Tulsa Symphony Orchestra: Dvořák/Strauss
Tulsa Performing Arts Center
April 12, 2025
The experience of going to a TSO concert is always terrific, especially when accompanied by a fun, knowledgeable friend and a pre-show stop for drinks and fries at Vintage Wine Bar. And the first piece on last Saturday’s program—Dvořák’s Carnival Overture, Op. 92—started us off in TSO’s trademark enthusiastic style, with guest conductor Gerard Schwarz, an actual American music icon and champion of American music, full of energy and charisma, decked out in a tux with tails. (I haven’t seen tails in a while and I want you menfolk to bring them back. There’s just nothing else as dapper.)
Being unfamiliar with Howard Hanson, whose Symphony No. 2, Op. 30, “Romantic,” was the centerpiece of the program, I listened to a recording before the concert. It wasn’t painful, but it wasn’t inspiring, either. I dug further. The only Hanson I had ever heard, I discovered on my deep dive, was during the final scene of Alien in which Sigourney Weaver settles into her sleep pod and the credits roll. That’s the slow theme from the first movement of this symphony, composed in 1930. I also learned—in addition to the details Maestro Schwarz provided before the performance—that Hanson was an academic and a music administrator, that he wrote in the neo-romantic style, and that he has been largely forgotten.
Even though I went in under-enthused about his music, I hoped the excitement of a live performance would reconcile me to it. But even the TSO’s spirited rendition of Hanson’s symphony didn’t get me on board. The melodies are unmemorable; the harmonies are lush but predictable; the rhythms are standard.
The audience didn’t seem to mind, uncharacteristically breaking into a smattering of applause after the first movement. (Come on, Tulsa symphony lovers—you know not to clap between movements! Those few seconds of silence are the amuse-bouche that we need between two beefy entrees.) I turned to my friend as the lights went up for intermission, wondering if I was just cranky.
“What did you think?” I asked her.
“I looooved the Dvořák,” she said. “So invigorating. Captivating.”
“What about the Hanson?” I pushed.
She craned her neck, looking past me. “Look at that dress! Those lace sleeves are great.”
I looked. The sleeves were stunning. “Yeah. Hey—the Hanson. What did you think?”
She shrugged and leaned back in her seat. “Like movie music without a movie.”
It wasn’t just me.
The concert’s last piece, Richard Strauss’ “Suite from Der Rosenkavalier,” redeemed the evening. Maestro Schwarz arranged this rendition himself, taking sections from Strauss’ opera and stitching them seamlessly together. It’s an intense and rollicking piece, and the harmonies pulled my soul out of my body and replaced it better than the way they found it.
The Viennese waltz—first the tame version, then the raucous rendition that whirled us around the room—took me back to my student days in Vienna. At its climax, the sun broke through the storm clouds and catapulted me to a plane of existence where I believed that there was good in the world and that humans are capable of creating and sustaining beauty. That, to be honest, is what I want out of classical music.
The 1930s, when Hanson composed the symphony we heard, was a happening era. Rachmaninoff excelled in the neo-romantic genre. Gershwin’s An American in Paris was going strong and his Girl Crazy was taking over Broadway. Copland wrote his Piano Variations. Schoenberg was blowing listeners’ minds with atonality. Charles Ives was turning traditional American music inside out. Hanson’s star faded, but those others have endured the test of time. Maybe we need to let him rest.
For Saturday’s concert, I would have preferred music from a different era for the middle piece. Going back in time, a crisp Mozart piano concerto would have been terrific, or something complicated and dense like Bach’s The Art of Fugue. Or, looking forward, maybe something rhythmic and hypnotic by Steve Reich (featuring TSO’s crack percussion section), or Jennifer Higdon’s Blue Cathedral.
I love the TSO and will go to their shows for as long as there are violins to be played, tuxes to be worn, and emotions to be roused, but, as the Hanson left me cold, this concert was only two-thirds terrific.
