A mere 33 years separate Tchaikovsky’s Fourth Symphony and Stravinsky’s Petrushka, yet what different worlds they inhabit.
Apart from the literally plucky third movement, the symphony takes itself very seriously, from defiant brass calls and a strangely restless, shuddering waltz to noisy triumph. (Composition of the symphony paralleled the composer’s disastrous and short-lived marriage.) Stravinsky’s score, for a ballet imagining contentious Russian carnival puppets, is the composer at his wittiest and most playful.
There they were, two Russian classics straddling the turn of the 20th century, on Thursday night’s opening concert of the Dallas Symphony Orchestra’s 2024-25 classical series. Guest conductor for the program was Edward Gardner, principal conductor of the London Philharmonic.
It was great to hear the orchestra again in the glorious acoustics of the Meyerson Symphony Center, with visceral sonic impact and a subtle afterglow of reverberation. It was good also to see a fuller-than-usual audience, with lots of young people.
That said, I’ve sometimes thought DSO programming overambitious, and this was one of those times. Suffused with Russian folk songs (or approximations thereof), Petrushka is a showcase of bright and sometimes raw colors and feisty rhythms — even overlays of competing rhythms. But those busy rhythms are not easy to coordinate, especially for an orchestra coming together after a summer break. Rehearsals for this program have been interspersed with rehearsals of the Wagner Ring Cycle coming up next month.
Opening the concert, in Stravinsky’s 1947 revision, Petrushka had a certain generalized energy. But those rhythms need to be quartz locked, and they weren’t always. Nor were strings always fine tuned in upper registers.
Maybe a more easily assembled work would have been a better idea for a season opener. But there were fine solo contributions from pianist Gabriel Sanchez (an important piano part), David Buck (flute), Gregory Raden (clarinet), David Matthews (English horn) and Stuart Stephenson (trumpet).
Gardner supplied helpful, charming comments at the beginning. But with a ballet score like this — music composed to accompany action — I wish audiences could be provided supertitles to describe the play-by-play drama. I’ve seen it done, very well. But, yes, it’s an expensive addition.
The Tchaikovsky is nothing if not standard rep, and the big brassy parts were exciting. Opening fanfares showed the orchestra’s horns, trumpets and trombones in splendid form.
But whenever the music got quieter it slowed down and lost direction. That shuddering waltz in the first movement seemed to mark time when it wanted urgency, although there were eloquent solos later from Raden, bassoonist Ted Soluri and Daniel Hawkins on horn. The opening of the second movement was surprisingly prosaic.
The third and final movements were emphatically not slow. In fact, the pizzicato Scherzo might have gone a hair slower for the sake of some busy wind writing later on. The finale exploded on the scene and drove to a frenzied close — and an explosive ovation.
Details
Repeats at 7:30 p.m. Saturday (no Friday performance) at Meyerson Symphony Center, 2301 Flora St. $47 to $264. 214-849-4376, dallassymphony.org.
