If Thursday night’s Dallas Symphony Orchestra opener wouldn’t put a smile on your face, you’re in a bad funk indeed. But a Meyerson Symphony Center concert bookended by Gershwin’s Piano Concerto and Ravel’s Boléro clearly had populist aims.
In varying degrees, all three pieces drew inspiration from folk music, and all three were showpieces of orchestration. The rarely performed Suite from Bartók’s Wooden Prince would have been more persuasive with a different presentation. (See below.)
It was good to have Spanish conductor Juanjo Mena back as a podium guest. As in a 2022 concert here, he impressed as a musician alert, sensitive and inspirational. Especially in the Gershwin, with Jean-Yves Thibaudet the brilliant soloist, the players looked as though thoroughly enjoying themselves.
Gershwin’s concerto puts a smartly organized, brightly colored art deco façade on a mix of jazz and blues. To hear Thursday’s performance, by turns exciting and hauntingly atmospheric, was again to wonder what music might have come if the composer had lived past age 38.
Between the bright lights and toe-tapping rhythms of the outer movements, the central Adagio seems to emerge from an empty, dimly lit bar, smelling of smoke and leftover drinks. But even it manages to work up a little dance.
Thibaudet supplied all the technical whiz-bang and sass one could want, but also irresistible dreaminess when called for. Mena and the orchestra matched him for pizzazz and poetry. L. Russell Campbell delivered the slow movement’s dusky muted trumpet musings; Erin Hannigan’s oboe solos had a great singer’s expressivity. Ravel’s Pavane for a Dead Princess was Thibaudet’s perfect encore.
Like Stravinsky’s Firebird and Petrushka, performed in Bartók’s Budapest in 1913, The Wooden Prince was composed for a fairy tale ballet. A prince’s attempts to woo a princess are foiled when woods, and then a stream, come to life. But the wooden replica he builds of himself does attract her, and with a fairy’s intervention the real prince finally embraces the princess.
The score is a marvel of theatrical drama and orchestral color, the extravagant instrumentation even including two saxophones. From the whole 50-minute score, premiered in 1917, Bartók later arranged a seven-movement suite about half that long. That’s what Mena and the DSO presented.
From deep, hushed rumbles to perky wind dances, from eerie rustles and snarls to undulations and scurries, Bartók puts on quite a sonic show, and Mena and the orchestra made the most of it. But in the absence of breaks between movements, the audience should have been given supertitles identifying the scenes. For illustrative works like this, supertitle screens should be as standard in concert halls as in opera houses.
Mena skillfully managed Boléro’s prolonged crescendo, although the snare drum was inaudible in early variations. Of excellent soloists too numerous to cite individually, Barry Hearn was a standout, his suave trombone cameo suggesting just enough down-’n’-dirty subtext. The piece built to quite a rousing end.
Details
Repeats at 7:30 p.m. Saturday and 3 p.m. Sunday (no Friday performance) at Meyerson Symphony Center, 2301 Flora St. $45 to $253. 214-849-4376, dallassymphony.org.
