Dallas Symphony music director Fabio Luisi spoke charmingly before the orchestra’s Friday night concert, thanking the audience for its and promoting subscriptions for the 2025-26 season. With the evening’s promise of one the grandest of symphonies, Gustav Mahler’s Second, it was great to see so many seats filled.
There were moments both thrilling and exquisite Friday. To start with, I can’t think of another concert hall that puts orchestral sound so vividly in your face, so deep in your bones, with so rich and spacious an acoustical surround, as the Meyerson Symphony Center.
Its powerful bass response reinforced the opening frenzies and trudges of cellos and double basses. Melodies shared by violas and cellos sang out with silken tones and suave contours. There were sounds alternately blazing and smoldering from trumpets, trombones and tuba, although a couple of trumpet bulges were too much of a good thing. The chorus-and-orchestra climax at the end, undergirded by organ, was thrilling.
With Mahler, you may think nothing succeeds like excess. The symphonies’ vast spans are populated with frequent shifts of musical ideas, tempos and timbres, in moods from sublime to earthy, even mocking. They’re rife with challenges for instrumentalists, but also for conductors.
How do you characterize individual sections, yet link them into cohesive wholes? How do you trace a trajectory through a whole movement, not to mention a whole symphony? There is underlying structure and logic to those movements, but you need to work them out.
In the Second Symphony, progressing from what Mahler originally titled “Funeral Rites” to a stirring promise of resurrection, Luisi went for extremes of tempo as well as dynamics, too often at the cost of overview. When the music got excited, it got very excited. When it yielded to reflection, as at the first movement’s hushed second theme, it tended to go lifeless. The pieces didn’t fit together.
Shifts of tempo, and expressive stretchings here and there, sometimes seemed to find musicians uncertain of Luisi’s intentions. Moments that slipped out of sync were brief, but they happened more than one wished.
The Dallas Symphony Chorus, prepared by director Anthony Blake Clark and filling the choral terrace, sang powerfully — when above pianissimos so mushy they sounded like wordless humming. Mind you, this was in German, that consonant-driven language of forward vowels.
Nor, to my ears, were the soloists distinguished — or, too much of the time, adequately projected. Mezzo Catriona Morison finally summoned some power at the top of her range, but too much below was covered by the orchestra (Oh, for the good old days of Maureen Forrester). Erin Morley delivered the soprano solos competently, but with no magic.
Projected supertitles supplied translations of the sung texts, even German movement markings and their translations.
I love this symphony, and I went prepared to love this performance. I hope subsequent performances come together better.
Details
Repeats at 7:30 p.m. Saturday and 3 p.m. Sunday at Meyerson Symphony Center, 2301 Flora St. $36.50 to $186. 214-849-4376, dallassymphony.org.
