Review: Fort Worth Symphony plays Italian-inspired works by Berlioz and Sibelius

FORT WORTH — Friday night’s Fort Worth Symphony concert, the last of the orchestra’s classical season, was billed as “An Evening in Finland.” Only the second half, though, was devoted to the best-known Finnish symphonist, Jean Sibelius. The first half featured Harold in Italy, a hybrid symphony-concerto by the très French Hector Berlioz.

Actually, the program could have been titled “Two Pieces by Two Very Different Composers Inspired by Italian Visits.”

 As a winner of the Prix de Rome, Berlioz traveled widely in Italy during 1831-32, and scenes and folk songs he encountered inspired a number of subsequent works. In Harold in Italy, he imagined the solo viola as a traveler akin to the eponym of Lord Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage. It was intended for the famous violin virtuoso Niccolò Paganini, who also played viola, but the latter dismissed it for insufficient showiness.

Indeed, it’s less a conventional concerto than a symphony with a semi-prominent solo viola part. Its four movements purportedly evoke “Harold in the Mountains,” “Procession of Pilgrims Singing the Evening Hymn,” “Serenade of an Abruzzi Mountaineer to his Sweetheart” and “The Bandits’ Orgy.” If the viola drifts in and out of a subtle spotlight, it’s still a relatively rare solo outing for the alto of stringed instruments.

FWSO principal violist DJ Cheek underlined its strangeness by walking onstage well after the orchestral introduction, and walking off, then back on again, in the finale. Beginning with gentle, silken tone and expressive reserve, he summoned a darker, creamier sound for the pilgrims’ evening hymn.

He played wisely and well, although the gentle-voiced viola couldn’t always be heard over larger sounds from the orchestra. I wondered if balances might have been better if he and music director Robert Spano had been a bit more forward on the Bass Performance Hall stage. But apart from a couple brief slippages of ensemble, the orchestra supplied an aptly dramatic performance.

We think of Sibelius as the quintessentially Finnish composer, his music suggesting rugged, windswept landscapes of forests and lakes. But he began sketching his Second Symphony on a 1901 Italian trip. After the strings’ opening shudders, the winds’ catchy little tune may be as Italian as Finnish.

Sibelius himself acknowledged the mosaic quality of the symphony’s materials, but, even with starts and stops within movements, he was at pains to integrate the ideas.

Spano, though, emphasized contrasts at the expense of coherence. Starting with the horns’ too-loud first entrance, bright sonic floodlights were trained on nearly every new idea.

If your idea of musical pleasure is strings as well as brasses playing as loudly as humanly possible — and doing so skillfully — you may have been thrilled. And there were patches of very quiet playing. Overall, I yearned for a subtler, more cohesive performance.

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

UPDATE, May 23, 2026, 10:45 a.m.: Additional photos from the concert were added.