FORT WORTH — Friday night’s Fort Worth Symphony Orchestra concert, at Bass Performance Hall, got off to an unpromising start. With music director Robert Spano conducting, I can’t think I’ve heard a more lifeless performance of Beethoven’s Egmont Overture. Matters improved in subsequent works by Beethoven and Shostakovich, although these weren’t this orchestra’s most consistent performances. Repeats will probably improve.
The overture was composed to introduce Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s play about a 16th-century count’s agitation against tyranny. But where was the music’s tension, the urgency, the excitement? Everything sounded routine, comfortable. When Beethoven, of all composers, sounds comfortable, something is off.
The young Dutch-American violinist Stephen Waarts brought a very personalized approach to the Beethoven Violin Concerto, with mixed results. Although he had all the technical wizardry one could wish, speed and volume weren’t his priorities. Far more impressive was the delicacy of his pianissimos in the first two movements, with Spano and the orchestra matching him.
As in the overture, though, the first movement could have used a bit less ease, a bit more urgency. But Waarts tossed off some surprising cadenzas, and there was a vociferous ovation at the concerto’s end. The encore was “L’Aurore” (Dawn), the first movement of Eugène Ysaÿe’s unaccompanied Sonata No. 5 — a quirky showpiece of solemn drones, fast and slow double stops and flourishes.
The quietly portentous opening of the Shostakovich Fifth Symphony should grab you by the wrist, and the symphony shouldn’t let go until its last chord is released. Friday’s performance opened with competent and careful delivery of the notes, but the visceral grip didn’t happen until the pace quickened in the vaguely sinister march. Spano and the orchestra worked up scorching intensity before easing the music into the long, spooky epilogue.
Cellos and basses overplayed the second movement opening, which is marked fortissimo, not quadruple forte. But thereafter the performance persuasively alternated among moods bumptious, playful and sardonic.
Spano and company sustained a thread of tension through the slow movement, building up great masses of string tone. Timpani were banged too loudly at the start of the finale, but from there on the performance was carefully plotted, the music’s forced rejoicing — as Shostakovich may or may not have described it — still making room for unsettled ambiguities.
Some of the symphony’s finest moments were eloquent solos from FWSO principals: Jake Fridkis (flute), Stanislav Chernyshev (clarinet), Jennifer Corning Lucio (oboe), Joshua Elmore (bassoon), Gerald Wood (horn) and Michael Shih (concertmaster).
While Dallas audiences increasingly applaud after individual movements of symphonies and concertos, I’ve yet to experience that in Fort Worth. Make of that what you will. But must we still have “The Star-Spangled Banner” before every FWSO concert?
Details
Repeats at 7:30 p.m. Saturday and 2 p.m. Sunday at Bass Performance Hall, Fourth and Commerce, Fort Worth. $26 to $99. 817-665-6000, fwsymphony.org.
