As if a returning hero, Jaap van Zweden was rousingly welcomed by the Meyerson Symphony Center audience Thursday night. Appearing as guest conductor with the Dallas Symphony Orchestra, of which he was music director from 2008 to 2018, he delivered quite a concert.
Offhand, I can’t a performance as edge-of-the-seat exciting as Thursday’s Shostakovich Fifth Symphony. After a Prokofiev Classical Symphony alternately rousing and deftly detailed, the concert’s centerpiece was an eloquent Mozart Piano Concerto No. 23, with Conrad Tao as soloist.
Although current DSO music director Fabio Luisi divides first and second violins on left and right, van Zweden had them all on the left, with other string sections also rearranged. The slow movement of the Shostakovich divides violins in three, which is hard to do if they’re physically split in two.
Shostakovich composed the Fifth Symphony when reeling from an official published attack on the raw modernity of his opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk. In a day when such critiques could presage a late-night police visit and “disappearance,” the composer was keen to soothe officialdom with a more “public” work.
We now hear it as a standard-rep showpiece, but van Zweden’s tightly wound performance suggested more of the intense emotion that must have gone into its composition. Start to finish, from muted violin delicacies at the threshold of audibility to formidable, finely focused full-orchestra assaults, through every shift and stretch of pace, van Zweden maintained tension that never let up.
The sonic explosions were all the more impressive for the control of dynamic nuances along the way. One section of the orchestra after another delivered everything that was asked. With so many fine solo contributions, it seems unfair to single out any.
Whether the finale represents “forced rejoicing,” as Shostakovich supposedly said, is open to question. With van Zweden and the DSO, the rejoicing Thursday felt genuine, and thrilling.
During his 10 years here, van Zweden’s sometimes withering critiques in rehearsals took a toll on DSO musicians, but he dramatically fine-tuned the ensemble’s precision and stylistic versatility. His sensitivity to what we know, or think we know, of 18th-century performance styles enlivened Thursday’s Mozart. With appropriately reduced string complements, both he and Tao gave the music apt buoyancy and tapered and dovetailed phrases with the utmost elegance.
The Prokofiev was also given a chamber-orchestra performance, but it was no less rousing for that in the outer movements. Indeed, those two movements benefit from tempos a little less hard-driven than van Zweden’s, and fortissimos a little less muscular. But quieter music sang and danced wittily and charmingly.
Van Zweden’s post-DSO tenure with the New York Philharmonic was interrupted by the COVID-19 pandemic and rebuilding of its concert hall, and some critics never forgave him for not being either Gustavo Dudamel or Esa-Pekka Salonen. He left after six years. He’s now music director of the Seoul Philharmonic in South Korea — “You wouldn’t believe how good that orchestra is,” he told me — and he’ll take over the Philharmonic Orchestra of Radio next year.
Details
Repeats at 7:30 p.m. Friday and Saturday at Meyerson Symphony Center, 2301 Flora St. $41 to $211. 214-849-4376, dallassymphony.org.
