Dallas Chamber Symphony carves its niche as a classical cornerstone in North Texas

Sitting at his desk on a June afternoon, Dallas Chamber Symphony Music Director and Conductor Richard McKay holds up a CD and smiles. “We just released our first album,” he says. The title, Chasing Home, references Joseph Thalken’s 2017 ballet about migrants fleeing the Syrian Civil War. “It came out well…very, very challenging music, but we’re proud of it. It’s a really nice debut album.” Paired with Copland’s original Appalachian Spring Suite, both pieces were recorded at Moody Performance Hall in Dallas, the venue that DCS has called home for more than a decade.

Now approaching its twelfth season, DCS’s new album reinforces the fact that it has made a place for itself within DFW’s vast classical landscape by offering up its own distinctive concert experiences and diverse repertoire. Some may call chamber orchestras a “niche” in the genre, walking a line between large-scale symphony orchestras and small chamber music ensembles. The result is a group that is nimble enough to take on a large breadth of repertoire ranging from baroque concertos, 19^th century warhorse symphonies, and even contemporary concert pieces.

Dallas Chamber Symphony’s 2024-25 season contains music spanning more than 200 years in a series of six concerts, including newly commissioned works. “I’m excited about every program I’ve got this season,” says McKay. “I’m looking at them on my computer screen and reminding myself of everything that we’ve planned all year. I’ll be honest, they all look great to me.”

The season launches with a movie in concert Oct. 15 when McKay leads the symphony in a DCS-commissioned film score for Alfred Hitchcock’s 1927 silent thriller film, The Lodger. Don’t expect this score by Douglas Pipes to be in the sweeping cinematic style of Bernard Hermann or Dmitri Tiomkin, however. “This is a much more modern language that Douglas Pipes uses, more akin to what you’d experience in a more modern horror film,” McKay explains. “There is a lot of use of percussion… it’s modern, but it works.”

Pianist Christopher Goodpasture joins the DCS Nov. 19 to perform Franz Liszt’s fiery Malediction. In English, the title translates to The Curse, a name assigned by the composer for a piece so technically challenging, many pianists avoid it. McKay admits that it’s an intimidating work to perform but is a dazzling showpiece. The evening also includes Joaquin Turina’s rarely performed Rapsodia Sinfonica and Gustav Mahler’s orchestration of Death and the Maiden, a haunting work written by Franz Schubert while he was dying.

The orchestra rings in 2025 on Jan. 14 with Ottorino Respighi’s Trittico Botticelliano, a work McKay says has been on his “wish list” for years. Though it was written in the 20^th century, “it’s also a bit neoromantic,” McKay explains, referencing Respighi’s sparkling musical depiction of three paintings by Italian Renaissance artist Sandro Botticelli. Violinist Sarah Ying Ma joins the orchestra as soloist in Ralph Vaughan Williams’ sublime work inspired by English poet George Meredith’s The Lark Ascending, followed by a buoyant finale of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 4.

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Composer Joe Kraemer; Photo courtesy of the artist.

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Pianist Christopher Goodpasture; Photo courtesy of the artist.

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Sarah Ying Ma; Photo courtesy of the artist.

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Richard McKay conducts the Dallas Chamber Symphony. Photo courtesy of DCS.

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Dallas Chamber Symphony is putting its own Concertmaster in the spotlight for its Mar. 4 concert when Kazuhiro Takagi takes the stage as soloist in Camille Saint-Saens’ Violin Concerto No. 3. “Every concert violinist is going to tell you that they have concertos that are theirs,” McKay says. “Ones that they perhaps came to at a very early age, and that they internalized and memorized and studied in such a way that there’s a closeness they have with these for their whole careers, their whole lives…this is one such piece for him.” With a commitment to including new music each season, McKay has also programmed a 2006 work by British composer Thomas Ades, Three Studies from Couperin. “It’s probably the most avant-garde thing on our entire season, but very palatable and very creative.” They’ll return to the more traditional classical canon for the concert’s second half with Georges Bizet’s Symphony No. 1.

Another new commission debuts in Dallas Chamber Symphony’s final concert on Apr. 29 with an orchestral work by Joe Kraemer, whose name is often associated with scores for well-known feature films such as Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation and Jack Reacher. The collaboration with Kraemer began last year, when DCS commissioned him to write the score for Murnau’s 1927 silent film, Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans.

“The funny thing was, he told the audience that when he heard it premiered, this was the first time that he got to hear his music performed live in a concert hall as a composer,” McKay says, explaining that as a film composer, Kraemer had only ever heard studio recordings of his work. “So we thought, ‘well, how interesting would it be to commission this composer to write something just for stage orchestra and remove the film altogether?’ So, we’ve given him carte blanche to do whatever he would like to do. This is going to be his playground for the next year.” Pianist Adam Jackson, winner of last year’s Dallas International Piano Competition, will return to perform a piano concerto (composer and piece tba), then Schumann’s Spring Symphony No. 1 serves as an appropriate closer for the April evening.

DCS returns to Moody Performance Hall for the Dallas International Violin Competition June 17, when three finalists join the orchestra to play a solo concerto. As with their previous competitions, the winner will join the orchestra for a concerto during the following season. Through the years, the annual competition has not only brought more recognition to the Dallas Chamber Symphony, but to the city itself, offering the reminder that not every major U.S. city has a professional chamber orchestra to satisfy its community’s craving for classical music, but the lucky ones do. Dallas is one of the lucky ones.

—AMY BISHOP