‘Symphonic Stories: Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland’ @ Fort Worth Symphony
Photos courtesy of Fort Worth Symphony and Bruce Wood Dance
—Wayne Lee Gay
Modern dance, richly scored twenty-first-century symphonic music, and Lewis Carroll's classic fantasy Alice in Wonderland meet this weekend for a captivating production at Bass Performance Hall.
Under music director Robert Spano, the Fort Worth Symphony Orchestra has regularly presented, in recent years, performances featuring operatic and and ballet performances presented on an extended stage in front of the orchestra—including, for instance, Stravinsky's Petrouchka and Wagner's Flying Dutchman. This weekend's project pushes the envelope a little further, with new modern dance choreography set to excerpts from a full-length ballet score composed in 2011 by British composer Joby Talbot for the Royal Ballet in London.
Composer Talbot is familiar to north Texas opera-goers for his operas Everest and The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, produced by The Dallas Opera in 2015 and 2023, respectively. The full-length ballet score for Alice's Adventures in Wonderland condenses quite convincingly into a suite of nine short movements that could, indeed, stand independently on a concert program without choeography.
Talbot is by no means a "national" composer. But the subject matter, drawn from classic British literature—as well as Talbot's magnificent gifts for lyrical melody and expert orchestration, his command of structure, and his ability to create thrilling musical moments—tempts this listener to view him as a worthy heir to the grand British symphonic tradition of Elgar, Vaughan Williams, and Britten.
The visually enchanting choreography by Bruce Wood Dance company director Joy Bollinger features, in the tradition of the company's founding namesake, constant geometric manipulation, algebraic interaction within the highly athletic thirteen-member ensemble, and a constant shift from whimsy to darkness. Particularly striking moments include a dark pas-de-trois in the second movement and a darkly comical tango (also for three) in the courtroom scene. Christa Billings' subtle projections enhance but never distract.
Unfailingly striking costumes by designer Tommy Bourgeois focus on sharp black-and-white broken by brilliant splashes of red, while Alice herself is portrayed in the traditional light-blue Victorian little-girl pinafore. In this version, the Red Queen, (frequently seen as a dour, rotund matron), is a lean, sexy vixen. A pair of hilarious flamingos-cum-croquet-mallets defy description, and a giant Cheshire cat (skillfully maneuvered by two completely concealed dancers) appears at a climactic moment. In the end, the enchantment and folly all come together for a surprisingly moving final moment, worthy of the literary masterpiece that inspired this wonderful mixture of genres.
The evening opens, interestingly, with a standard masterpiece of musical classicism, Mozart's Symphony No. 38 in D ("Prague"). As is his custom—and in defiance of common contemporary practice with Mozart—conductor Spano opts for a full string section rather than the usual reduced ensemble. The effect is a bit romantic for Mozart but in this instance totally effective, thanks to beautifully concise playing in the string sections, producing clean lines and appealing broad contrasts of volume.
WHEN: September 19-21, 2025
WHERE: Bass Performance Hall, Fort Worth
WEB: fwsymphony.org
