The Dallas Symphony has had quite a run lately.
Rare performances of Austrian composer Franz Schmidt’s big oratorio The Book with Seven Seals. The first two operas in what this fall will be a complete semi-staged presentation of Wagner’s Ring of the Nibelung. A triumphant European tour packing concert halls in Spain, Germany and Austria. And the orchestra’s annual residency at the Bravo! Vail festival in Colorado.
“I have been proud in this last season many times,” says Fabio Luisi, starting his fifth season as the DSO’s music director. “It shows how important it is to have tours. It makes the musicians really stick together all the time. We had really great concerts.
“I’ve been very proud during the Ring, even during very difficult and challenging music, with not enough time to rehearse. We have developed this sense of responsibility — not just placing all the responsibility on the conductor to bring things together, but every one of our musicians wanting to be good.”
Initially challenged by the COVID-19 pandemic, the Luisi-DSO partnership remains a work in progress. But the 2024-25 classical season, starting with Sept. 12 and 14 concerts led by Edward Gardner, principal conductor of the London Philharmonic, promises its own highlights.
In October, Luisi and the DSO will complete their semi-staged Ring survey with the remaining Siegfried and Götterdämmerung, then a weeklong presentation of the entire four-opera cycle. Ring cycles, calling for large casts of powerhouse voices, are rites of passage for opera companies. But multiple inquiries suggest the DSO’s may be the first integral Ring cycle performed by an American symphony orchestra.
Luisi also will conduct two major Austrian symphonies of the late 19th century, Mahler’s Resurrection and Bruckner’s Seventh, as well as a variety of other repertory.
“Fabio wants to do a full Mahler cycle with the orchestra,” says Katie McGuinness, the DSO’s chief artistic officer. “It’s every music director’s wish. What better way to close the season than with Mahler? And it’s sort of a sneak preview to our 125th season next year.” (The 2025-26 season won’t be announced for some months yet.)
There’s plenty of standard rep, including favorites by Mozart, Beethoven, Mendelssohn, Schumann, Berlioz, Dvořák, Strauss and Rachmaninoff. Former music director Jaap van Zweden will return for a program of Mozart, Prokofiev and Shostakovich.
Also returning as guests will be Juanjo Mena, Matthew Halls and, doubling as violin soloist, John Storgårds. Making DSO debuts will be quite a diverse array of guest conductors: in addition to Gardner, Jonathon Heyward, Markus Poschner, Aziz Shokhakimov, Giedrė Šlekytė, Anu Tali and Ilan Volkov.
“I’m looking forward to working with Edward Gardner and Jonathan Heyward,” says DSO concertmaster Alexander Kerr. “I’m looking forward to The Ring. I’m looking forward to playing the Bruch concerto with Fabio. I’m looking forward to Sean Shepherd’s concerto for winds. He’s a friend and a really talented composer. I’m looking forward to Jaap coming back. And Mahler Two — that’s one of my favorite symphonies.”
Soloists, in addition to Kerr, will include violinists Augustin Hadelich and Leonidas Kavakos, pianists Jean-Yves Thibaudet, Hélène Grimaud, Nelson Goerner, Benjamin Grosvenor and Conrad Tao, and DSO principal harpist Emily Levin.
The schedule also includes new and recent works by a diverse range of composers: composer-in-residence Sophia Jani, Raven Chacon (the Pulitzer Prize-winning Native American’s first orchestral composition), Sean Shepherd (a concerto for DSO wind principals David Buck, Erin Hannigan, Gregory Raden and Ted Soluri), Andrew Norman, Arlene Sierra, Hannah Eisendle, Kris Bowers, Kyle Gann and Keith Jarrett.
“It’s been our mission for many years, certainly with our previous CEO Kim Noltemy, to advocate for female composers, female conductors, female administrators,” McGuinness says. “We have committed to 50% of our new music by female composers.”
The DSO’s ongoing evolution
The orchestra meanwhile continues its evolution under Luisi, who had the bad luck of taking over just as COVID-19 had shut down performances worldwide. While many other orchestras terminated all activities, the DSO developed performances to fit shifting challenges of the pandemic.
