“Jaap van Zweden’s final Mahler performances as music director of the Dallas Symphony Orchestra began with a fortissimo barrage from the cellos and basses to open the Symphony No. 2 Friday night,” writes Wayne Lee Gay in Saturday’s (2/24) Texas Classical Review. “Yet this performance—with just under three hundred instrumentalists and singers onstage—was about much more than loud and jolting symphonic thunderbolts. This became apparent when, after the dark passion of the first theme, the lyrical second theme arrived in glowing lightness from the strings; thanks to van Zweden’s flawless pacing that became the dominant focus of the movement…. After ten years with the Dallas Symphony, the long opening movement also demonstrated the depth of van Zweden’s understanding, of the magnificent acoustic of the Meyerson Symphony Center, and his ability to shape Mahler’s inspired sound world within it.… In [the fourth movement], German soprano Dorothea Roschmann’s voice rose magically from the general choral sound with soaring radiance; the Dallas Symphony Chorus whispered its first entrance with breathtaking intensity before arriving at its final proclamation of resurrection and eternal life, delivered with that ensemble’s characteristic precision and tidal wave of choral sound.”
Posted February 26, 2018
