DSO season starts and my comments, including good riddance to Litton

The Dallas Symphony Orchestra began its 2005-06 season tonight. After a decade, it is Music Director Andrew Litton’s last with the orchestra. Due to his penchant for butchery such as the way he conducted the Shostakovich Fifth, I say good riddance.

Here is what I e-mailed Dallas Morning News classical critic Scott Cantrell:

I'm talking about the Shostakovich.

Tempos and interpretation all off, above all in the second half of the finale.

The first movement itself was too deliberatively slow, sounding too Mahlerian to me. The second movement at first I was prepared to categorize the same way, but then said, no, it's too deliberately slow in a way that sounds like some neoclassical music. I found myself thinking of a large-orchestra Pulcinella.

The third movement not bad.

The finale? First, the opening bars were way too slow, not just deliberative. After that, the first third of the finale, the initial development of the main theme, was just about right, but given the deliberate tempo of the first two movements and the too-slow intro to the finale, sounded rushed.

Of course, this was nothing compared to the horridly slow tempo for the reintroduction of the main theme.

Yes, a bit slower tempo is called for. But nothing like that.

I found myself thinking that Stalin had in fact killed Shostakovich and somebody had finished out the movement as a dedicatory funeral march.

And, as you have noted in the past, bombast from the brass by itself does not cut a triumphal attitude.

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On the plus side, Yefin Bronfman was very good in the opener (Tchaikovsky's Piano Concerto). (I'm not a huge Tchaikovsky fan, not much more of him in apex late Romanticism than I am of Mozart in apex late Classicism. But Bronfman was very good. Clean pedaling, as well as good playing. And Andrew managed not to over-romanticize the orchestra.)

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Update, an hour later:
Scott e-mailed me back, and said he actually liked the Shostakovich. I should say that I found much in the playing, the music-making, to like, as did he. But we'll have to agree to disagree on Litton's interpretation, I guess.