Violinist Frautschi returns to play Sibelius with ASO

Violinist Jennifer Frautschi appears to be speeding up her performance cycle with the Arkansas Symphony Orchestra.

Frautschi made her first appearance with the orchestra in Robinson Center Music Hall in October 2003 (Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's "Turkish" Violin Concerto, No. 5), and returned a decade later, in October 2013, to play the Violin Concerto by Samuel Barber. So we ought not to have expected her back here before October 2023.

But Frautschi will be on stage this weekend (7:30 p.m. Saturday and 3 p.m. Sunday) -- six years early, you might say -- at what is now Little Rock's Robinson Center Performance Hall, soloing in the Violin Concerto in d minor by Jean Sibelius with the orchestra and conductor Philip Mann.

The program, titled "Go Brahms," is the curtain-raiser for the 2017-18 Stella Boyle Smith Masterworks season, the orchestra's 51st. It will also include the titanic c-minor Symphony No. 1 by Johannes Brahms and Go, the first of several works on this season's slates from ASO Composer of the Year Adam Schoenberg.

Frautschi, also this season's ASO "Artist of Distinction," will stick around until Tuesday to play the "Chaconne" from J.S. Bach's Partita No. 2 in d minor for Solo Violin, BWV 1004, and join five ASO string players for the Sextet, "Souvenir de Florence," op.70, by Peter Ilich Tchaikovsky. The concert, 7 p.m. at the Clinton Presidential Center, 1200 President Clinton Ave., Little Rock, opens the orchestra's 2017-18 River Rhapsodies Chamber Music Series.

"I've done it a fair number of times," she says. "It's a very fun piece to perform and put together. And I think the audience will enjoy it."

Some musical scholars might fix the Sibelius work between those of Mozart (Classical) and Barber (20th century) on a theoretical timeline of violin concertos.

"Yes," Frautschi agrees. "[But] something like Brahms might be more squarely in the middle, because the Sibelius -- it's considered a Romantic violin concerto, but it was written at the beginning of the 20th century. It has Romantic tonal language, but there's something about it quite modern-sounding to me. It's more heavily in the 20th century than the Romantic period.

"The Barber is also very Romantic work, even though it was written in the 20th century -- it's very lyrical, but it is less muscular than the Sibelius, [which is] a very brawny piece. The writing is very symphonic, and the writing for the violin is challenging.

"One of the main challenges, as with any large-scale concerto, is that there is this written-in struggle between the orchestra and soloist. So it is quite physical, in the scale of writing, in a way the Barber is not. The last movement [of that concerto] is technically challenging; it's very fast. But there's no competition with the orchestra in terms of projecting, which is very much written into the fabric of the Sibelius."

Frautschi played the concerto earlier this month with the Kalamazoo (Mich.) Symphony, so, she says, it will be fresh in her mind and fingers. She'll have also played the Violin Concerto No. 1 by Max Bruch with the Des Moines (Iowa) Symphony the week before she arrives; the week after she leaves, she'll play Mozart's Violin Concerto No. 3 with the Santa Barbara (Calif.) Chamber Orchestra.

A native of Pasadena, Calif., she started the violin at age 3, going on to study at Colburn School for the Performing Arts in Los Angeles, Harvard, the New England Conservatory of Music and the Juilliard School, where she studied with Robert Mann. She performs on a 1722 Antonio Stradivarius violin known as the "ex-Cadiz," on loan from a private American foundation.

She recently recorded Robert Schumann's three violin-piano sonatas with pianist John Blacklow, which she describes as "music that's very close to my heart. I very much relate to Schumann's writing.

"The first sonata is played with some regularity; the third sonata is almost never played. It's a little bit of a tricky work, but very compelling."

Weekend on 09/28/2017