Klarinet Archive - Posting 000164.txt from 2011/03

From: "Forest Aten" <forestaten@-----.com>
Subj: [kl] Mozart/basset horns
Date: Sun, 20 Mar 2011 13:05:26 -0400

Dan....would loved to have had you attend the performances of Mozart's Masonic Funerary music this weekend...with the
Dallas Symphony. It's not often you have three (3) basset horns on stage at the same time. I thought of you and Keith!
Three and a half minutes of the most incredibly beautiful music. Here's the review:

Classical music review: Van Zweden does it again, with compelling Mozart and Stravinsky from the Dallas Symphony
Orchestra

By Scott Cantrell
Classical Music Critic
scantrell@-----.com

Published 17 March 2011 11:16 PM

Does Dallas know how lucky it is? With the Dallas Symphony Orchestra , week after week, Jaap van Zweden is producing
some of the most compelling orchestral performances to be heard anywhere. This is music-making of intellect and emotion,
elegance and visceral excitement.

The DSO's music director did it again Thursday night, and in very different music. He managed to make both Mozart - the
K. 477 Masonic Funeral Music and the C major Piano Concerto (K. 503) - and Stravinsky's Rite of Spring sound as
brand-new, and astonishing, as they must have been to their first audiences.
With a formidable army of musicians onstage, van Zweden whipped up the Rite 's feral ferocities to almost scary
intensity. Almost more impressive was how organic he made all those shifting, off-beat rhythms feel, and he made magic
of the score's eerie atmospherics. The acoustics of the Meyerson Symphony Center were spectacularly displayed, too.
Wilfred Roberts delivered the famous opening bassoon solo with a tone of creamy unearthliness, and clarinetist Paul
Garner was a standout among numerous musicians with shrieking high parts. Timpanist Ed Stephan repeatedly upped the
excitement.

To post-Stravinsky ears, Mozart can sound like aural comfort food, and that's often how it's served up. But van Zweden
subtly underlined the odd turns of line and harmony in the brief Masonic Funeral Music, a somber procession-like piece
memorializing two of the composer's Masonic brothers.

French pianist David Fray was similarly exploratory in the concerto, reminding us how much more spontaneous performances
must have sounded when soloists, not conductors, controlled the proceedings. He didn't hesitate to nudge the music along
when it wanted to get somewhere, or to linger ever so slightly elsewhere.
He didn't so much play the notes and runs as set them aglow. Again and again, van Zweden coaxed elegantly tapered
phrases from the orchestra. And with stylishly sparing the vibrato - and with Philadelphia Orchestra concertmaster David
Kim the evening's guest concertmaster - the violins produced the most beautiful sheen I've ever heard from the DSO.

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