First, the bad news. The brave tone of the press releases didn’t hide the hard facts: the two flagships of the classical musical establishment in Dallas, the Dallas Symphony and the Dallas Opera, made substantial, noticeable cuts in their core product. The 2012-13 classical subscription series of the Dallas Symphony will feature five fewer classical subscription concert weekends than in recent years (down from twenty-one to sixteen), and Dallas Opera subscribers were faced, for 2011-12, with a season that was ..read more

Two weeks ago, I reported on what might be termed a “post authentic” version of Handel’s Messiah presented by the Fort Worth Symphony at Bass Performance Hall. Sunday, I took in my second Messiah of the season, a purist, devotedly authentic version presented by the Dallas Bach Society at St. Mark’s Episcopal Church in Arlington and scheduled to be repeated tonight, Monday, December 19, at Morton H.MeyersonSymphonyCenter.

Both performances had much in common: both strove toward the lean textures, pungent sonorities, ..read more

With album titles like The Gift, Joy, and Christmas Romance who better to present the perfect Christmas package. Bass Performance Hall brings two-time Grammy-nominated Jim Brickman, his piano, and a number of special guests to the stage on December 19th and we’ve got a pair of tickets to giveaway. To get your hands on them all you have to do is answer the question in the form below: Christmas jingles weren’t Brickman’s first venture. How did he begin his music ..read more

They told Chris Davis in the early 80s that a Christmas record would never sell. Over twenty years and 27 million Christmas records later, Davis has done the impossible. Mannheim Steamroller is taking over the Meyerson Symphony Center on December 27th and we’ve got a pair of tickets for you. To get your hands on them all you have to do is answer the question in the form below: Mannheim Steamroller began as an alias for Chip Davis. Where does ..read more

Conductor David Thye of the music faculty of Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary revealed visionary insight into Handel’s Messiah Monday night at Bass Performance Hall in the traditional annual presentation of the venerable oratorio by the Fort Worth Symphony.

Philosphically, one could question the annual presentation of the same work, year after year, to the point that it becomes more of an icon that a work of art. Likewise, one could question the necessity of trimming the piece into a version that ..read more

Feliz Navidad? More like Fiesta Navidad! The Dallas Symphony Orchestra partners with the Grammy Award-winning Mariachi Los Camperos de Nati Cano for a Mexican/American holiday ensemble on December 6th and we have a pair of tickets to giveaway. Get your Santa hat, or your Sombrero, ready and answer the question in the form below: Which president did founder Nati Cano perform for at the White House? We’ll pick a winner after 3pm.

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The radio stations have officially committed to spreading Christmas cheer, so we no longer feel guilty about entering into a hotbed of holiday giveaways. The Fort Worth Symphony Orchestra presents their sounds of the season with ‘Home for the Holidays,’ and we have a four pack for you and the family on November 26th. To get your hands on them all you have to do is answer the question in the form below: Conductor Ron Spigelman performed with several British ..read more

Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 2 used to be one of the most frequently performed works in the orchestral repertoire. An increased interest and understanding of the composer’s other works has pushed it into the background in recent decades, allowing a fresh look at its remarkable and subtle structure, and its intriguing intertwining of virtuosity and expression.

However, Thursday night’s performance of the concerto at Morton H. Meyerson Symphony Center, featuring soloist Lise de la Salle with the Dallas Symphony and guest ..read more

The Dallas Symphony Orchestra’s Holiday concert, A World of Joy, will bring together everyone from conductors Joshua Habermann and Lawrence Loh, to the Christmas Celebration Children’s Choir. We’ve got two four packs of tickets to the performance on December 4th to give away. To get your hands on them all you have to do is answer the question in the form below: What was the date and location of the first official performance of the Dallas Symphony Chorus? We’ll pick a ..read more

One might, at first, feel a little misled by the designation of the mostly-French, totally Francophile program Tuesday at Bass Performance Hall as “An Evening in Paris.” There was little hint of chestnut blossoms or can-can dancers or moonlit fountains.

