IMAGES: The 2015 Immanuel and Helen Olshan Texas Music Festival Grand Celebratory Opening.
Photos by Jeff Grass Photography.
While the level of playing at the festival has always been very high under the direction of general and artistic director Alan Austin, the organization has achieved an unprecedented artistic height in this year’s season opening concert on June 6. The celebratory event began with an appropriate fanfare, Short Ride in a Fast Machine, by American minimalist master John Adams, commissioned by Michael Tilson Thomas and premiered by the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra in 1986. It’s for good reason that the piece has become one of the most frequently performed orchestral works written in the last thirty years; it’s fast, loud, short and ablaze with frenetic energy. It’s also marked by rhythmic precision from start to finish, which the TMF Orchestra, under the direction of Franz Anton Krager, delivered in abundance.
One of the most notable features of Ein Heldenleben is its extended violin solos depicting “The Hero’s Companion.” Violinist Ingrid Hunter, a DMA candidate at the Moores School of Music, played them with elegance and panache. They were the perfect compliment to an otherwise stunning evening.
—CHRIS JOHNSON