LITTLE ROCK — Facing almost two years in which its regular concert home, Little Rock’s Robinson Center Music Hall, undergoes a major overhaul (starting in fall 2014), the Arkansas Symphony is looking to go into“exile” with a season full of big musical blockbusters.
It’s the third full season Philip Mann has put together for the orchestra as music director (not counting the season on which he had some input while he was still a candidate for the job).
“I’m very confident in the Masterworks series,” he says. “Each program has multiple points of great appeal, both to newcomers and longtime symphony goers, but also from an artistic perspective.”
The season will start busting blocks Sept. 21-22 with Igor Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring and Peter Ilich Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No. 1, with Croatian pianist and 2009 Cleveland Competition winner Martina Filjak as soloist.
The curtain-raiser on the all-Russian program will be the Festive Overture by Dmitri Shostakovich.
“Any time you play Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, that’s always an event,” Mann says, “and that’s a highlight for any fan of orchestral music.
“A lot of orchestras have [programmed the work] on this current season because of the centennial,” Mann says. The revolutionary ballet, written for Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes and choreographed by Vaslav Nijinsky, caused a near-riot at its May 29, 1913, Paris premiere.
However, “We’re not programming it because of its anniversary, because in that case we’d be a year late.”
Among the season’s other demolitions of concrete: The March 1-2, 2014, performance of Giuseppe Verdi’s massive Messa da Requiem with massed choirs and soloists (all to be announced).
“Those people that remember power and energy of [the Feb. 12 performance of] Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony with those massed chorus members on stage with us are going to hear something even grander, even more powerful and loud,” Mann promises.
And the season finale, April 12-13, will include the world premiere of a piece the orchestra has commissioned from its 2013-14 composer of the year, Christopher Theofinidis.
A world premiere, “especially an ASO commission, the musicians of the ASO commission,” Mann says, would be event enough for what will probably be the orchestra’s final pre-renovation performance in Robinson Center. “But we’re pairing that with the power and spectacle of Gustav Mahler’s Fifth Symphony.”
Violinist Jennifer Frautschi, who played a Mozart concerto with the orchestra to considerable acclaim in October 2003, will return Oct. 19-20 to solo in the Violin Concerto by Samuel Barber, under the baton of a guest conductor to be announced. The program also will include Theofinidis’ Rainbow Body, which according to the composer’s biography is “one of the most performed new orchestral works of the last 10 years, having been performed by over 100 orchestras internationally.”
Theofinidis, a Dallas native, holds degrees from Yale (where he now teaches) and the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, N.Y., and has been a Guggenheim Fellow.
Israeli-American cellist Inbal Segev will be the soloist Nov. 9-10 in Friedrich Gulda’s Concerto for Cello and Wind Orchestra for the annual “Beethoven and Bluejeans” concert. The “Beethoven” part will be the composer’s Symphony No. 4; the curtain raiser will be Richard Strauss’ 1945 Suite from his opera Der Rosenkavalier.
The “Beethoven and Bluejeans” concert, for which orchestra members wear jeans instead of white tie and audience members are encouraged to dress similarly, “has been our biggest seller most recently and most successful in bringing in new audience members,” Mann says.
Gulda, a native of Vienna who died in 2000, was best known as one of the 20th century’s great pianists, specializing in the music of Beethoven, Mozart and Bach. He also was “a jazz performer, a conductor, a musical polymath, a real personality on the podium and on the stage,” Mann says. “It’s a truly Viennese concerto, but one that doesn’t fit into one period or style; it has everything from Haydn up through rock, and it doesn’t sound kitschy or cliched, it’s just a beautifully,masterfully crafted piece.”
The Beethoven symphony stays with the concert’s Viennese theme and, Mann adds, “What could be more Viennese than Der Rosenkavalier? For me as a conductor, that’s one of the real highlights of the season; it’s a frothy, beautiful, fun work and just a masterpiece of orchestration and composition.”
Segev, this year’s ASO “artist of distinction,” will hang around a couple of extra days for the Nov. 12 River Rhapsodies chamber concert, in which she will play, with the orchestra’s cello section, one or more of Heitor Villa-Lobos’ Bachianas Brasileiras suites. (No. 1 is scored for an orchestra of cellos; No. 5 is scored for soprano vocalise and cellos.) She’ll also anchor a performance of the Octet by George Enescu.
Pianist Norman Krieger, who played Johannes Brahms’ Piano Concerto No. 1 with the orchestra in November 2011, will return to play the composer’s Piano Concerto No. 2, Jan. 25-26, on a program with Antonin Dvorak’s Scherzo capriccioso and a selection, “our own kind of suite,” Mann says, from Dvorak’s 16 Slavonic Dances, opp. 46 and 72.
“That performance will be part of what I’m calling a ‘Bohemian festival,’ paired with other programs, notably a River Rhapsodies [chamber concert],” Mann says. “We’ll have a Prague-Czech Republic-Bohemian theme for a couple of weekends.”
POPS SEASON
The 2013-14 pops season will focus on spooky music for Halloween, The Wizard of Oz and the music of singer-songwriter James Taylor.
The Oct. 12-13. “Halloween Spooktacular,” is a semi-reprise of a successful concert from two years ago. “We had one of the largest audience responses to that and we’ve had constant requests to reprise it,” Mann says. “The program will have a few similarities - [Modest Mussorgsky’s] Night on Bald Mountain, of course, and some real great Halloween orchestral classics, but there will be some things that are new and different from last time, too.”
This year’s Dec. 20-22 “Happy Holidays” concerts will again feature a slate of Arkansas performers, Mann says. “We are really listening to our audiences, to community members, what has resonated in the past. We want to make sure that it’s a program that remains and is even increasingly beloved.”
A to-be-named concert pairing Feb. 15-16 will feature vocalists to be announced singing Broadway standards, hits and love songs, conducted by Associate Conductor Geoff Robson. Mann says it will neatly lead into the soon-to-follow March 8-9,2014, pops concert, “Oz With Orchestra,” in which the orchestra will “back up” Judy Garland and other cast members of the 1939 MGM film The Wizard of Oz.
And May 3-4, 2014, Jeans ’n Classics, a Canadian outfit that specializes in rock tribute shows with orchestras, will join the symphony for “Shower the People: The Music of James Taylor.”
The orchestra has yet to announce details for the rest of its River Rhapsodies chamber series, and the continuation of its new Intimate Neighborhood Concert Series, smaller-scale concerts featuring chamber-size works, that the orchestra instituted this year, depends on “funding issues,” Mann says.
Style, Pages 51 on 03/03/2013