But, on a more profound level, the repertoire selected for this collaboration of violinist Cho-Liang Lin and pianist Jon Kimura Parker was very much a reflection of a time when Paris had become a focus of reexamination, of deepening of shadows, ..read more

The instrument made by the famous seventeenth and eighteenth century Italian craftsman, Antonio Stradivari, is on loan form an annoymous Fort Worth patron, and it will be played by the Fort Worth Symphony Orchestra’s Associate Concertmaster Swang Lin. The violin, which was built around 1685, is the second “Strad” at the service of the Fort Worth Orchestra. A 1710 Stradivari has been on loan with the orchestra for three decades, and it is played by concertmaster Michael Shih. Here’s the full release:

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At the risk of being labeled chauvinistic, I’ll opine that, while all music belongs, potentially, to all interpreters, performers often have a special insight into the music of their own country. No one should advocate limiting Tchaikovksy to Russian interpreters, for instance, or Gershwin to American musicians—or Smetana and Janacek to Czech performers. But just as sometimes Americans can bring a special flavor to Gershwin, and Russians often manage to bring a unique perspective to Tchaikovsky, Czech conductor Jakub Hrusa ..read more

On the heels of the naming of Dallas Symphony Orchestra Artist Director Jaap van Zweden as conductor of the year by Musical America, the Dallas Symphony has announced a new business plan which will cut the number of classical series performances but increase the number of community appearances. The release also states that the number of concerts van Zweden and Pops director Marvin Hamlisch conduct each season will stay the same. From Chairman of the Board Blaine Nelson.

“Given the fiscal ..read more

This past weekend, the Soundings new music series, now in its second year at the Nasher Sculpture Center, once again delivered a flawlessly paced program in which the classical tradition intertwined convincingly with frontline musical innovation. And, as usual, musicians from the Yellow Barn Chamber Music Festival inVermontprovided the core of the material.

For this concert, traditionally trained musicians from Yellow Barn (violinist Anna Elashvili, violinist Keats Dieffenbach, violist Margaret Dyer, and cellist Hamilton Berrywere joined by members of Checkpoint KBK, ..read more

The disparity between old and new, serious and “non-serious,” and highbrow and lowbrow is a running theme throughout all art forms, but for various reasons the argument is especially pronounced in modern music. Differing opinions on the relevancy of certain eras or the legitimacy of particular styles can have an impact that ranges anywhere from humorous to devastating. Indeed, history has shown how consideration of this kind can manipulate audiences, patronage, the part of town that an event is held, ..read more

If you thought the Dallas Symphony Orchestra only performed classical standards with presenters who remained in chair, this Tuesday’s giveaway will correct your misconception. Cirque Musica combines the visual presence of Ringling Bros., Barnum & Bailey, and Cirque du Soleil with the melodies of Flight of the Bumblebee, Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto, and music composed by Emmy and Academy Award nominated composer, Marcelo Zarvos. We’ve got a pair of tickets for November 4th and 5th, to get your hands on our ..read more

Last week, Dallas Symphony co-concertmaster Nathan Olson grabbed laughter, applause, and national attention by striding onstage at Meyerson Symphony Center wearing a bright red Texas Rangers cap. Olson walked on capless this week, but the reason for the letdown became obvious seconds later when Italian-born guest conductor Carlo Rizzi came onstage in the famous red baseball cap.

The concert itself was clearly designed to fit comfortably; programming by the DSO throughout October, with the exception of guest conductor Marin Alsop’s presentation ..read more

We’re not too stuffy to get into the spirit of the season and offer a Halloween-inspired giveaway. So that’s exactly what we have for you this Thursday: a pair of tickets to The Dallas Symphony Orchestra’s Monsters of Film Music on October 30th. The concert features selections from Harry Potter, Star Wars, The Dark Knight, Gostbusters and others. Dress up, arrive early, and cash in on contests, arts and crafts. To get your hands on them all you have to ..read more

Okay, now this is starting to shape up. The entire idea for FrontRow Live, our multi-faceted musical, artistic extravaganza which will take place on November 3 from 8 p.m. until midnight, was to create an event that mashed together as many different cultural activies as possible and see what happens. To that end we have three DJs (Play-n-Skillz, DJ Prince William, and DJ Sober), live video projections (Lars Larsen) a dance troupe (Rhythm Knightz), movies (our short film screening room), art ..read more

