Review: Dallas Symphony electrifies in ‘Rite of Spring,’ premieres Cello Concerto

Thursday night time’s Dallas Symphony Orchestra live performance was a veritable riot of sonic coloration and texture.

The centerpiece was the world premiere of American composer Katherine Balch’s elaborately textured Whisper Concerto, for cello and orchestra. Additionally on this system, led by principal visitor conductor Gemma New, had been Stravinsky’s Ceremony of Spring and Borodin’s Polovtsian Dances — two works which shared this system on the Ceremony’s actually riotous 1913 premiere.

In her early 30s, with a doctorate from Columbia College, Balch is a visiting composition professor at Yale. The title of her Whisper Concerto, a co-commission by the DSO, the Staatstheater Darmstadt in Germany and England’s BBC Three, alludes to a hushed cadenza within the 1966 Cello Concerto of the late Hungarian composer György Ligeti.

Title your instrumental particular impact, and it’s someplace on this three-movement, 25-minute rating. Certainly, a complete web page explains the particular methods. A piano is altered in tuning and timbre by varied objects clamped to strings or jammed between them. Strings someday play microtones, pitches between “regular” notes, in addition to pitch slides and wispy harmonics. The solo cellist typically lays apart the bow to faucet strings with a brief stick.

So elaborate is all of the gimmicky, although, that you simply’d discover solely just a little of it until you’d studied a rating and adopted it in efficiency (as I did in a Thursday morning rehearsal). Certainly, one wonders if it’s price loading a rating with so many results which can be basically inaudible. In the end, after all of the nervous exercise, the concerto appears to attempt for the calm chorale that step by step surfaces within the finale.

Barely amplified, the solo cello is much less a “star,” much less distinguished than in most concertos, than an brisk drive inside the advanced textures. The writing is of breathtaking virtuosity, with determined scurries, huge leaps, double stops (a couple of pitch performed without delay), fierce pluckings and slides.

Zlatomir Fung, a younger American cellist of Bulgarian and Chinese language heritage, with first prizes within the Tchaikovsky and different main competitions, dispatched fearsome challenges with jaw-dropping brilliance. With path clear and targeted, much less athletic than in previous performances, New and the orchestra made a powerful case for the piece. Whether or not it is going to have legs stays to be seen, however there was a standing ovation.

The Ceremony challenged its first viewers — to not point out the orchestra and Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes dancers. Its earthy primitivism, with lurching rhythms, barbaric yawps and garish shrieks, is information that has stayed information, to borrow Ezra Pound’s phrase. Nevertheless it’s lengthy since been normal rep even for conservatory orchestras, and definitely for the DSO.

Conducting extra energetically within the Ceremony, New presided over an electrifying efficiency. Particular reward goes to solos from Ted Soluri (that spooky opening bassoon croon), Stephen Ahearn (enjoying the excessive E-flat clarinet) and David Matthews (English horn). And there have been stirring sounds from the eight horns (5 of them subs). I did want, although, that supertitles had recognized the dramatic scenes the music was composed to accompany.

Each right here and within the rousing account of the Polovtsian Dances, from Borodin’s opera Prince Igor, the visceral immediacy and sonorous envelopment of the Meyerson Symphony Middle acoustics made for aural thrills inconceivable from the best stereo system.

Particulars

Repeats at 7:30 p.m. Friday and Saturday at Meyerson Symphony Middle, 2301 Flora St. $35 to $155. 214-849-4376, dallassymphony.org.