Press Release
Classical Review: FWSO blends Shakespeare with Bard-inspired music at Bass Hall
From March 5,2006
Dallas Morning News
By Scott Cantrell
FORT WORTH - The most stimulating classical-music program of the season may be the one offered this weekend by the Fort Worth Symphony Orchestra. And the orchestra played it pretty stunningly Friday evening.
Combining four pieces inspired by Shakespeare isn't revolutionary. The 19th-century European infatuation with the Bard coincided with the rise of the orchestral tone poem, so there's plenty of material, not even counting all the Shakespeare-based operas and ballets. It's not even that bold to preface performances with readings from the appropriate plays.
But FWSO music director Miguel Harth-Bedoya has had the daring idea of breaking up the pieces, at clear transition points, with readings. The luscious "love" theme of Tchaikovsky's Romeo and Juliet Fantasy Overture is even overlaid, with exquisite timing, with Romeo's "It is my lady...." Tone poems are turned into incidental music, a medium revered in the 19th century. The reader is none other than actor Michael York, who - no small accomplishment - matches the music for high drama and expressivity.
The composers are all familiar, but of the four pieces only the Tchaikovsky is a concert-hall staple. Dvorák's Othello Overture and Liszt's Hamlet, both turbulent works, remind us why Shakespeare found such resonance in the age of high romanticism. Elgar's Falstaff, composed as late as 1913, finds poignancy as well as comedy and faux grandeur in the old knight, and it's a tour de force of orchestral writing.
One wouldn't want to hear these pieces thus interrupted all the time, but on this evening the stop-and-start performances made all kinds of sense. Actually, breaking up the Elgar probably lent coherence to what can seem as sprawling and extravagant as Sir John himself.
Apart from winds not always unanimously tuned, the orchestra played thrillingly all evening. Having first and second violins divided at the left and right of the stage brought out all sorts of interplays lost when all the fiddles are on the left. The brasses whipped up chills-down-the-back climaxes, but quieter passages were nicely finished.