Symphony's rugged energy reined in

Symphony No 3 - HarrisViolin Concerto - MendelssohnSymphony No 5 - Tchaikovsky

It's been a busy summer for American music in Ireland. July 4th brought a flurry of activity in Dublin. In Belfast, the BBC's summer invitation concerts with the Ulster Orchestra have featured the concertos of Barber and Menotti as well as Hanson's Romantic Symphony. And, following all of this, the Dallas Symphony Orchestra arrived with a programme featuring the Third Symphony (1939) of Roy Harris.

This is one of the most acclaimed symphonies that America has produced. Ten years after its premiere, the astute Virgil Thomson described it as America's most successful symphony - "earnest, clumsy, pretentious, imaginative, and terribly sincere". And, nearly a quarter of a century later, when the Philadelphia Orchestra became the first US orchestra to perform in China, Harris's Third was the American piece they chose to represent their native music to Chinese listeners.

The piece, in five contrasting sections cast as a single movement, still conveys a pioneering spirit expressed through ruggedness and primitivism. The only surprise in the Dallas orchestra's performance was a tendency of the conductor, Andrew Litton, to tame the very coarseness of feature which makes this piece so successfully what it is.

The symphony revealed the orchestra to have a string section with an ample and sonorous tone, with brass players to match, but a woodwind section that was altogether weaker, and which often sounded unduly recessed.

In spite of the doubling up of the woodwind in Tchaikovsky's Fifth Symphony after the interval, the sense of imbalance remained. Litton here gave a reading which traded on fullness of tone. The manoeuvring through tempo changes was often extreme, the focus on fullness of sonority obliterated essential contrasts of dynamic and the single-mindedness of the approach turned the tonal attractiveness of which this orchestra is capable - and which is an immediate, undeniable advantage - into a long-term liability. The delights of a spoonful of honey don't actually apply to the eating of a bathful.

The still boyish-looking Joshua Bell (30 this year) was the soloist in Mendelssohn's Violin Concerto. He acquitted himself in the mode of the typical young virtuoso in the opening movement, but then came intriguingly and appealingly to life in a meltingly soft slow movement. He followed this with a levitationally airy finale that avoided overt display and, instead, altogether more memorably teased and flickered with fascinating half-lights.