Scott Cantrell

FORT WORTH – American composer John Corigliano, who turned 70 last month, has gotten good mileage out of music he composed for the 1997 film The Red Violin. A Chaconne derived from the movie score became a stand-alone violin-and-orchestra piece; an expanded Suite has been programmed March 27 through 29 by the Dallas Symphony Orchestra. This weekend, the Fort Worth Symphony is presenting the Chaconne along with three other movements that Mr. Corigliano turned into a full-fledged, 35-minute Violin Concerto.

The Chaconne casts quite a spell, working variations on an upward-expanding theme. One moment, music sparkles and tinkles around it; the next, the theme growls up from bassoons and trombones. The solo violin wreathes arabesques and soars above the theme, eventually blared out by loud brasses.

A "Pianissimo Scherzo" flutters, buzzes and shimmers. In the "Andante Flautando," strings lay down plush but unstable chords beneath the soloist's sweet soarings on high. Later, brasses proclaim a tart Stravinskian chorale. The finale is a danse macabre, with rude grunts from strings and later a ghostly echo of the Chaconne theme from the trombones.

The piece is a virtuoso workout for the soloist, but it met its match in Alexander Kerr, a former concertmaster of Amsterdam's Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra (where one of his predecessors was Jaap van Zweden, now the DSO's music director-designate). Dazzling runs and double stops, honeyed lyricism – everything was impeccably dispatched, and with personality, too. Led by music director Miguel Harth-Bedoya, the FWSO put on a no less virtuosic show.

Mendelssohn's Italian Symphony was a showpiece for the lustrous Fort Worth violins. (We're counting on Mr. van Zweden to get the DSO violins consistently on this level.) But it was also good to hear the winds evincing more personality than usual, as well as mastering the score's rapid-fire flutters.

One could imagine more rise-and-fall of lines here and there, but tempos were lively and well judged. What wasn't convincing was a tendency to rip into climactic passages as if they were Shostakovich fortissimos, not Mendelssohn fortissimos. The effect was crude, and if there's anything Mendelssohn never is, it's crude.

Memo to man in middle of Row U: Did it really not occur to you that sending and receiving text messages during a symphony concert is distracting to others and downright rude?

• Repeats at 8 tonight and 2 p.m. Sunday at Bass Performance Hall, Fourth and Commerce, Fort Worth. $15 to $76. 817-665-6000, www.fwsymphony.org.

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