MUSIC REVIEW

Cathedral lights up for music of Mozart

The Arkansas Symphony Orchestra cheated a little bit for its "Mozart by Candlelight" concert Thursday night at Little Rock's Trinity Episcopal Cathedral.

The candles around the altar area where the 34 players were snugly packed were real enough, but they got a little extra illumination from stand lights and a couple of electric-powered chandeliers. And the statue of Jesus behind the altar was lit, so the Intimate Neighborhood Concert program also proceeded "ad lumina Christi."

In the brightest part of the all-Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart concert, Carolyn Brown, the orchestra's principal flutist, and Alisa Coffey, its principal harp, soloed in Mozart's Concerto for Flute and Harp in C major, K.299. The orchestra, with Associate Conductor Geoffrey Robson wielding the baton, was as usual excellent in support of soloists, especially when it's two of their own performing as brilliantly as these did.

The intimate chamber-church setting was perfect for this combination (in a concert hall you'd have to at least amplify the harp), and the performance was nearly perfect to match. The program doesn't credit who wrote the cadenzas, but the rippling one in the second movement was particularly fine.

Alas that Robson's after-intermission reading of the Symphony No. 40 in G minor, K.550, didn't quite measure up.

The first movement was solid, with a good quick tempo, and the musicians dug in nicely to execute the closest thing you'll get to hearing Mozart swing. The promise was good that this would match the superior INC performances of two other later Mozart symphonies -- No. 35, "Haffner," which Robson's boss, Music Director Philip Mann, conducted in January 2013, and No. 38, "Prague," which Mann led this past January.

But Robson backed down the tempos for the final three movements and they never recovered the punch of the first. The "Menuetto" third movement was way too stately; the fourth movement, "Allegro Assai," lacked drive.

The concert opened with a lively performance of the Overture to Mozart's opera Don Giovanni, which Robson took at a good clip, though I would have liked the opening passages to have been a little more dramatic.

Metro on 05/16/2014

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