Portrait of Felix Mendelssohn by Wilhelm Hensel. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

The Dallas Symphony Orchestra, for which I am the longtime annotator, is putting my program notes online again, on their elegant and well-appointed website, which means I no longer need to download pdfs (although I might end up doing this eventually, if the links wind up as broken as the ones on some of my other pages, a deficiency of which I am regrettably aware and that I have resolved to correct eventually). But in the meantime, yay! Even though I have a backlog of program notes (hundreds of batches by now, I’m thinking), I prefer talking about concerts before they happen, if at all possible, because that means a few more people who might not have known about the concert otherwise will benefit from the advance notice and buy tickets for what promises to be a transcendent experience.

I wrote about Mendelssohn’s Lobgesang Symphony, sometimes referred to as his Symphony No. 2, for the upcoming performance on March 2-5, at the glorious and acoustically superb Meyerson. Conducted by Paul McCreesh, it should be a fantastic concert: also on the program is Charles Hubert Hastings Parry’s Blest Pair of Sirens, a setting of a Milton poem. Along with the DSO and the DSO Chorus, the roster includes sopranos Susanna Phillips and Sari Gruber and tenor Nicholas Phan.

You can read my program notes here (just scan down a bit, and be sure to click on the little plus-sign icon on the right to read the full essay for each composer/work). I do retain the copyright, so if you have any interest in reprinting them, please email me at rene.saller@att.net