Electrifying ‘Symphonie fantastique,’ lively Strauss, von Einem from Fabio Luisi, Dallas Symphony - The Dallas Morning News

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Once in a great while, I’ll write, “Drop everything, get tickets and go to a repeat performance.”

This is one of those times. Friday night’s Dallas Symphony Orchestra performance of the Berlioz Symphonie fantastique was electrifying, and exquisitely detailed in ways I can’t remember hearing before in the Meyerson Symphony Center.

The first half of the program supplied lively accounts of rarely performed works by Strauss and Gottfried von Einem. As music director Fabio Luisi increasingly sets his stamp on the orchestra, it’s becoming more polished and more expressively flexible.

Luisi was at his dramatic best in the Berlioz, heightening sonic effects at both ends of the dynamic spectrum. In a work that supposedly imagines an opium dream of love, rejection, murder, execution and a witches’ sabbath, he missed no opportunity — appropriately — to bring out the garishness, even grotesquerie, of the scoring.

Berlioz supplies plenty to work with: savage blazes of brass, shrieking winds, booming timpani and bass drums, and bells tolling the dead — but also, in an imaginary ball movement, four harps. English horn and offstage oboe plaintively call back and forth, until rolling thunder silences the oboe. You hear the crash of the guillotine blade and the severed head plop in the basket. Hell’s denizens dance in a frenzy to the funereal “Dies irae” chant.

Luisi had the orchestra in the palms — and highly expressive fingers — of his hands. He got pianissimos at the threshold of audibility as well as sonic explosions, and elaborate nuances in between. He daringly stretched and compressed time, and the orchestra followed his every move. It was an unpredictable performance in the very best sense. Some less than unanimous wind and horn chords will likely improve in subsequent performances.

As with most conductors these days, Luisi took the “March to the Scaffold” faster than the score’s tempo marking. Berlioz clearly wanted some solemnity to the march, but Luisi’s driven pace certainly added excitement.

It was good to see the two trumpets and (mellower) two cornets specified in the score, but it was a shame to eschew the solo cornet part Berlioz added as an afterthought. It adds whimsy to the Ball movement, and deliciously heightens some harmonic suspensions.

A razzle-dazzle Capriccio by Swiss-born Austrian composer Gottfried von Einem was the concert’s opener. Jazzy effects bump up against busy Hindemithian counterpoint in the 1943 score, winds and brasses adding cheeky punctuations even in more reflective music. Luisi and the orchestra had a fun time with it.

Principal clarinetist Gregory Raden, left, and principal bassoonist Ted Soluri, right, performed with music director Fabio Luisi and the Dallas Symphony Orchestra in the Duett-Concertino by Richard Strauss, on Friday evening, April 08, 2022 at the Morton H. Meyerson Symphony Center in Dallas. (Ben Torres / Special Contributor)

Composed five years after the von Einem, Strauss’ Duett-Concertino for clarinet and bassoon, with strings and harp, had charming, warmly expressive soloists in DSO principals Gregory Raden and Ted Soluri. A late work, contemporaneous with the Four Last Songs, this almost seems an extended transcription of an operatic dialogue from a more civilized age destroyed by World War II. Luisi and a slightly reduced string complement collaborated beautifully.

Details

Repeats at 7:30 p.m. Saturday and 3 p.m. Sunday at Meyerson Symphony Center, 2301 Flora St. $35 to $183. 214-849-4376, dallassymphony.org.

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"lively" - Google News
April 09, 2022 at 07:22PM
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Electrifying ‘Symphonie fantastique,’ lively Strauss, von Einem from Fabio Luisi, Dallas Symphony - The Dallas Morning News
"lively" - Google News
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