Fabio Luisi returns to DSO with storytelling music - The Dallas Morning News

Fabio Luisi, the Dallas Symphony Orchestra’s music director designate, is conducting only five programs this season.

The next one, running Jan. 9-12, features quite a variety of music that tells a story, or at least paints a scene. Aaron Copland’s Quiet City imagines a nighttime with haunting English horn and trumpet solos. From DSO composer-in-residence Julia Wolfe comes a work that premiered just last April, Fountain of Youth.

“I was thinking about what keeps us young, in a positive sense, and music certainly does this,” Wolfe has said. “It’s a youthful piece — lively, rhythmic and crunchy — with some unexpected sounds to play with.”

Completing the program are Samuel Barber’s Andromache’s Farewell, dramatizing a scene from Euripides’ The Trojan Women, with soprano Lise Lindstrom, and Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherazade, imagining tales told by a sultan’s wife.