It was evidence of either cultural riches or poor planning that music lovers on Tuesday had to pick between concerts by the Dallas Winds and Dallas Chamber Symphony.
Rightly or wrongly, I opted for the Chamber Symphony, at Moody Performance Hall. The reward was fresh, nicely nuanced performances of three works ideally suited to an ensemble of around 40 musicians.
Richard Wagner’s Siegfried Idyll, a birthday present to his wife Cosima, was first performed by a small ensemble in the couple’s home outside Lucerne, Switzerland. Wagner subsequently produced the enlarged orchestration usually heard today.
As throughout the concert, music director Richard McKay conducted clearly and expressively, without ever overdoing it. The orchestra responded with a gently urgent, warmly shaped performance, although winds and horns weren’t always reserved enough to balance quieter string playing.
Here and elsewhere in the concert an occasional smudge from violins or horns wouldn’t have been heard from, say, the English Chamber Orchestra. But this was impressive playing from an ensemble with many young musicians, and quite a few new faces this time.
Soloist in the Mozart D major Violin Concerto (K. 218) was Jaewon Wee, who won first prize and the audience choice award in the 2023 inaugural Dallas International Violin Competition, produced by the Dallas Chamber Symphony. Trained in her native South Korea, at the Juilliard School and New England Conservatory, she’s currently pursuing an artist diploma at Rice University’s Shepherd School of Music.
First-class training was evident in a smart, stylish performance, impeccable in every technical respect. And there was that extra air of unassuming authority that can’t really be trained. Her own cadenzas were just showy enough, without sticking out.
McKay and the orchestra supplied suave, buoyant collaboration. For an encore, Wee tossed off a dancing Allegro finale from the Bach A minor Sonata for unaccompanied violin.
For Beethoven’s Eighth Symphony, McKay opted not for monumentality, but for the high spirits implied by Beethoven’s metronome markings. The outer movements were exhilarating, the finale maybe pushing the group to its technical edge, the inner ones naturally sprung.
The DCS did a good job of filling the hall with an audience conspicuously younger and more diverse than at, say, Dallas Symphony classical concerts. And it was a very attentive and enthusiastic audience.
But this was a perfect opportunity to suggest listeners could get a deeper experience of the music by withholding applause between movements. It would also help to give the audience enough light to read the program and see that there are multiple movements. The printed program notes were of unfriendly length, and McKay’s rambling comments, especially before the Beethoven, weren’t helpful.
Speaking of illumination, and lack thereof, pitch-black, unattended parking lots across Ross Avenue hardly encourage attendance at Arts District events. The meters where you pay a rather stiff $20, plus tax, are barely readable in the dark. The Dallas Office of Arts and Culture might make some noise about this.
