Season announcement

Dallas Symphony rings in 2023-24 season with world premieres and epic musical events

Fabio Luisi, Dallas Symphony Orchestra music director

Fabio Luisi and the DSO will take on Wagner's "Ring Cycle" in 2024.

Photo by Barbara Luisi Photography

Time flies when you're having fun on the podium. The 2023-24 concert season will mark Fabio Luisi's fourth as music director of the Dallas Symphony Orchestra. Together, he and the orchestra have stacked the new season with five world premieres, 11 DSO first-timers, movies-in-concert, jazz and blues, holiday hits, and - oh yes - the teeny tiny commitment of a Wagner Ring Cycle.

“We are thrilled to share this upcoming season of programming with our subscribers and patrons,” says DSO president & CEO Kim Noltemy in a release. “These programs represent a stunning range of genres and combine beloved favorites, unique repertoire and bold new voices. We know that there is something for everyone, and we look forward to welcoming you to the Morton H. Meyerson Symphony Center.”

According to the release, the Texas Instruments Classical Series will see the return of some of the top artists working today, including Emanuel Ax, Eric Owens, Rudolf Buchbinder, Matthias Goerne, Karen Slack, Jan Lisiecki, Kelley O’Connor and Maxim Vengerov.

Other soloists will make their big DSO debuts, including Jeremy Denk (piano), Maximilian Hornung (cello), Alexi Kenney (violin), Isabel Leonard (soprano), Anthony McGill (clarinet), Golda Schultz (soprano), Inbal Segev (cello) and Tine Thing Helseth (trumpet).

Concerts to bookmark on the calendar include:

Saint-Saëns’s “Organ” Symphony, which will be performed with resident organist Bradley Hunter Welch and recorded on February 22-25, 2024.
For the Dallas Symphony Orchestra Gala on September 30, 2023, Luisi and the DSO will welcome guests Emanuel Ax, piano; Isabel Leonard, mezzo-soprano and the Dallas Symphony Children’s Chorus for an evening of Carmen, Chopin, and Ravel’s La Valse.
The DSO (along with solo singers, chorus, organ) will perform Franz Schmidt’s monumental oratorio The Book with Seven Seals on March 1-3, 2024.
The DSO will perform works by two Ukrainian women composers, Anna Korsun and Victoria Vita Polevá, under the direction of Ukrainian conductor Kirill Karabits, November 9-12, 2023.
Adolphus Hailstork’s JFK: The Last Speech is a DSO co-commission making its Dallas debut October 6-8, 2023, one month before the 60^th anniversary of the death of John F. Kennedy. The work features text from Kennedy’s speech at Amherst College in October 1963, which praises American poet Robert Frost, who had just passed away.

Ring Cycle
Luisi and the DSO will present an opera-in-concert version of Richard Wagner’s complete Der Ring des Nibelungen with internationally renowned singers. It will begin on May 1, 2024 with Das Rheingold and Die Walküre premiering on consecutive nights. The cycle will continue in the fall; Luisi and the DSO will perform Siegfried on October 5, 2024, and Götterdämmerung on October 8, 2024, followed by a week-long presentation of the full Ring cycle beginning on October 13, 2024.

“The Ring Cycle is one of the deepest and most complex musical works that has ever been written. It is all of humanity brought to the stage – family, love, sex, loss, consequences and the quest for power,” Luisi says. “Across the entirety of the story, with beautiful music and beautiful text guiding you, you are transformed at the end.”

Pops series
There will be nine pops concerts, three of which will be conducted by principal pops conductor Jeff Tyzik.

Pianist, vocalist and composer Ben Folds will make his long-awaited return with the DSO after canceling performances in fall 2021 due to the rate of COVID-19 infections in the city. He'll have a two-night stand, October 20 and 21, 2023.

Grammy Award-winning singer Lila Downs and singer-songwriter Amos Lee both will make their debuts with DSO, on September 15-16, 2023 and March 22, 2024, respectively.

Movie fans will be intrigued by award-winning film composer Danny Elfman joining the DSO on the stage for Danny Elfman’s Music from the Films of Tim Burton; and three films screened in the Meyerson with scores performed live by the DSO: Amadeus, Harry Potter & The Prisoner of Azkaban, and The Polar Express.

