DAUNTING PIECES INSPIRE COGENT MUSICIANSHIP
By Scott Cantrell
Dallas Morning News, TX
Oct 22 2007
CLASSICAL REVIEW: Youth group makes bracing season debut
A youth orchestra? A bunch of high-school kids? How good could they be?
Very good indeed, in the case of the Greater Dallas Youth Orchestra.
In the first of its four concerts this season, only two months
into the school year, the group wasn’t as polished Sunday evening
as it will be with a few more weeks under its belt. But the Morton
H. Meyerson Symphony Center resounded to a lot of very impressive –
and very musical – playing.
Music director Richard Giangiulio had set his players some daunting
challenges with two real orchestral showpieces: John Corigliano’s
Gazebo Dances and the two suites from Manuel de Falla’s The
Three-Cornered Hat. Both call for intensely rhythmic playing, and
plenty of turning on rhythmic dimes – or should we say pesetas?
The occasional diggety-diggety pattern wasn’t quite unanimous
throughout the large orchestra, and more sparingly scored passages
weren’t always ideally taut. The winds’ tuning drifted a bit in
the Falla.
But the exciting parts were very exciting, and Mr. Giangiulio shaped
phrases with a loving hand. The strings were amazingly lustrous,
brasses impressively firm; an oboist, a clarinetist and the bassoons
lent especially lovely cameos.
The Falla, though, is one of those orchestral pieces that would benefit
from having movement titles projected – maybe even play-by-play cues
to actions in the ballet for which the music was composed. (The
Fort Worth Symphony recently did a very effective job of this in
Stravinsky’s Firebird.)
Two trumpet concertos had the sleek, suave services of David Bilger,
former principal trumpet of Dallas Symphony Orchestra and since 1995
holder of the same chair in the Philadelphia Orchestra.
The 1950 concerto by the Armenian composer Alexander Arutunian isn’t
top-drawer music – more like Armenian Hollywood fluff. But it’s good
clean fun, and both Mr. Bilger and the orchestra played it to the hilt.
A Giuseppe Torelli concerto, actually called a Sonata in D major, was
less convincing. A piece meant for maybe a dozen musicians was pumped
up for the full GDYO string sections, who played in a big-vibrato style
unknown in the baroque era. Surely no professional orchestra today
would play a baroque piece in this 1950’s Eugene Ormandy/Philadelphia
Orchestra manner. Better to prepare these young musicians for today’s
real-world performances.
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress
