‘Radiohead on Strings’ opens ConcertDome at Fort Worth’s Omni Theater

There’s a moment early in Radiohead on Strings when the room dissolves. The first notes of “Everything in Its Right Place” rise from five musicians on the floor of the Jane & John Justin Foundation Omni Theater, and overhead, the ceiling fills with color spilling onto the screen, as if the audience were sitting beneath the surface of an ocean, watching waves roll in from below. It’s cosmic and a little disorienting, setting the tone for everything that follows. This is a concert experience that engages much more than your ears and eyes.

ConcertDome Fort Worth opened its doors Friday night, June 5, with this debut performance, and the premise is deceptively simple: take one of music’s most singular catalogs, strip it to its emotional bones, and wrap the entire room in live, reactive visuals. The result lands somewhere between a chamber recital and a planetarium dream.

A marriage of live sound and art

What separates this from a Vegas Sphere-style spectacle is the word “live” — not just the music, but the art on the screen.

“Everything you see will never be replicated again,” Cinephonic Studios co-founder Scott Berman told the crowd during the intro. “This is a one-time deal. It will never look the same way and never sound the same way again.”

Berman knows the territory. He’s spent 35 years making visuals for local heroes, including Tripping Daisy and The Polyphonic Spree, and his team produced “Resolution,” the album film currently screening in this very theater. The visuals here skip stock screensavers for inspired images in real time, digital colors colliding under a petri dish, stringy and smeared one second, drifting from black hole to black hole the next.

The local string ensemble — violinist Florence Conrad, violist Rachel Li McDonald, Nicolas Tsolainos on bass and Jonah Kim on cello among them — gives Radiohead’s gloom plenty of room to breathe. The band’s gothic moodiness suits cello-deep low end far better than the chipper string covers you’d hear on “Bridgerton.” There’s actual weight here.

A musical love letter built in Texas

Violinist Tom Yaron, one of ConcertDome’s co-founders, framed the whole enterprise plainly between songs: every night is “a musical love letter to a different theme.” He also pulled back the curtain on the work behind it. “It’s all of our composers and arrangers that reimagine all this music,” he said. “It’s all done in-house.” Much of it is born in Texas — The Radiohead track “All I Need,” for one, came courtesy of Austin-based arranger Karl Metzi.

That homegrown quality gives the night its charm, glitches and all. A few visuals lagged behind the music — at one point the dome settled into a static drift around a visual of Saturn, a safe fallback while something possibly rebooted backstage. And not every painting matched its song. Quieter, downbeat numbers occasionally got loud, blocky bursts of color that felt more like fun grade-school doodles than the drift through the stars they deserved. Still, the live art pieces remained beautiful on their own terms, even when they did not fully gel with the songs.

The highs and the one that got away

When art and music locked together, the show soared. The clear standout was “Let Down,” third from the end — minimal, then stretching wider as the visuals breathed right along with it, as if the artist behind the screen knew the song in their bones. “Everything in Its Right Place” was its equal, with the underwater cinema on screen setting the mood for the whole evening.

The one stumble? “Creep.” Radiohead’s biggest song thrives on simplicity, and the string arrangement got a touch too plucky and busy where it needed to be still. It was still lovely, but it just didn’t quite reach the ache it could have.

Why this could become a summer ritual

ConcertDome isn’t a one-off. Each featured artist’s work gets a single night with two showtimes, around 7:15 p.m. and 9 p.m., with tickets running around $58 and each show lasting about 70 minutes. The upcoming lineup this summer is stacked: Coldplay on Strings on June 12, Kendrick on Strings on June 26, with more reportedly on the way.

There’s something quietly radical about that rhythm — a recurring Friday night pilgrimage to hear familiar songs made strange and gorgeous beneath 43 million LEDs. If the team keeps refining the dance between live sound and live light, North Texas may have just found its most transporting summer tradition. As Yaron put it, every night is its own universe. On opening night, that one floated.