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Soprano Janice Chandler-Eteme and reader Quincy Roberts join guest conductor Peter Oundjian and the Dallas Symphony Orchestra in the Dallas premiere of Adolphus Hailstork's 'JFK: The Last Speech ' at the Meyerson Symphony Center on Oct. 6, 2023.Surely every concertgoer has had the experience: sitting in the hall, wondering if our biorhythms are off, or we’re too tired to be receptive — or if the concert just isn’t quite what it might have been.
Advancing the 60th anniversary of President John F. Kennedy’s assassination in Dallas, the program included a DSO co-commission premiered this past summer by the Colorado Symphony. By the veteran American composer Adolphus Hailstork,incorporates excerpts from Kennedy’s last major speech, at Amherst College, a month before his death. It also quotes lines from poet Robert Frost, whose Amherst faculty tenure Kennedy honored in his talk.
How we need to hear these words today: about privilege and responsibility, about power and necessary challenges, about the arts as conscience. Twenty-eight minutes long, Hailstork’s score is appropriately populist in tone, nicely scored, with occasional suggestions of Copland and folk songs. But it could lose its orchestral epilogue after Frost’s “miles to go before I sleep.”
The performance seemed competent, although Chandler-Eteme’s diction could have been more consistently clear. At the end, spotlit in a rear balcony, Hailstork shared in the applause. Whether such aAfter Rachmaninoff’s Second Symphony, one of the greatest of the 20th century, his Third has always seemed an also-ran. One recognizes the composer’s voice, but the music shifts restlessly from one idea, one texture, to another, and the themes aren’t from the top drawer.
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