In Saturday’s (9/26) Dallas Morning News, Scott Cantrell writes, “Familiar composers Joseph Haydn and Johannes Brahms, born almost exactly a century apart, were paired in the Fort Worth Symphony Orchestra’s Friday night concert. But one of the pieces was presented in a world premiere arrangement…. The novelty, conducted by music director Robert Spano at Bass Performance Hall, was pianist Dejan Lazić’s piano-concerto arrangement of Brahms’ Double Concerto for violin and cello. A Croatian native trained in clarinet and composition as well as piano at the Salzburg Mozarteum, Lazić has composed original works as well as an earlier piano-concerto version of Brahms’ Violin Concerto. What’s billed as the Brahms/ Lazić Piano Concerto ‘No. 4’ leaves the orchestral score untouched but adapts the solo parts for more or less Brahmsian pianistic effects…. I rather enjoyed it. Lazić’s arrangement supplied pianistic sonorities that effectively filled in solo parts originally for just a violin and a cello. Whether unaccompanied or integrated within orchestral textures, the piano parts sounded plausibly Brahmsian to me…. Brahms was no stranger to rearrangements. He developed his Piano Concerto No. 1 from a two-piano sonata and an intermediate symphonic version. And he produced piano arrangements of all four of his symphonies…. Lazić played his Double Concerto arrangement with panache … The performance was personable and caringly formed, and violins produced a particularly lovely silvery sheen…. I rather like the current FWSO practice of introducing concerts with well-produced videos featuring members of the orchestra.”
