The program for this weekend’s Arkansas Symphony concerts represents beginnings and endings.
The ending: The orchestra is playing its last Masterworks programs at Little Rock’s Robinson Center Music Hall for a while - the hall will shut down this summer for a major two year rebuild.
The beginning: Saturday night’s world premiere of The Wind and Petit Jean, which the musicians commissioned from Composer of the Year Christopher Theofanidis (and in an apparently unprecedented move, dedicated to the orchestra’s board).
It’s everything the musicians asked for and more: A tone poem and orchestral showcase, which Theofanidis based on the central Arkansas mountain and the legend of the young French girl who disguised herself as a boy to follow her lover to the New World who’s buried there.
The piece is deeper and edgier than Theofanidis’ rousing Rainbow Body, which the orchestra played earlier this season; it’s moving, thought-provoking, full of orchestral color (the first violins, with just a touch of percussion, bring us in and take us out with a musical representation of the wind), and it’s a piece I hope this orchestra (and other orchestras) will play again often. The audience left little doubt: They gave the composer, present for the occasion, an appreciative ovation.
The short length of the Theofanidis piece (just under 15 minutes) left plenty of program scope for conductor Philip Mann’s other going-away present to the hall and the audience: Gustav Mahler’s massive Fifth Symphony, which the orchestra gave a dramatic, impressive and masterful performance.
Mann’s tempos were spot on throughout; he took the funeral-march first movement at just the right clip. The fourth movement, the strings-only “Adagietto,” was played as gorgeously as I have heard it. And the Finale, when it finally came (Mahler specialized in false climaxes), appropriately blew out the hall’s back doors.
Theofanidis, Mann and the orchestra reassemble to repeat the concert at 3 p.m. today at Robinson, West Markham Street and Broadway, Little Rock. Ticket information is available at (501) 666-1761 or online at ArkansasSymphony.org.
Arkansas, Pages 19 on 04/13/2014