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Cellist Zlatomir Fung performs with the Fort Worth Symphony Orchestra and guest\u00a0conductor Peter Oundjian at Bass Performance Hall on May 8, 2026.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Karen Almond\/Fort Worth Symphony<\/p>\n
FORT WORTH \u2014 With the Fort Worth Symphony Orchestra<\/a> playing on a very high level lately, Friday night\u2019s concert, at Bass Performance Hall, looked particularly appealing. It included two late 19th-century classics \u2014 the\u00a0Dvo\u0159\u00e1k\u00a0Cello Concerto and Brahms\u2019 Second Symphony \u2014 and a new \u201csuite\u201d from American composer Joan Tower\u2019s 1991 Concerto for Orchestra.<\/p>\n Past impressions of guest conductor Peter Oundjian have been positive. Soloist in the\u00a0Dvo\u0159\u00e1k was a winner of the prestigious International Tchaikovsky Competition, the young American\u00a0Zlatomir Fung.<\/p>\n Article continues below this ad<\/p>\n Tower\u2019s 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\u2019s 12-minute stream-of-consciousness m\u00e9lange of Tower\u2019s motivic gestures and often busy orchestral colors and textures.<\/p>\n 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.”<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n Make Dallas News a preferred source so your search results prioritize writing by actual people, not AI.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Add Preferred Source<\/p>\n <\/a><\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n Article continues below this ad<\/p>\n The Dvo\u0159\u00e1k\u00a0got 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\u00a0of the same piece<\/a>.<\/p>\n It didn\u2019t help that\u00a0Oundjian sometimes allowed the orchestra to overpower the cello\u2019s relatively understated tone. When the orchestra was on its own, he kept whipping up fortissimos out of proportion to the music at hand.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n Early in the first movement, though, he slammed on the brakes for leaping octaves that Brahms marks only \u2014 in parentheses \u2014 \u201csort of held back.\u201d 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.<\/p>\n Article continues below this ad<\/p>\n By signing up, you agree to our Terms Of Use<\/a> and acknowledge that your information will be used as described in our Privacy Policy<\/a>.<\/p>\n Brahms is a subtler composer than this, and his music is from an age far less noisy than ours. There\u2019s intense emotion in his music, but it\u2019s firmly controlled. Its performance wants a certain reserve, a careful control of volumes and balances too rarely demonstrated in performances these days.<\/p>\n Details<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
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