“Dallas got a preview of the future … Thursday and Friday nights,” writes Scott Cantrell in Sunday’s (4/21) Dallas Morning News. “These were the only two Dallas Symphony Orchestra concerts to be conducted this season by music director-designate Fabio Luisi…. Friday night’s performances … certainly suggested the wait will be worthwhile. Luisi got passionate but carefully detailed playing in three very different pieces.… From the pioneering and prolific black American composer William Grant Still … came the 1944 Poem. The Swiss composer Frank Martin … was represented by his 1949 Concerto for seven winds, timpani, percussion and strings. The concert’s second half was devoted to Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony…. Martin’s [Concerto] is certainly a showpiece for the soloists.… It was splendidly served by the DSO’s David Buck (flute), Erin Hannigan (oboe), Gregory Raden (clarinet), Ted Soluri (bassoon), David Cooper (horn), Russell Campbell (trumpet), Barry Hearn (trombone) and Brian Jones (timpani). In Beethoven symphony performances these days, conductors increasingly try to evoke the leaner sonorities of early 19th-century orchestras, and to take the composer’s ‘controversial’ metronome markings more seriously…. The orchestra gave Luisi what he asked for, with spirit and skill, and the audience exploded with enthusiasm.”
Posted April 22, 2019
