The Dallas Symphony Orchestra has been doing its part for American music lately. We’re getting both brand-new pieces and what might be called legacy works, from the middle and earlier 20th century.
With music director Fabio Luisi conducting, that was the fare for the first half of Thursday’s concert at the Meyerson Symphony Center. The program included the world premiere of Snapshots by Jessie Montgomery, a DSO co-commission, and another recent work, David Chesky’s American Bluegrass Variations. Between them came George Antheil’s 1925 Jazz Symphony.
Brahms’ Piano Concerto No. 2 occupied the concert’s second half, with veteran Austrian pianist Rudolf Buchbinder as soloist.
Although the program page didn’t say so, the Montgomery comprises four movements. It took 21 minutes, not the listed 12.
The piece opens with glowing washes and surges of sound, before brass chatterings set the whole orchestra dancing in dotted and syncopated rhythms, with lots of percussion. A dreamy, shimmering episode gives way to busy buzzings. The second movement mingles hypnotic chimings and quasi-chorales from brasses.
In the third movement, a ruminative horn solo — beautifully played by new principal Daniel Hawkins — is spun out over a bed of muted strings. More jitters and chatters animate the finale, spiced with glaring dissonances. A razzle-dazzle performance drew an enthusiastic response, as did Montgomery, who joined in the applause from a side balcony. (Too bad the spotlight was aimed at the wrong people.)
Chesky was at least accurately spotlit, and applauded, at the end of his curtain raiser. Produced to honor Luisi’s DSO appointment, this is an orchestral elaboration of an earlier string quintet. If it’s bluegrass, it’s an urban take, jagged and jittery before cutting loose with a hoedown — with sly hints of “The Yellow Rose of Texas.”
Antheil, who lived from 1900 to 1959, was a shorter-lived contemporary of Aaron Copland, but his music couldn’t be more different. A Jazz Symphony sounds like something from 1920s Weimar Republic Germany — raucous, restless, in your face — with an excursion south of the Rio Grande. Gershwin tunes slip into the mix, as does a bit of Stravinsky’s Petrushka. Foot-tapping rhythms alternate with rhythmically complex mash-ups.
The performance used the original instrumentation, including three saxophones and two banjos, rather than a later simplification. It would be effective if half as long, but Gabriel Sanchez more than deserved his solo bow for dispatching some virtuoso piano passages.
Ultimately, the concert’s first half was too much of the same thing: lots of splash, chatter and sizzle. It left me with no burning desire to hear any of the pieces again.
I’ve never understood why modern performances of the Brahms open the first and third movements at tempos much slower than the score indicates. Luisi, to his credit, let the horn and cello solos move a bit more than usual, and they were finely played by, respectively, Hawkins and principal cellist Christopher Adkins.
Buchbinder played most of the notes, but summoned no real grandeur or poetry. The orchestra was often too loud, basses especially, pumping out fortes and fortissimos appropriate to Shostakovich, but not to Brahms.
Details
Repeats at 7:30 p.m. Saturday and 3 p.m. Sunday at Meyerson Symphony Center, 2301 Flora St., Dallas. $43 to $262. 214-849-4376, dallassymphony.org.
