There’s a special pleasure in hearing a refreshing take on a composition you know pretty well. Not, of course, a performance that’s distorted or belabored with point making.
On Tuesday night, at Moody Performance Hall, music director Richard McKay led the Dallas Chamber Symphony in a fresh take on the Brahms Third Symphony. If a chamber orchestra performance of a Brahms symphony was unusual, so were the piano-and-orchestra offerings in the concert’s first half.
Anton Nel, a professor at the University of Texas at Austin who performs all over North America, was the soloist in Haydn’s D major Piano Concerto (Hob. XVIII:11) and Schumann’s Op. 92 Introduction and Allegro appassionato.
We’re accustomed to big-boned, muscular, fleshy Brahms performances in our big concert halls. And some early performances of the symphonies were with 100-piece orchestras. But Brahms was also happy with smaller ensembles, notably the 49-piece Meiningen Court Orchestra — which he conducted in the premiere of his Fourth Symphony.
The Dallas Chamber Symphony numbered 48 players Tuesday night, quite enough to fill Moody’s lively acoustics. (Indeed, the sound might have been clarified a bit by slight lowering of adjustable acoustical banners on side walls.) Numbers of winds and brass were the same as you’d get in a Dallas Symphony performance, but string complements were considerably smaller.
McKay did better than most conductors in keeping fortes from turbocharging into fortissimos. And he was generally careful to keep winds, brass and strings in balance, while allowing inner voices more prominence. I heard counterpoints I’d never noticed before. Trumpets maintained commendable reserve when their parts were just texture fillers, although here and there a horn line stuck out more than needed.
This is a very part-time organization, and the mostly young musicians seem to vary from one concert to another. So the playing, although professional and caring, didn’t always have the last bit of tonal finish. The second and fourth movements ended with wind chords out of tune, and in the first movement violins didn’t always aim unanimously at quick moving upper notes.
But McKay had a real feeling for the tempo giusto, the pace at which the music would live, move and have its being. Urgency was balanced by expressive detail. Lingering lovingly over crucial intersections, he then could give the music just the right nudge ahead.
The Haydn was as refreshing as a splash in cool water, and here the strings played with great finesse and subtlety. Both McKay and Nel kept the music light on its feet, but also elegantly detailed, with lots of deft interaction — and just the right feistiness in the finale.
The orchestra was less consistently focused in the Schumann, although Nel vividly expressed the music’s — and Schumann’s own — contrasts of dreaminess, whimsy and frenzy. As in the Haydn, this was a sophisticated musician thoroughly enjoying himself.
Nel gave friendly introductions to the two piano works, and McKay spoke about the Brahms. But please, presenters, there are friendly, non-condescending ways to ask audiences not to applaud after every movement, as this audience did.
