Texas Classical Review

Fabio Luisi and the Dallas Symphony Orchestra presented a Hungarian program Thursday night, with the centerpiece a dazzling performance of Miklos Rózsa’s Violin Concerto featuring soloist Amaryn Olmeda. 

The concert marked 70 years since the local world premiere of Rózsa’s Violin Concerto by soloist Jascha Heifetz and the Dallas Symphony under the baton of Walter Hendl.

A Sphinx Competition first-prize winner, Olmeda maintained a clear, singing violin tone that balanced the orchestra perfectly as she negotiated the alternately brilliant and devilish virtuoso passages peppered with multiple stops, and the more lyrical interludes, many containing exotic themes resembling those from Rózsa’s epic film scores. Just before the first movement’s abrupt conclusion, Olmeda took up a fiery cadenza, producing a torrent of sound from her instrument that seemed to briefly encapsulate the preceding movement’s entire contents.

Luisi and the DSO matched her every step of the way, bolstering her flowing, sinewy melodies with lush sonorities and complementing her rapid and turbulent lines with their own driving and syncopated rhythms.

Hazy harmonic clouds of winds and strings underscored Olmeda’s calm principal theme in the second movement as she gradually moved into the violin’s extreme high register while Luisi guided the orchestra in accompanying her with undulating chords.

The finale resumed the first movement’s alternating lyrical and fast sections. An abrupt timpani stroke unleashed a flurry of notes from Olmeda before spurring the finale’s first brisk episode.  Olmeda set a relentless pace while Luisi adroitly steered the ensemble’s responses from the podium, with graceful motions and precise gestures drawing playing of comparable ardency from the DSO musicians.

The Hungarian spirit persisted into the second half of the program with three dance sets that were suffused with Hungarian and Romani rhythmic and harmonic idioms despite broader stylistic differences.  Attempts to capture “authentic” Hungarian folk practices produced the asymmetric meters and modal harmonies heard in the Béla Bartók’s Romanian Folk Dances and and Zoltan Kodály’s Dances of Galánta. These idioms provided the energy powering the DSO’s performance and served as Luisi’s guides for directing the orchestra through the dances in each set.

Bartók’s individual dances are so short that Luisi easily navigated the DSO through them as though they constituted shifting sections of a larger piece.  Luisi similarly maneuvered the two-part, verbunkos-inspiredform of Kodály’s Dances of Galánta, amplifying the solemn, declamatory character of the initial procession before spurring the DSO to frolic through the quicker closing section.

The Hungarian Dances of Brahms present a more “streamlined” style yet preserved the flamboyant Romani-inspired gestures and tempo shifts that his audiences would have recognized as “Hungarian.” Luisi’s set included some of Brahms’ most familiar items, especially No. 4 in F-sharp minor and No. 5 in G minor. Luisi brought out a variety of character and instrumental combinations while reinforcing the Hungarian spirit evident in their slow, impassioned sections and and brisk, fervent passages. 

The opening Surprise Piece provided a vivid introduction for the evening’s program even if it strayed from the Magyar program . Opening with barely audible drones from the low strings and a brief horn solo from David Heyde, string ostinatos and additional horns emerged on cues from Luisi, gradually building to a boldly sustained triumphant sonority before reversing the process, gradually winding the texture down to the faintly audible tones of the beginning. 

Following the intermission, Luisi revealed the Surprise Piece to be Carl Nielsen’s Helios Overture inspired by the rising and setting sun over the Aegean Sea.  A Danish composer, Nielsen was an ardent devotee of Mahler and Strauss, although curiously not an admirer of Wagner despite the resemblance between Helios and the prelude to Das Rheingold.  Still, the waxing and waning dynamic of the Surprise Piece made for a suitably dramatic overture to the vigorous and energetic program that followed.

The program will be repeated 7:30 p.m. Friday and Saturday. dallassymphony.org