LITTLE ROCK — After two hours of two extraordinarily intense musical works in Saturday night’s Arkansas Symphony concert at Little Rock’s Robinson Center Music Hall, some audience members might have felt like they’d been run over by a steamroller.
Music Director Philip Mann made an extraordinary pairing of pieces for the program, both of which were designed to show off and stretch the orchestra, and perhaps stretch the audience as well.
The cutting-edge Concerto for Orchestra by Jennifer Higdon, the orchestra’s composer of the year, was boisterous, high-spirited, energetic and, well, relentless, but on the whole, just plain fun.
Higdon, while giving almost every member of the ensemble his due, explores the gamut of orchestral textures and colors in the five movement work. Particularly enjoyable: the fourth-movement percussion extravaganza, starting with pitched instruments (including vibraphone and cymbal-like crotales played, not with mallets, but with bows) and ending up in a pounding frenzied finale featuring wood blocks, scratch box and triangle.
Even more unrelenting was the excellent but exhausting performance of Dmitri Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 10, a symphonic portrait both of just-deceased Soviet dictator Josef Stalin, with whom the composer had a long and unhappy struggle, and an expression of eventual triumph, complete with musical battle scars.
Higdon, Mann and the orchestra will return for a second concert at 3 p.m. today at Robinson, West Markham Street and Broadway, Little Rock.
Higdon also will attend the River Rhapsodies Chamber Series concert at7 p.m. Tuesday at the Clinton Presidential Center, 1200 President Clinton Ave., Little Rock, where some of the orchestra’s string and wind players will play her Piano Trio and Autumn Music, respectively.
Ticket information for both concerts is available by calling (501) 666-1761 or online at arkansassymphony. org.
Arkansas, Pages 23 on 02/24/2013