Fabio Luisi Continues Inaugural Season as Music Director Designate of Dallas Symphony with Programs Featuring Salome and The Book with Seven Seals

Fabio Luisi returns to the podium of the Dallas Symphony Orchestra in January to conduct two new programs as part of the orchestra’s 2019-20 Texas Instruments Classical Series season: one featuring the the Dallas premiere of Fountain of Youth by Pulitzer Prize-winner and DSO Composer-in-Residence Julia Wolfe, and the other a concert performance of Richard Strauss’s Salome, starring Lithuanian soprano Ausrine Stundyte. Then, in April, Luisi returns for the Dallas premiere of Franz Schmidt’s The Book with Seven Seals (“Das Buch mit sieben Siegeln”), at the DSO’s Nancy A. Nasher and David J. Haemisegger Family SOLUNA International Music & Arts Festival, and accounts of Brahms’s Second Symphony that will be recorded for future release on the orchestra’s own DSO Live label. Luisi begins his tenure as the orchestra’s next Music Director in the fall of 2020.

Luisi – currently in his eighth season as General Music Director of the Zurich Opera, and former Principal Conductor of New York’s Metropolitan Opera from 2011-17 – is widely acknowledged as one of the world’s most distinguished opera conductors. Also an “outstanding” (Gramophone) interpreter of the music of Richard Strauss, his Salome performances are highly anticipated (Jan 31-Feb 2). The cast is led by Lithuanian soprano Ausrine Stundyte, who made her debut as Salome at the Berlin State Opera in 2018 and immediately became a sensation in the role. A full cast list can be found below.

Luisi’s performances with the orchestra of Franz Schmidt’s oratorio The Book with Seven Seals (“Das Buch mit sieben Siegeln”)(April 3-5) promise to be one of the highlights at the DSO’s SOLUNA International Music & Arts Festival (April 3-21). The music of Franz Schmidt (1874–1939) is rarely played outside of his native Austria, but Luisi has been a passionate advocate for it, recording not only The Book with Seven Seals but all four of the composer’s symphonies. The subject of the oratorio, often described as the composer’s magnum opus, is no less than the the biblical Book of Revelation. Describing the work in an article for London’s Guardian back in August 2000, writer Andrew Clements observed, “Franz Schmidt thought his oratorio The Book with Seven Seals his finest achievement, and it is a masterpiece by any standards … It was premiered in Vienna in 1938, just two months after the Anschluss. Within a year Schmidt was dead, and so did not live to see Europe overtaken by the apocalypse that this setting of the Book of Revelation foreshadows, and the destruction of the tradition that his music embodied.” The complete lineup for this year’s SOLUNA Festival will be announced on January 27.

Luisi and the DSO opened their 2019-20 season in September with a lush and sweepingly cinematic performance of Strauss’s Alpine Symphony, which can be heard at the orchestra’s website. That concert also featured Beethoven’s “Emperor” Concerto, with Cliburn prizewinner Beatrice Rana as piano soloist, and the Dallas premiere of Augusta Read Thomas’s Aureole, a highlight of the DSO’s “Women in Classical Music” initiative. Complete details for the Dallas Symphony Orchestra’s 2020/21 season will be announced on March 6, 2020.

High-resolution photos can be downloaded here.

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Dallas Symphony Orchestra and Music Director Designate Fabio Luisi:
Winter/Spring 2019-20 engagements

Jan 9–12
Dallas, TX
Morton H. Meyerson Symphony Center
COPLAND: Quiet City
JULIA WOLFE: Fountain of Youth (Dallas premiere)
BARBER: Andromache’s Farewell (with Lise Lindstrom, soprano)
RIMSKY-KORSAKOV: Scheherazade

Jan 31–Feb 2
Dallas, TX
Morton H. Meyerson Symphony Center
R. STRAUSS: Salome (opera-in-concert, sung in German with English surtitles)
   Salome: Ausrine Stundyte, soprano
Jochanaan: Mark Delavan, baritone
Herodias: Elizabeth Bishop, mezzo-soprano
Herod: Herwig Pecoraro, tenor
Narraboth: Richard Trey Smagur, tenor
Page of Herodias: Deniz Uzun, mezzo-soprano

April 3–5
Dallas, TX
Morton H. Meyerson Symphony Center
Nancy A. Nasher and David J. Haemisegger Family SOLUNA International Music & Arts Festival
SCHMIDT: The Book with Seven Seals (Dallas premiere; sung in German with English surtitles)
St. John the Divine: Herbert Lippert, tenor
The Voice of the Lord: Mika Kares, bass
Organ: Michael Schönheit
Dallas Symphony Chorus / Joshua Habermann, director

April 9–11
Dallas, TX
Morton H. Meyerson Symphony Center
ELGAR: Violin Concerto (with James Ehnes, violin)
BRAHMS: Symphony No. 2 

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© 21C Media Group, January 2020