, too forced, for music from an age far quieter than ours. I wanted more focus, more clarity, a lighter touch. But quieter music was elegantly shaped.
Maybe the concert’s overlap with over and Holy Week thinned the crowd, but several recent DSO concerts have had too many empty seats. Are there problems with programming and/or marketing?
Details
Repeats at 7:30 p.m. Saturday at Meyerson Symphony Center, 2301 Flora St. $43.50 to $200. 214-849-4376, dallassymphony.org.