For more information on the new season, subscriptions, and tickets, visit the DSO website.

DSO concerts symphony

A good listen

Dallas Symphony and Fabio Luisi release landmark Wagner 'Ring Cycle' set

Fabio Luisi conducting the Dallas Symphony Orchestra

Photo courtesy of Dallas Symphony Orchestra

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Fabio Luisi wanted his Ring Cycle to be heard and not seen.

Wagner’s four-opera epic Der Ring des Nibelungen, approaching the 150th anniversary of its premiere in 1876, has been reinterpreted and deconstructed by directors finding various meanings in the conflicts among gods, humans, giants and dwarfs.

While most new recordings are on video, Luisi led his Dallas Symphony Orchestra in concert performances that were released on 13 compact discs by Delos on May 22 and are available on streaming services.

“Wagner conceived this as a total immersion in visual and acoustic, but I could focus really only on the music, and this was the point actually — not to be distracted by staging and not to have to cope with maybe strange ideas of staging,” Luisi said. “I think the music tells everything.”

Luisi became DSO music director in 2020 and broached the idea while dining two years later with (the now late) Morton H. Meyerson, a longtime board member.

“Fabio came back from lunch sort of giddy but sort of sheepishly saying: `Do you think that this would ever be possible?” recalled Kim Noltemy, the Dallas CEO at the time. “So, I said, well, let’s give it a try. So, we called around to see if there were people who wanted to support it and did a budget.”

After securing a waiver from the orchestra allowing for the needed rehearsals and performance length, recordings were made during four concerts from May 1-5 and six more from Oct. 5-20. Each opera was performed two or three times.

Americans in cast fill big roles
American singers featured prominently, with Mark Delavan as Wotan, Lise Lindstrom as Brünnhilde and Sara Jakubiak as Sieglinde, part of a cast that included Christopher Ventris (Siegmund), Daniel Johansson (Siegfried), Deniz Uzun (Fricka), Tómas Tómasson (Alberich), Michael Laurenz (Mime) and Stephen Milling (Hagen).

Delavan sang Wotan at New York’s Metropolitan Opera in 2013 after Luisi took over from an ailing James Levine in Robert Lepage’s much-maligned production staged on a 45-ton set of 24 rotating planks.

“We’re accessible and they know that we’re hungry and we have a chip on our shoulders,” Delavan said. “What conductors like about American singers is their technique is sound. Even a European conductor would say: Well, I’m going to give up some of the communication skills, only one degree of separation with the language, but I’m going to get a solid technique, and I’m going to get pretty good acting chops.”

Lindstrom has been in Atlanta to sing in its production of “Götterdämmerung,” the concluding night of the tetralogy, leading to what is being billed as the first complete Ring Cycles in the America South in 2029.

“The wonderful thing about it is the intimacy between the orchestra and us, because we’re not separated by a chunk of stage or a chunk a scenery or a chunk of concept,” she said of the Dallas performances. “And for people like me, who have had the opportunity to perform the role before, I have all those iterations to rely on for my portrayal that I can sort of filter myself through.”

A younger Luisi listened to famous renditions
Luisi, 67, first heard a Ring recording in Georg Solti’s famous studio set with the Vienna Philharmonic from 1958-65. He also admires Karl Böhm’s live recording from the 1967 Bayreuth Festival and Marek Janowski’s 1980-83 studio version with the Staatskapelle Dresden.

He first conducted Ring when he was music director of Dresden’s Semperoper from 2007-10. Luisi’s Dallas performances include more legato and softer sound than his rendition a decade earlier at the Met. He tries to keep an arc from the first notes of “Das Rheingold” to the final strains of “Götterdämmerung.”

“I have a deeper understanding about the meaning of this piece,” he said. “I consider the ring to be a big Bruckner symphony. So we have the introduction, then we have the first movement, this is “Walküre,” which happens to be a slow movement, and then we have the scherzo, which is “Siegfried,” of course, and then the long, long, last movement. There is a unity.”

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