The management of most American orchestras can only dream of a front-page story in the local daily newspaper on the opening day of the classical subscription season—but the Fort Worth Symphony got just that, Friday morning, when the Star-Telegram examined a recent social media brouhaha involving the orchestra’s on-going practice of performing the national anthem (complete with audience sing-along) at every concert. In response to objections raised from an aesthetic viewpoint, orchestra CEO Amy Adkins solicited public opinion and got—no surprise here for anyone who knows anything about Fort Worth—an overwhelming vote in favor of the tradition, which dates back to World War II but which was renewed at the time of the attacks of September 2001.
From where this listener sits (or stands, when the anthem begins), the playing of the anthem actually doesn’t intrude on the aesthetic balance of a concert any more than reading a lighthearted bit of prose or watching a television show interferes with one’s ability to pick up a novel of Tolstoy. The objection in the original social media post that the anthem was out of place in a concert of works of Beethoven, Haydn, and Mozart rather oddly overlooked the fact the patriotic song is exactly contemporaneous with those three composers. Although hearing the national anthem every week doesn’t really contribute to national security or even patriotism (and it’s not a particularly strong piece of music or poetry), if the folks in Fort Worth (who, by the way, have a remarkably strong sense of pride for and identification with the orchestra and other cultural institutions) want their symphony to play the “Star-Spangled Banner” at every concert, it’s certainly within the reasonable function of the orchestra to provide their always excellent rendition. Mahler, Brahms, and Stravinsky are just as good with or without the national anthem preceding.
With that bit of cultural controversy out of the way, the orchestra and music director Miguel Harth-Bedoya launched into the sort of intriguingly fashioned program audiences in Fort Worth have come to expect, ranging across three centuries and including an ambitious work entirely new to the audience.
That work was the “American Symphony” of 34-year-old, California-based Adam Schoenberg, not to be confused, and, for that matter, not at all likely to be confused, once you hear his music, with Arnold Schoenberg, the titan of twentieth-century dissonance. Premiered in Kansas City in 2011, the “American Symphony” is seamlessly structured and unfailingly lyrical. Adam Schoenberg owns a clear command of orchestral resources and large-scale architecture, evoking the large-scale American symphonies of the middle twentieth century (most notably Aaron Copland’s majestic Symphony No. 3), he has produced a work that’s often moving and always captivating. The fourth movement, titled “prayer,” is a particularly attractive musical meditation with wonderful, song-like solos for clarinet and oboe, her magnificently performed by principals Ana Victoria Luperi and Jennifer Corning Lucio. Adam Schoenberg was present in the audience to receive the most enthusiastic ovation I can recall for a living composer at a Fort Worth Symphony concert.
The concert continued with Mozart’s Concerto in E-flat for two pianos (K. 365), with the longstanding duo of Canadian pianists Louis Lortie and Hèléne Mercier delivering a solid rendition, particularly striking in the surprising twists Mozart introduces in the serenely melodic second movement and the ebulliently joyous finale.
Rachmaninoff’s Symphonic Dances, a high point of that composer’s later years and of twentieth-century romanticism, closed the concert grandly after intermission.
