In Northwest Arkansas we have much for which to be thankful: beautiful outdoors, four distinct seasons, fine schools, SEC football and low unemployment. Oh yes, and year-round golf. In visual and performing arts, we have a gracious plenty as well.
With music we are blessed with not one, but two fine orchestras: The Symphony Orchestra of Northwest Arkansas (SONA) and the Arkansas Philharmonic Orchestra (APO). In the span of two recent weekends, I was pleased to attend concerts performed by these ensembles.
The SONA program at the nearly sold-out Walton Arts Center Jan. 26 was a Russian tour de force with a touch of French.
Maestro Paul Haas, SONA’s wunderkind conductor from New York, commanded the Fayetteville hall with his usual crisp energy or, as The Washington Post describes, “fresh thinking and visceral engagement.” The musicians performed beyond expectations placed on any orchestra in any city large or small, whether with the Prokofiev Symphony No. 5 or as fitting accompanists for pianist Ching-Yun Hu’s Tchaikovsky concerto.
Ms. Hu’s virtuosity was so profound the veteran Fayetteville audience broke into spontaneous applause after the first movement.
Lost in the music, we forget concert decorum and couldn’t wait till the final movement to express appreciation.
As in previous SONA concerts, Haas featured young local talent. Select members of the Ozark Philharmonic Youth Orchestra, whose alumni of six years ago performed in Carnegie Hall, entered to play Bizet’s Farandole from the L’Arlésienne Suite alongside orchestra seasoned professionals. Our youth were well up for the task. All I heard was one, cohesive orchestra, young or otherwise.
One week later at the Arend Arts Center in Bentonville, the APO played a different yet equally entertaining and professionally performed evening of music. George Gershwin, Richard Rodgers, Jerome Kern and Cole Porter were the All-American fare on Bentonville’s J Street. Neither the musical selections nor their performances were to be dismissed as any less serious and skillfully interpreted as the European music from a week earlier in Fayetteville.
Similar to the Prokofi ev symphony in Fayetteville, which I had never heard before, the Bentonville opener of Gershwin’s 1925 medley from his Song of the Flame was also new to me.
I always learn something new from APO’s Denver-based Maestro Steven Byess. A generation older than Haas but no less talented and energetic, Byess seems to fit the Benton County crowd with his silver hair and his accomplished resume that ranges from conducting studies under the likes of Robert Shaw (Yes, that Robert Shaw, with his famous chorale) to his conducting the 2000 Superbowl halftime show. I think his services were sorely needed in the Superdome recently.
Ms. Yoonie Han’s Rhapsody in Blue on the Arend Steinway was equally as engaging as Ms. Hu’s Tchaikovsky in Fayetteville.
Paul Whiteman and George Gershwin would have been happy with the featured soloist and our regional musicians. After a standing ovation, Ms. Han favored us with a mid-concert encore.
The Arend was about 80 percent filled. Clearly there is room for tooting the publicity horn to fill those remaining Bentonville seats and to nudge folks from Washington County and nearby southwestern Missouri to discover the APO. Frankly, it escapes me why more folks don’t “get” classical music. I guess that’s another discussion and a wider selling challenge for orchestras everywhere. This stuff isn’t stodgy at all. At the bottom of it all, most symphonies, like operas, are all about war or sex. Or both!
My son, a cellist and student at the highly regarded University of North Texas College of Music, is fortunate to have played in both our regional orchestras.
Additionally he has been conducted and taught by David Itkin, professor at North Texas and former long-time music director of Little Rock’s Arkansas Symphony Orchestra. I met Itkin after a college concert last year. Learning I lived in Bentonville he expressed curiosity about how two orchestras came to be in a corner of Arkansas.
I started to explain something of SONA’s rise from a defunct Fayetteville orchestra. Or I could have shared what I knew of the Benton County Civic Orchestra startup that became the APO. But I thought better and skipped any entanglements of funding or politics in the arts.
“Professor Itkin,” I answered, “I suppose we have two fine orchestras up there in Northwest Arkansas for the same reason you have this world-class music school down here in Denton, Texas, of all places: We are all just blessed. Very blessed.”
The next SONA and APO concerts are on March 9 and April 20 respectively. See you there.
TED TALLEY IS A RESIDENT OF BENTONVILLE WHO HAS LIVED IN THE OZARKS FOR 18 YEARS.
Opinion, Pages 11 on 02/10/2013