Joaquín Achúcarro doesn’t like being told he has had a long career. “My career is just beginning,” insists the pianist, who performed last week with the Dallas Symphony Orchestra. In many ways, he’s right. Achúcarro has recently released two DVD recordings with the London and Berlin Philharmonics, and his touring schedule remains ever busy. But the 78-year old pianist has also enjoyed a distinguished, quarter-century tenure at Southern Methodist University, which has seen him shape artists like Alessio Bax, who ..read more

In his review of last Thursday’s Dallas Symphony Orchestra performance, FrontRow music critic Wayne Lee Gay noted that co-concertmaster Nathan Olson sported a Texas Rangers ball cap at the beginning of the evening’s performance. Yesterday, in the New York Times, David Waldstein writes more in-depth about the symphony players’ love of the ball club.

[Cardinal’s pitcher] Lohse, preparing to throw a critical pitch to Mike Napoli of the Texas Rangers in the second inning of Game 3 of the World Series on Saturday night, stepped off the rubber and wiped his brow before leaning in again for a new sign.

“Hurry up and throw the ball,” yelled the principal French horn player, Gregory Hustis. “Don’t they know we have a concert to play?”

But before Lohse could throw the pitch, Scott Walzel, a bassoon player and the personnel manager of the Dallas Symphony Orchestra, corralled his fellow musicians and ushered them to the Morton H. Meyerson Symphony Center stage.

When the players made their way to the stage, Olson tipped his Rangers cap to the sound of applause and laughter, and then flipped the cap around so the Rangers’ emblem faced the audience as Olson led the orchestra’s per-performance tuning. Waldstein then has some kind words for what happened in the Meyerson, including glowing praise for pianist Joaquín Achúcarro, but the best parts of the article happen off stage:

As the musicians poured back into the lounge, the game had changed drastically and St. Louis was leading by 8-4 in the fifth. But as they pushed their way into the room, immediately asking colleagues for the score, the Rangers mounted a small rally, scoring two runs as cheers erupted, mostly from the brass section.

The woodwinds and cellists remained skeptical.

Read the full piece here.

Concertmaster Nathan Olson drew laughter and applause by stepping onstage wearing a bright red Texas Rangers cap Thursday night at the beginning of the Dallas Symphony’s concert at Morton H. Meyerson Symphony Center; this non-musical whimsy was the beginning of what would quickly become an evening of remarkable artistry under the baton of guest conductor Hannu Lintu.

Finnish-born Lintu, who exudes a wiry, almost eccentric presence, jolted any audience member whose attention might have been on baseball back to the concert ..read more

American orchestras have a grand old tradition of scheduling a box office favorite—such as Dvorak’s “New World” Symphony—after intermission on a program that includes an unfamiliar work—such as Christopher Rouse’s Concerto per Corde (Concerto for Strings) of 1990, the theory being that music lovers will by tickets and arrive at the beginning of the concert, and thus listen to—and, in theory at least—learn to love the unknown work.

Certainly, a healthy crowd turned out Thursday night at the Morton H. Meyerson ..read more

Pianist Seth Knopp, a member of the faculty of the Peabody Institute and the driving artistic force behind the Soundings new music series at the Nasher Sculpture Center, clearly owns a remarkable gift for innovative, theme-centered programming. Friday night’s opening concert of the series’ second season once again demonstrated Knopp’s ability to bring together artists, ideas, and repertoire in ways that add new layers of meaning to every work.

Building around the slightly unwieldy title “Intimate Letters: Cultural Outrage and Personal ..read more

Mendelssohn was neither Beethoven nor Brahms. Having made this self-evident statement, and noting that he was contemporaneous with the former for the first 18 years of his life, and with the latter for the last 18 years of his life, I’ll also observe that many conductors apparently confuse him with one or the other.

Fortunately, Dallas Symphony music director Jaap van Zweden let Mendelssohn be Mendelssohn throughout the first two programs of the first weekend of a two-weekend festival devoted exclusively ..read more