Fort Worth Symphony brings Beethoven's Pastoral, and the Kimbell's landscapes, to Bass Hall

Jane Glover conducts and tenor Ian Bostridge sings Britten in a three-show weekend that starts Friday night downtown.

There are weekends when the best thing happening downtown doesn't need a light show or a guest list, and this is one of them. Starting Friday, October 30 at 7:30 p.m., the Fort Worth Symphony Orchestra takes the Bass Performance Hall stage for Beethoven's Pastoral, a program that leans on bird calls, open country and one of the most famous symphonies ever written about a walk outdoors.

The run has three performances: Friday at 7:30 p.m., Saturday, October 31 at 7:30 p.m., and a Sunday, November 1 matinee at 2 p.m., all at Bass Hall, according to the orchestra's concert page and the hall's own calendar. Yes, that means the Saturday show lands on Halloween.

The bill is a smart one. Beethoven's Symphony No. 6, the "Pastoral," sits alongside Missy Mazzoli's *Orpheus Undone* and Benjamin Britten's *Serenade for Tenor, Horn, and Strings*. That puts a living American composer, a mid-century English song cycle and a Viennese warhorse on the same night, which is the kind of programming that rewards people who usually only show up for the Beethoven.

On the podium is Jane Glover, whom the FWSO named its principal guest conductor beginning in 2025, per her Operabase profile. The Britten belongs to two soloists: tenor Ian Bostridge, the featured artist, and the orchestra's own principal horn, Gerald "Gerry" Wood, who is listed on the ticketing version of the program. The *Serenade* is built on that pairing, voice and horn trading lines over the strings, so it's a rare chance to hear someone from inside the orchestra step to the front of it.

A living American composer, an English song cycle and a Viennese warhorse on the same night.

The Pastoral is where the visual piece comes in. The symphony's own copy describes Beethoven weaving "shepherd tunes and bird calls into the music in a celebration of nature," and for these performances that gets amplified with artwork from the Kimbell Art Museum's landscape collection. Fort Worth gets to do something here most cities can't: pull from a world-class museum a few minutes up the road from the concert hall and put it in the same room as the orchestra that calls this town home.

The room matters too. Bass Performance Hall opened on May 1, 1998, according to its Wikipedia entry, and has been the FWSO's downtown home and a resident-company stage for the opera, ballet and the Cliburn ever since, per the hall's resident companies page. If you've only been for a touring Broadway show, a symphony weekend is the better way to hear what the place was built for.

Tickets are on sale through the FWSO concert page. If you've been waiting for an easy way into the orchestra's season, a Sunday afternoon of Beethoven, Britten and a wall of Texas-adjacent landscapes is about as gentle a start as it gets.

Sources: Fort Worth Symphony Orchestra: Beethoven's Pastoral (concert page) (fwsymphony.org); Bass Performance Hall (basshall.com); Bass Hall resident companies: The Cliburn (basshall.com); Jane Glover, Operabase (operabase.com); Bass Performance Hall, Wikipedia (en.wikipedia.org)