Joaquin Achucarro

  

Fort Worth Symphony with Joaquín Achúcarro, piano

Presented by Fort Worth Symphony Orchestra

February 6 - 7

at Bass Performance Hall
330 E. Fourth Street
Fort Worth, TX 76102
817-665-6000

$10-$78

8pm Saturday; 2pm Sunday

After decades of regular attendance at weekend evening concerts of the Fort Worth Symphony, followed by an absence of five years, I found myself once again listening to Cowtown’s orchestra on Friday night at Bass Hall—and feeling a bit like Rip Van Winkle. I’ll admit I’ve put on a pound or two in my absence, and gone from one pair of glasses to two.

And I guess I should have realized that even matinee idols grow old. Still, I could hardly help reflecting on time’s relentless onslaught when I saw music director Miguel Harth-Bedoya, who, when I last saw him conduct, looked as if he had probably rolled in on his skateboard—has gone from zero to one pair of glasses while conducting.

At any rate, given the specs, and the boxy black tux-coat and four-in-hand tie now worn by Harth-Bedoya and the men of the orchestra on Friday nights, he looks more like someone who would turn you down for a mortgage loan, or maybe get out a tape measure and tiny piece of chalk, and ask if you want your pants hemmed with or without cuffs, than someone who would be back on his skateboard as soon as the Mozart or Mahler was out of the way for the evening.

Fortunately, although he has gained a pair of glasses, Harth-Bedoya has lost none of the youthful exuberance this listener remembered; if anything, he’s added layers of maturity to the evident enthusiasm and insight he already possessed. Confidently giving free rein to the brass in the opening sections of Schumann’s Fourth Symphony ("Rhenish"), he was able to boldly point out the layers of counterpoint and endlessly imaginative orchestration Schumann brought to this work. And the orchestra responded with equal boldness in a symphony that, composed in 1850, ushered in the high romanticism that Brahms, Tchaikovsky, and Dvorák would bring to the symphony as a genre in the ensuing decades.

The opening work on the concert, Chopin’s Piano Concerto No. 1, was not so successful. Although the concerto features glimmers of its 19-year-old composer’s still-developing genius for melody and passionate gesture, it lapses all too frequently into glossy, unimaginative passagework, and the listener can at times be painfully aware of a young composer trying to squeeze new ideas into old forms. Spanish-born Joaquín Achúcarro, who currently teaches at Southern Methodist University, substituted as soloist for the ailing Horacio Gutiérrez; Achúcarro brought some valuable insight to the work—for instance, in the beautifully whispered recapitulation of the lyrical second theme of the first movement—and consistently applied his famously radiant tone. But neither he nor Harth-Bedoya could find any meaningful momentum in the work, resulting in a performance that was often listless and perfunctory.

►Wayne Lee Gay has covered classical music and dance in the north Texas region for three decades, and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism in 1990. He currently lives in Denton and teaches in the English Department at the University of North Texas.