hope they don't kill me for this...

DSO going back to Carnegie Hall

06:21 PM CST on Saturday, April 2, 2005

By SCOTT CANTRELL / The Dallas Morning News

The Dallas Symphony Orchestra returns to New York's Carnegie Hall this week with a blockbuster program. Friday's concert includes Richard Strauss' tone poem Also sprach Zarathustra, made famous by the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey, and Carl Orff's Carmina Burana .

Music director Andrew Litton will conduct the concert. The Dallas Symphony Chorus and the Children's Chorus of Greater Dallas will join in the Orff, along with soprano Heidi Grant Murphy, tenor Andrew Skoog and baritone Richard Zeller.

The orchestra also will perform a family concert Saturday. Mr. Litton will conduct that as well. The program includes orchestral chestnuts by Sibelius, Smetana, Dvorák, Elgar and Tchaikovsky (the 1812 Overture), and orchestral excerpts from operas by Verdi, Wagner and Borodin. It's designed for families with children 5 to 12 years old.

This will be the DSO's seventh trip to Carnegie, and its first since 2001.
"Carnegie is still one of the really important halls for music anywhere in the world," says Fred Bronstein, president of the Dallas Symphony Association. "In this country it's probably the most important. All important orchestras play there, and appropriately the Dallas Symphony should be there also."

The programs, products of much back-and-forth between the DSO and Carnegie Hall officials, are veritable orchestral hit parades. They won't raise the DSO's prestige in New York's snootier circles, but they should be crowd-pleasers.
"We went through many, many drafts of various programs," Dr. Bronstein says. "This is where we landed after much discussion. It says something about the need for Carnegie Hall, like a lot of places, to promote and put forward programs they can market and sell effectively.
"And the orchestra will do these pieces very well. They are terrific pieces, in different ways. This also gives us a chance to show off the chorus, which is a great asset to the organization."
Dr. Bronstein says he's happy the orchestra is also doing the family concert.

"Having your music director do that program is terrific. ... It's a really important part of our mission, not just something that gets shunted to the side."

E-mail scantrell@dallasnews.com

Dallas Symphony at Carnegie Hall

Friday at 8 p.m., $25 to $87; Saturday at 2 p.m., $8. Carnegie Hall, Isaac Stern Auditorium, 881 Seventh Ave. at 57th Street. 212-247-7800 or http://www.carnegiehall.org/.