Another week, another D-FW classical music competition.
Tuesday night, just a week and a half after the Van Cliburn International Piano Competition named its winners in Fort Worth, the Dallas International Violin Competition presented its three finalists in concert at Moody Performance Hall, then announced their prizes.
The $2,500 first prize went to American violinist Laurel Gagnon, currently studying at the Yale University School of Music. The prize also includes a future solo engagement with the Dallas Chamber Symphony, which presented the competition.
The $1,500 second prize and $500 audience choice award went to Hong Kong native Hiu Sing Fan, who’s pursuing a doctor of musical arts degree at Northwestern University.
The $1,000 third prize was awarded to Alice Lee, a Canadian studying at New England Conservatory.
In the concert, each of the finalists played a violin concerto with the Chamber Symphony, led by guest conductor Peter Bay, music director of the Austin Symphony Orchestra. Gagnon performed the Brahms concerto, Fan and Lee the Sibelius.
The biennial competition is open to violinists 18 to 35. From applications and video recordings, 16 violinists were selected for the in-person competition. The first two rounds were held June 12 and 13 at the Murchison Performing Arts Center at the University of North Texas in Denton.
Each quarterfinalist performed a violin concerto with piano accompaniment, after which nine semifinalists performed recitals of unaccompanied solo violin works. A jury of three professional violinists/teachers picked contestants for each round.
It’s impressive that even a newer and lower-visibility competition could attract players of such technical authority and interpretive sophistication as the three heard Tuesday. Different listeners might have ranked them very differently.
All three occasionally overdid gruff bowings of fortissimo double-stops, at least for a 700-seat hall about one-third the size of most orchestra halls. This bothered me more in the Brahms, where it’s better to err on the side of reserve. And for me Gagnon’s choice of the over-the-top Fritz Kreisler cadenza overloaded the concerto.
But she’s an accomplished and expressive musician, and after Bay and the orchestra — principal oboist Elise Belk especially — eloquently introduced the slow movement, Gagnon tapped right into their timing and tapered phrases. The finale was a little more deliberate than I was expecting, but Brahms does qualify his “happy allegro” marking with “but not too lively.”
Both Fan and Lee delivered Sibelius’ scurries, double-stops and leaps into high pianissimos with impressive assurance, but differently. Not for Lee the Nordic cool often heard in the piece — hers was a passionate account, by turns earthy and ethereal, with considerable freedom in the built-in cadenza. Fan’s Sibelius was more conventionally cool, with a fine focus throughout.
With wind and brass sections as large as would be deployed in a 2,000-seat hall, although far fewer strings, Bay had his work cut out to keep the orchestra in balance. Apart from an occasional spot when flutes and clarinets or horns were a little too prominent, he and the players maintained impressive equilibrium. Always attuned to the soloists, Bay shaped the music securely and sensitively.
This would have been a good opportunity to ask the audience not to applaud after every movement, as it did Tuesday. And prolonged late seating during the slow movement of Lee’s Sibelius was unfortunate.
DALLAS – Dallas City Council members approved a measure to explore options for leaving Dallas City Hall while, but left the door open to staying in the iconic building.
What we know:
The resolution approved will explore options to buy or lease a new City Hall building. It was amended to include a plan to pay for repairs to the current building that would be compared side by side to the options to leave.
Dallas City Council approved the resolution by a 9-6 vote. The vote came around 1 a.m. Thursday morning after 14 hours of debate.
Councilman Chad West told FOX 4’s Lori Brown that if the city decides to stay or leave City Hall, the resolution includes proposals to redevelop the land around the building.
“We still should be looking at redevelopment options to tie it into the convention center later on, because otherwise it just equals ghost town, which is what we have now,” West said. “And of course, if we decide to move and City Hall itself gets repurposed or demolished and something gets built there, we need to have a projected plan for what that could look like as well.”
Local perspective:
Around 100 residents spoke about their desire to keep the current Dallas City Hall, the historic structure designed by architect I.M. Pei.
“The thought of losing this land to private hands is disheartening. A paid-off asset, unfair to taxpayers, built on what is here,” Meredith Jones, a Dallas resident, said.