From outdoor concerts by small ensembles to widely spaced chamber orchestra concerts for limited audiences in the Meyerson Symphony Center, the DSO was an industry leader in the art of possibilities. Adaptions were sometimes necessary day by day as pandemic recommendations shifted — and as musicians contracted and recovered from the virus. (A new wave of COVID waylaid a dozen players as recently as the European tour in June.)
A richly experienced conductor in the musical capitals of Europe, in opera as well as symphonic music, including seven years as principal conductor at New York’s Metropolitan Opera, Luisi had to reassemble the pieces of the DSO.
“The biggest challenge was that I didn’t have every week the entire orchestra,” he says of his first seasons. “I could not develop what I wanted to develop, a sound. Sound is for me one of the highest priorities I have to work on.
“I found a very good orchestra in terms of technical skills, but I didn’t find an orchestra with a self-awareness of the sound they wanted to use. The positive thing of this time was that we could do a different kind of repertoire, to listen more to each other, which you cannot always do with the full orchestra.”
So it’s taken Luisi some time to set his full stamp on the orchestra — still something of a work in progress. Part of the challenge was succeeding van Zweden, who was very much a musical micromanager, specifying the tiniest nuances. In van Zweden’s hands the orchestra could be a fine-tuned mechanism, but Luisi wanted the musicians to take more responsibility. Without every detail spelled out from the podium, ensemble hasn’t always locked into perfect sync.
“My way of rehearsing is to find common ground, a way to communicate,” Luisi says. “If I change something in the moment in the concert, or if a musician offers something different than in a rehearsal, that is something we can do.
“Flexibility to me is very important. That is why I am insisting on opera. In opera you need to be flexible. Educationally, this is a great thing, to be forced to listen all the time and react immediately, and react even before things happen.”
Last spring was also loaded with challenging music well off the orchestra’s normal playlists: the two Wagner operas, the Schmidt oratorio, symphonies by Shostakovich and William Walton and a major new piano concerto by Anna Clyne. Rehearsals for the European tour began the day after the Walton performances.
From the start, Luisi also experimented a lot with different seating arrangements for the orchestra. He immediately divided violins in the older European way, with firsts on the left and seconds on the right, to clarify independence of the two parts. Double basses moved from the right of the stage to the middle and finally to the left.
Neither he nor DSO musicians were fond of the steeply terraced risers dating from the Meyerson Symphony Center’s 1989 opening. So Luisi sometimes had the orchestra on the flat stage floor, sometimes with some musicians on low temporary risers, before settling on new risers less steeply layered than the original ones.
Touring and turnover
Luisi, Kerr and McGuinness all point to touring as a powerful way of cultivating a sense of ensemble — and listening and flexibility. Repeatedly performing a relatively small repertory over a couple of weeks, in different acoustics, focuses music making in a way much more difficult when the orchestra is playing completely different programs week after week.
Of the orchestra’s post-pandemic challenges, Kerr says: “There’s also been a lot of turnover in the last couple of years. It’s a lot of different factors at once. It’s a new conductor, the turnover, the pandemic. It’s taken time to get to know each other.
“I think Fabio was a bit reticent to let us know verbally what he wanted out of us. When we finally started to figure it out, especially on the tour, things started to jell a lot more.”
The DSO is also getting a new president and CEO later this month. Succeeding the much admired Kim Noltemy, who left this summer to head the Los Angeles Philharmonic, is Michelle Miller Burns, who previously served as an executive vice president and interim CEO of the DSO before heading the Minnesota Orchestra for six years.
“We met in Dallas during the search and in Vail in July,” Luisi says. “I cannot think of anyone better. I look forward to working together and continuing on this path. I’m sure she will be a partner with me as Kim was.”
Details
The Dallas Symphony Orchestra’s 2024-25 classical series begins Sept. 12. For information and tickets, call 214-849-4376 or go to dallassymphony.org.
