LITTLE ROCK — With a chilly drizzle outside the Clinton Presidential Center on Tuesday night, Little Rock hovered somewhere between fall and winter.
But inside in the Great Hall, at the sold-out opening concert of the Arkansas Symphony Orchestra's River Rhapsodies Chamber series, it was all Four Seasons.
Violinist Giora Schmidt joined the orchestra's Quapaw Quartet - Meredith Maddox and Eric Hayward, violins; Ryan Mooney, viola; and Melita Hunsinger, cello - and John Dahlstrand, bass, with ASO Music Director David Itkin at the harpsichord, for a lovely performance of Antonio Vivaldi's quartet of seasonal concertos.
The Four Seasons is actuallyfour separate concertos, the first third of a set of 12 published in 1725 as Vivaldi's op.8, with the title Il cimento dellarmonia e dell'inventione ("The contest between harmony and invention").
It works quite well as a one-on-a-part chamber piece. Among other things, it allowed Schmidt to take some successful risks in terms of dynamics, bowings and flexibility of tempos, most of which were fairly fast.
It also allowed for some additional subtleties that usually would have to take a back seat to projecting over a 30- or 40-piece string section.
Particularly effective: The stormy third movement of the "Summer" concerto, the harvest-festival jollity in the first and third movements of "Autumn" and the skittery, brittlefirst movement of "Winter."
On the first half of the program, the quartet, after some initial first-movement tuning problems, gave a charming performance of Franz Schubert's String Quartet No. 13 in a minor, op.29, "Rosamunde."
The wistful "Andante" second movement, based on a theme from the opera that gave this quartet its nickname, was especially nice. The players took some passages in the last movement a little more delicately than they might have, but took advantage of other passages where they could really dig in.
In addition to keeping the room temperature fairly brisk, the center's air conditioner produced a high-pitched whistlewhine that was not in the same key as the Schubert piece or any of the Vivaldi concertos.
Arkansas, Pages 15 on 10/24/2007