Dallas Chamber Symphony calls its March 4 concert at the Moody Performance Hall in the Dallas Arts District a French program. What’s surprising is the first piece on the concert is British.
British composer, pianist and conductor Thomas Adès is a star of the modern classical music world. He is best known for The Tempest, Violin Concerto, Tevot, In Seven Days, and Polaris. Adding to his many accolades, Adès was presented with the Royal Philharmonic Society's Gold Medal at the BBC Proms in Sept. 2024.
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WATCH HEREDallas Chamber Symphony is performing Adès’ Three Studies from Couperin.
“Adès very often looks to old styles for inspiration,” said Richard McKay, Dallas Chamber Symphony’s Artistic and Music Director. “What he’s doing throughout this piece is highlighting aspects of the music of Couperin.”
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SIGN UP François Couperin was a French Baroque composer, organist and harpsichordist and his compositions for harpsichord are remarkable.
“They’re wonderful. They have so much personality,” McKay said. “His pieces are so tuneful, and they are so playful with ornamentation. This piece is Adès’ way of orchestrating, colorizing a lot of the more ornamental aspects of Couperin’s music. You can think of it as refracting certain components of Couperin’s music in a more modern language and with a modern orchestration.”
Three Studies from Couperin is the first piece by Adès that McKay has conducted.
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“I find that when I look at his pieces, they’re inventive, they’re very colorful, they’re very complicated,” McKay said. “When musicians talk about performing his work, they use words like ‘crazy,’ meaning difficult to perform, there’s a lot going, there’s a lot to them. I think I agree.”
Adès divided the ensemble, creating a double string orchestra for this piece and an extra challenge for the conductor.
“Once you split your string section into two independent groups, you’ve doubled the number of cues you’ve got to give right there and you have that in addition to the winds and percussion,” McKay said.
When planning this concert, McKay first selected Saint Saëns’ Violin Concerto No. 3 with the orchestra’s Japan-based concertmaster, Kazuhiro Takagi, as the soloist. The piece is important to Takagi, a prizewinner of the Queen Elisabeth International Music Competition and the 54th Geneva International Music Competition.
“Most musicians have a piece that is near and dear to them, that they know backwards and forwards, that they have memorized and performed with many times. Perhaps it is a piece they performed when they were starting off professionally, so it is just one of those pieces with which they are very close, and they have a deep relationship. This is one such piece for our concertmaster,” McKay said.
As a conductor, McKay has revisited special works and knows intimacy that develops over time.
“The works stay the same, but you change and so when you revisit those old works, I find it’s always fun and interesting to consider things I was thinking back when I first approached that work, how that differs from what I’m thinking today. But even small memories, for example, if I learned the piece at a festival, the recollections of the festival, the smell of the air in the town where I might have been living or studying, these are all the things that come back to you when you revisit a score like that. So, it’s fun for me to think that this is a piece like that for our concertmaster,” McKay said.
The second half of the program is devoted to Georges Bizet’s Symphony in C. Bizet died at age 36 in 1875, shortly after his most famous opera, Carmen, premiered.
“His story had some sad undertones, but this piece of music is quite joyful and fun,” McKay said.
Bizet composed Symphony in C while he was a student at Conservatoire de Paris, studying with French composer Charles Gounod.
“It was not ever performed or known about during his lifetime,” McKay said. “Bizet did not himself publish it because he might have conceived of it as an exercise or a student work that he was writing with his teacher.”
The piece was discovered in the archives of Conservatoire de Paris in the 1930s and it was first performed in Basel, Switzerland in 1933, decades after the composer’s death.
With these three works, the concert gives a taste of the complicated world of French music.
“Audience members will see a variety of styles,” McKay said. “It’s just a really nice French program.”
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