The Dallas Symphony Orchestra sounded pretty fabulous Thursday night, in multicolored music full of drama. French conductor Stéphane Denève, music director of the St. Louis Symphony, offered a program of imaginative cross references, and he brought plenty of flair to the proceedings.
The first two pieces were based on works by American writers. After intermission came Rachmaninoff’s Symphonic Dances, composed in his self-imposed U.S. exile, but looking back longingly at a Russia gone forever.
First, inspired by the eponymous fantasy tale by H.P. Lovecraft, came Celephaïs, by the 52-year-old French composer Guillaume Connesson. Ten minutes long, in five sections, it evokes visions of a fantastic city of bronze gates, onyx pavements, a turquoise temple, a rose-colored palace of delights and processions of orchid-wreathed priests. (It’s too bad the program didn’t list the sequence.)
Influences as various as Strauss, Debussy and Ravel are compressed and layered in complex modernist textures. Quite an orchestral showpiece, it has just enough melody and motif to keep listeners engaged. As throughout the concert, Denève carefully balanced sonorities and calculated dynamics for a gripping performance.
A fantasy of quite another aura, Samuel Barber’s Knoxville: Summer of 1915 is a mostly dreamy setting for soprano and orchestra of James Agee’s evocation of boyhood innocence.
Judging by the great ovation at the end, mine was a minority opinion of Trinidad-born Jeanine de Bique’s interpretation. There was, to be sure, an openness to her performance, which dramatized the music in gesture as well as tone.
But the timbre was often too metallic for my taste, and bubbles of accented syllables alternated with unaccented syllables that simply disappeared. I craved more line — and sometimes more accurate vowels.
The Symphonic Dances, Rachmaninoff’s last new orchestral work, was composed in 1940, seven years before the Barber. (Rachmaninoff subsequently revised his earlier Fourth Piano Concerto.) Conceived with the title Fantastic Dances, its three movements labeled Noon, Twilight and Midnight, it was premiered with the more neutral title and just tempo directions for the movements.
Rachmaninoff’s musical language takes on new melodic, harmonic and rhythmic restlessness here, and new textural brilliance, but he also finds room for signature sweeping melodies. There is a fantastic quality to the music, making it an apt balance to the program-opening Connesson.
Denève had the orchestra playing on top form, from a pianissimo at the threshold of audibility to thrilling and admirably precise masses of trumpets and trombones. One wind solo after another was eloquently spun out, none more so than Tim Roberts’ saxophone contributions. But Denève let introspective episodes go slack, slowing tempos too much, with too much pushing and pulling.
The DSO has a history with this piece. A 1960s recording with then-music director Donald Johanos was a showpiece for what was then state-of-the-art sound engineering. The dry acoustics of McFarlin Auditorium did it no favors, but the sound remains amazingly vivid.
Details
Repeats at 7:30 p.m. Friday and Saturday at Meyerson Symphony Center, 2301 Flora St. $19 to $131. 214-849-4376, dallassymphony.org.
