Wails, bellows, purrs, barks, hisses, laughter, gurgles, screeches, yelps, retching, squeals, gurgles, screams, grunts and groans. No words. Just clusters of prickly, spindly instrumental spattering, and the human voice reduced to animalistic expression. If John Cage had aimed his sights at prepared vocal chords instead of pianos, this is what...
SYZYGY's Ligeti Was Black Comedy
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On a Night Out With Open Classical, I Ate Cheesecake and Met Composers
These days, classical music is necessarily an acquired taste. Unless you study music, you're probably not exposed to it much. The songs that dominate the charts are manufactured like Doritos: They're small bites of sound engineered to stimulate pleasure centers but also to be bland and forgettable, so they can...
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Dallas Chamber Symphony's Bumpin' Into Broadway Was as Charming as a Kitten
The Dallas Chamber Symphony is coming to the end of its season; Tuesday they performed Bumpin' Into Broadway at the Dallas City Performance Hall, the fourth of 5 concerts that comprise this season's offerings. It was a cold and rainy evening, but the concert was a near sell-out. The performances...
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Dallas Symphony's 2015/16 Season Is a Delicious Concoction of Old and New Music
Sunday night the Dallas Symphony Orchestra revealed its recipe for the 2015/16 season, which is a delicious cocktail of grand symphonies, music written for opera, and world premieres. They've combined the drama of Wagner with Act 1 of Die Walküre with the spice Mahler's Das klagende Lied and the sugar...
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Schoenberg Took Life at the Nasher on Saturday
For better or worse, I eat this stuff up. Dark, depraved, macabre, mysterious in that delicately frightful manner, I delight in music that takes me somewhere else, especially if that somewhere is both alien and shadowy. I'm not alone. There's a particular legion of listeners--largely social outliers, closet weirdos, lifetime...
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The Best Classical Concerts in Dallas This April
For many Dallas listeners, April's been a month long anticipated: the month that brings Mozart's Requiem. You could almost be forgiven for blowing off the rest of the month, were it not for a series of unexpectedly brilliant programs peppering the calendar in Requiem's wake. Courtesy some of the smaller,...
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The DSO's Requiem Was Lopsided and Underwhelming
Here we have the sound of creativity longing for immortality, reaching for infinity and failing brilliantly--melancholy fashioned as a grand statement on the frustration of living with an expiration date. Inside, genius is showcased as elegantly brittle, the transcendent made vulnerable to the grim and the lowly; the supernatural grounded,...
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Soluna Festival Is off to an Uneven, But Promising, Start
Last April on a Friday morning in the middle of the Dallas Art Fair, the Dallas Symphony Orchestra lured a number of journalists, artists and visiting gallerists into the Meyerson with the promise of coffee, pastries and an exciting announcement. A woman known only in social circles introduced herself to...
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St. Vincent Blessed Dallas with a Rock Symphony Sunday Night
If hometown performer Annie Clark has proven anything to Dallas in her flight to fame, it's that she's a veritable rock god. Sunday night in performance with the Dallas Symphony Orchestra, she proved without misstep that she doesn't just shred with the best of 'em, she also writes music that...
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Nasher's Soundings Consistently Breaks Down the Wall Between Art and Music
It seems that for most classical music institutions the answer to the audience problem is to pander. To program music that's familiar, safe. "Give them more Beethoven," could very well be the marketing strategy. And it might work for a time. Then, if things go well the friendly music would...
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SOLUNA'S and Nasher Soundings' Pierrot Lunaire Did Not Disappoint
What's music apart from the production and organization of sound? Truthfully, not much. More or less, that's it. That's music's skeleton. Allow some space to take into account certain conceptual nuances here and there and you have its flesh, too. Of course, there's a lot of wiggle room left in...
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From Weekly Open Mic to Citywide Phenomenon, Open Classical Keeps It Casual
At SMU’s Meadows Museum last week, classical music lovers gathered for the first annual gala for Open Classical, an organization that’s been putting on inventive and inexpensive classical music events around Dallas since 2011. The gala showcased a sampling of their events, and some aspects of the evening —...
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Classical Music Is Centerstage at Weekly Basically Beethoven Festival Performances
It was an excellent day to be at the Dallas City Performance Hall in Dallas Arts district spending a hot Sunday afternoon listening to live classical string music. The auditorium was all but full for a performance of the Basically Beethoven Festival, a free admission series presented by the Fine Arts...
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The Best Classical Concerts in Dallas this September
Summer's fading, and fall's creeping around the corner. Which means the classical season is underway––almost. While in many ways the season proper won't hit its stride until October, there's plenty of performances to make this a month to look forward to. What follows are the events we're most excited about...
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The Music Hall Exits the Building with Yellow Barn's Music Haul
In The Shawshank Redemption, Tim Robbins plays Mozart over the prison’s public address system and locks himself in the control room. All the prisoners stop what they are doing and listen. They were shocked that it was actually happening, but inspired. And they understood the music. When Seth Knopp brought...
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Texas Ballet Theater Brings a Christmas Dream to Life With The Nutcracker
Ben Stevenson’s The Nutcracker is a stunning production with choreography exquisite enough to bring a Christmas dream to life and accentuate Tchaikovsky’s melodies. With athleticism and grace set to music, a story is magnificently told without words. Every performance makes use of 200 exotic costumes and there are three different...
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Jaap van Zweden's First Step Out the Door Features a DSO Rarity: New Music
Dallas music lovers learned on Wednesday that the Dallas Symphony’s music director Jaap van Zweden has accepted the post of music director of the New York Philharmonic, to complete the transition to his new job at the beginning of the 2018-19 season. Thus, what was to have been a fairly...
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New York Isn’t Thrilled to Welcome the Dallas Symphony’s Conductor
The New York City cultural world has heard the news that Dallas Symphony Orchestra maestro Jaap van Zweden will be taking over the New York Philharmonic, and its reaction is a resounding “meh.” Many critics are underwhelmed by van Zweden’s modest international stature, but there is also more than a...
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Shostakovich's Politically Charged Symphony No. 7 Comes to Life at Canellakis' Baton
An orchestral program of Mozart’s darkest piano concerto and Shostakovich’s most complex symphony would challenge a conductor under any circumstances. Thursday night at Myerson Symphony Center, the Dallas Symphony’s assistant conductor Karina Canellakis stepped in for music director Jaap van Zweden (who was called away on a family emergency) with...
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Buster Keaton Came to Life Thanks to Composer Jon Kull, Dallas Chamber Symphony
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