Review: Fort Worth Symphony performs a new concoction, plus Brahms and Dvořák

FORT WORTH — With the Fort Worth Symphony Orchestra playing on a very high level lately, Friday night’s concert, at Bass Performance Hall, looked particularly appealing. It included two late 19^th-century classics — the Dvořák Cello Concerto and Brahms’ Second Symphony — and a new “suite” from American composer Joan Tower’s 1991 Concerto for Orchestra.

Past impressions of guest conductor Peter Oundjian have been positive. Soloist in the Dvořák was a winner of the prestigious International Tchaikovsky Competition, the young American Zlatomir Fung.

Tower’s music was widely programmed in the 1980s and ’90s, but seems much less so these days, so a refresher was welcome. What we got from her original 30-minute, two-movement work was not a suite in the usual sense of a set of separate movements. No, it was Oundjian’s 12-minute stream-of-consciousness mélange of Tower’s motivic gestures and often busy orchestral colors and textures.

In a program note, Oundjian wrote that, having conducted the original piece multiple times, he felt that “the excellent orchestral writing could lend itself to an innovative sampling of this masterpiece … rendering it more flexible to program.”

Starting from low pulsings, it built up to full-orchestra clashes. Clarinet and horn solos ensued, then bright flashes of sounds and chatters scattered around the orchestra. A wild ride of sonic exuberance retreated to make room for quieter undulations.

Another buildup of sometimes mocking excitement yielded more jabs and chatters, the piece culminating in a frenzied, dissonant coda. Oundjian was presumably a definitive interpreter of his own creation, which he premiered earlier this year, the orchestra razzling and dazzling as appropriate.

The Dvořák got an enthusiastic ovation, but to my ears the performance never quite came together as a coherent whole. Fung supplied the expected technical command, plus silken tone and conscientious expressivity, but I missed the compelling personal stamp the German cellist Julian Steckel supplied last month in a Dallas Symphony performance of the same piece.

It didn’t help that Oundjian sometimes allowed the orchestra to overpower the cello’s relatively understated tone. When the orchestra was on its own, he kept whipping up fortissimos out of proportion to the music at hand.

The Brahms started with gentle promise, at a mobile pace felt in one beat per measure, not three. Indeed, for a composer too often freighted with heavy-footed tempos, Oundjian started each movement with welcome momentum.

Early in the first movement, though, he slammed on the brakes for leaping octaves that Brahms marks only — in parentheses — “sort of held back.” And here, as too often elsewhere in the symphony, music marked merely forte got pumped up into fortissimo. Fortissimos were turbocharged into quadruple fortes worthy of Shostakovich at his most hysterical.

Brahms is a subtler composer than this, and his music is from an age far less noisy than ours. There’s intense emotion in his music, but it’s firmly controlled. Its performance wants a certain reserve, a careful control of volumes and balances too rarely demonstrated in performances these days.

Repeats at 7:30 p.m. Saturday and 2 p.m. Sunday at Bass Performance Hall, Fourth and Commerce streets, Fort Worth. $30 to $103. 817-665-6000, fwsymphony.org.