The Dallas Symphony Orchestra’s Thursday night concert was, well, frustrating.
It started with a misjudgment: a first-half pairing of two recent works inspired by life during the COVID-19 pandemic. Sophia Jani’s Flare and Xi Wang’s YEAR 2020 had too much overlap of musical effects for either to get a fair hearing. In the concert’s second half, the performance of the Saint-Saëns “Organ” Symphony proved that excess doesn’t always succeed.
With music director Fabio Luisi conducting, this was the first classical concert at the Meyerson Symphony Center with musicians on new risers. I wish they looked more intrinsic, less provisional; edge flaps to cover the substructures would help.
It was good to be able to see winds and brasses that had been hidden on lower risers. Initial sonic impressions were positive, but full judgment must wait for the usual lower position of the overhead canopy. For this concert it was raised to expose the whole organ case.
In its world premiere, the Xi was a DSO commission, supported by the Norma and Don Stone New Music Fund. With an undergraduate degree from her native China and a Cornell University doctorate, Xi is a composition professor at Southern Methodist University’s Meadows School of the Arts.
Sixteen minutes long, YEAR 2000 is subtitled Concerto for Violin, Trumpet and Orchestra. The odd solo pairing works by mostly having the trumpeter at some distance — in this case on the side of the Meyerson’s choral terrace. It helped having a star trumpeter, Tine Thing Helseth, capable of great subtlety, in dialogue with the excellent violinist Karen Gomyo.
The music does suggest the mixed emotions of the time. Surprisingly lyric violin musings — even a central oasis of glowing beauty — alternate with busily unsettled music and brassy, percussive onslaughts. The solo trumpet can supply rousing summons and nervous chatters, but in the end it joins the solo violin onstage for music of affirmation.
Being programmed after the Jani didn’t show the piece to best advantage, but the performance got a rousing ovation, with Xi joining onstage. For an encore, Gomyo, Helseth and pianist Anastasia Markina played the Prelude from Shostakovich’s Five Pieces for two violins and piano.
Jani, educated in her native Germany and Yale University, is the DSO’s current composer in residence. Her 2021 work Flare, 10 minutes long, was said to be inspired by a poem by Mary Oliver, although lines quoted in the program note don’t clarify much.
From smears of brass and strings, oozy glissandos and wind flutters, piano and drums begin an insistent pulse that leads to great explosions of orchestral sound. Even a decrescendo is littered with fragmented fanfares, and the music ultimately rouses itself for a loud final dissonance.
“Beware of all exaggeration,” Saint-Saëns himself said. It was advice unheeded in the loudest performance I think I’ve ever heard of the composer’s Third Symphony. It was really loud even in too many places the score says merely forte. Brasses often stuck out too much. The scherzo and the final fugue sounded not exhilarating but frantic — and not always together.
Some may have been surprised at a relatively restrained registration for the organ’s first big C major chord. But it’s marked only forte, and Bradley Hunter Welch got it just right. The next big chords got appropriately louder, and the ending was plausibly hefty. But too many softer passages were barely audible — this for a composer who, after all, was also famous as an organist.
Details
Repeats at 7:30 p.m. Friday and Saturday and 3 p.m. Sunday at Meyerson Symphony Center, 2301 Flora St. $53 to $270. 214-849-4376, dallassymphony.org.
