Well, that was fun.
We don’t often think of Shostakovich symphonies as “fun.” And, seeing the composer’s name on the program Thursday night, many in the Meyerson Symphony Center audience may have been steeling themselves against jackbooted marches, great dissonant assaults and post-apocalyptic slow movements.
Composed in waning months of World War II, the Russian composer’s Ninth Symphony isn’t like that. It does have a couple of unsettled slow movements, but elsewhere it’s almost giddy.
The Shostakovich occupied the second half of Thursday’s Dallas Symphony Orchestra concert. Led by guest conductor Jonathon Heyward, a South Carolina native now music director of the Baltimore Symphony, the program opened with the Beethoven Emperor Concerto, with British pianist Benjamin Grosvenor. If you come to one of the repeat performances, don’t be late, as there’s no overture.
The Shostakovich intersperses three faster movements with two slower ones, the second shorter than the first. The last three movements are played without pause.
The first movement is a veritable feast of cheeky, toe-tapping tunes you may find yourself humming as you leave. Its frisky solos were played with panache by James Romeo (piccolo), David Buck (flute) and Alexander Kerr (violin), with appropriately irreverent comments from trumpets and trombones.
Long, sinuous wind solos frame the second movement — clarinet at the beginning (Gregory Raden displaying an amazing range of pitches, timbres and dynamics), flute (Buck again) at the end. In between, lines are wound around and through each other in ing harmonic crunches.
There’s more jolly music in the central Presto, making much of high winds. A trumpet solo (irably played by Stuart Stephenson) sounds like a signal for a bullfight.
Portentous brass fanfares announce the solemnity of the Largo. Ted Soluri strung out the long, mournful bassoon solo with rich tone and warm expression, before setting the finale in motion with a happier little dance tune. A march does get pretty rowdy, but not really threatening — more like a march for big toy soldiers.
With incisive beats, Heyward made a compelling narrative of the symphony, and the orchestra as a whole played splendidly. The audience responded enthusiastically to the Shostakovich — and to the Beethoven with a roaring, whooping ovation.
Between the Beethoven and the encore — Ravel’s Jeux d’eau (Play of the Water), with glistening fingerwork — Grosvenor displayed technique that seemed capable of anything. That said, he kept pushing Beethoven’s early-19th-century fortissimos to assaults better suited to, well, Shostakovich — or at least Liszt. He turned lovely quieter phrases, but attacked some bigger ages with unseemly vehemence.
Heyward and the orchestra responded in kind. Even with reduced string sections, sonic muscles were flexed rather too much for the matter at hand. The music’s very nobility, which soon gained it (not from Beethoven) the Emperor nickname, was too readily sacrificed to Big Statements. Even the Ravel got too loud.
Details
Repeats at 7:30 p.m. Friday and 3 p.m. Sunday at Meyerson Symphony Center, 2301 Flora St. $46 to $191. 214-849-4376, dallassymphony.org.
