FORT WORTH — It’s not often that a bassoonist is the best thing about a symphony concert. But that was the case with Friday night’s Fort Worth Symphony Orchestra concert at Bass Performance Hall.
The concert itself was unusual: a one-off classical program wedged in among the orchestra’s spring concerts in the Fort Worth Botanic Garden. FWSO management wanted to give principal guest conductor Kevin John Edusei another gig with the orchestra, but options had been limited by his commitments elsewhere, as well as by schedules of the orchestra and Bass Hall.
The program was bookended with variations: Zoltán Kodály’s Variations on a Hungarian Folk Song “The Peacock” and Brahms’ Fourth Symphony, the latter’s final movement a set of variations on the theme introduced at the start. But the real magic happened in the Mozart Bassoon Concerto.
Principal bassoonist Joshua Elmore, one of the newest, and youngest, members of the orchestra, effortlessly dispatched fleet chatters and scurries, and wild leaps from low notes to high. Everything was polished and shapely, his tone unfailingly beautiful.
Edusei was a sympathetic collaborator, coaxing stylishly understated but buoyant playing from a contingent appropriately reduced to chamber-orchestra proportions.
Like his Hungarian contemporary Béla Bartók, Kodály collected and was often inspired by Central European folk music. Like Bartók’s Concerto for Orchestra, which the Dallas Symphony played a week earlier, Kodály’s 1939 “Peacock” Variations are something of an orchestral showpiece. Introduced by solo oboe, the theme is transformed among brassy exhilarations, rippling winds, a perky little fugue, a passing accumulation of trumpets-and-trombones dissonance and, finally, a movie-music apotheosis.
Edusei led a boldly characterized account, but I wondered if discipline hadn’t suffered a bit from all the popular fare of the “Music in the Garden” concerts. Quieter contributions from horns weren’t always firm, and violins could have used some tidying.
The performance of the Brahms reinforced my contention that no composer is more misunderstood — and misrepresented. Quieter passages were often quite lovely, but too much of the rest was too loud and too forced. Blazing, searing climaxes appropriate to the most wrenching passages of Shostakovich symphonies didn’t fit this music from an age of horse and buggy.
Brahms rarely writes fortissimo, and even then it doesn’t mean at all what it would for Shostakovich. Of 440 measures in the first movement, Brahms marks only 50 fortissimo. But too often throughout the symphony, Edusei let, or encouraged, mere fortes get turbocharged into fortissimos. Horns were sometimes too prominent in textures, timpani sometimes attacked with unseemly violence.
The tempos were mostly “normal,” but the first movement felt more moderato than the marked Allegro non troppo (not too quick). Surely the finale’s Allegro energico e passionato calls for more drive, and less slowing for the horns’ solemn variation.
Ah, but that Mozart …