“The decision belongs to the people, not the city council,” David Boss, the former manager of Dallas City Hall, said.
Several questioned why the price tag for a repair is public knowledge, but the cost for a move isn’t.
“The public deserves to know the value of the land we are giving up. Dallas deserves a careful decision, not a rushed one,” resident Azael Alvarez said.
Dallas City Council went back and forth on the resolution, amending it before it finally passed. Much of the conversation revolved around the Dallas Mavericks’ potential interest in the site for a new arena.
Mayor Eric Johnson lamented that conversation revolved around the Mavs’ future and not City Hall itself.
“A conversation about a particular sports team and where you want them should never have been part of the conversation because that was not what was infront of us,” Johnson said. “I’ve never seen such vehement opposition to gathering more information.”
Councilwoman Cara Mendelsohn wore a Mavericks T-shirt to a recent hearing due to the continued conversation around them.
“We’re talking a lot about the Mavs. They’re the elephant in the room, but they’re actually not here, so let’s at least let them have a seat at the horseshoe,” Mendelsohn said on Monday.
Residents were also upset at the idea of City Hall being bulldozed to make way for a new Mavs arena.
“The Mavericks were ridiculed nationally, and still are. Worst trade in the history of the NBA,” one resident said Monday. “The decision to knock this building down without all the facts and allowing the people to make the decision is your Luka Dončić trade.”
The backstory:
Experts who assessed Dallas City Hall said the 47-year-old building’s mechanical, plumbing, heating, air conditioning, and electrical systems don’t meet modern standards.
It put a $906 million to $1.4 billion price tag on keeping the iconic building, which was designed by the famous Chinese architect I.M. Pei, for another 20 years.
Downtown Dallas Inc., an advocacy group for Downtown Dallas, said last week they support leaving the current City Hall site.
“We believe Dallas City Hall is no longer serving its intended purpose. The important functions that happen and must continue to be evolved and innovated within our city government are inefficient and truly stymied in that space,” said Jennifer Scripps, President and CEO of Downtown Dallas Inc. told the crowd. “Our board called a special called meeting and voted unanimously in support of pursuing options to relocate City Hall and redevelop the site. We were we feel that the opportunity is huge.”
The Source: Information in this story came from FOX 4 reporting.
How much do you earn? And how far does that paycheck really go?
In Dallas, a $100,000 salary is a figure that’s more than double the area’s individual median income, but nevertheless a useful benchmark for the region’s burgeoning business community. However — once taxes and the local cost of living is factored in — it has the effective purchasing power of around $80,000 according to a new financial report.
Consumer-focused fintech site SmartAsset worked the numbers on the country’s 69 largest cities, determining the “estimated true value of $100,000 in annual income” in each location by measuring federal, state and local taxes as well as local cost of living data, including on housing, groceries and utilities.
It used its own proprietary figures, as well as information from the Council for Community and Economic Research.
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Despite recent research suggesting North Texas has lately been losing some of its famous economic advantage — a major factor behind the region’s explosive growth — Dallas actually fared relatively well in SmartAsset’s analysis. Of the 69 cities, Dallas’ effective purchasing power, of $80,103 on the $100,000 salary, tied with Nashville to rank 22nd highest.
Like many cities in the report, Dallas also actually saw a year-over-year effective salary bump, likely because of slightly lower effective tax rates and living costs that have hewed closer to the national average. In 2024, the value of a $100,000 salary in Dallas came out to $77,197.
Other large Texas cities fared even better than Dallas. El Paso, where SmartAsset calculated the effective value of the $100,000 salary at nearly $90,300, ranked third highest overall.
San Antonio, where the effective value was around $86,400, ranked eighth. Houston, where the figure was around $84,800, ranked 10th, and Austin, where the figure was $82,400, ranked 17th.
Oklahoma City topped SmartAsset’s value ranking, with an effective salary of around $91,900, and Manhattan, which the website considered as its own city, came in with the lowest value, at around $29,400.
Dallas’ relatively strong effective value score won’t necessarily translate to the good life: Another financial report, published in November by the website Upgraded Points, determined that even a single adult with no kids needs a pre-tax salary of at least $107,000 to live “comfortably” in the Metroplex.
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