Call it a string bass, a double bass, a contrabass or a bull fiddle, it’s downright rare to see a solo for it on a classical program.
But Barron Weir, the Arkansas Symphony’s principal bass player, played the heck out of it Thursday night in the Double Bass Concerto in D major by Johann Baptist Vanhal at Little Rock’s St. James United Methodist Church with a couple of dozen orchestra colleagues and conductor Philip Mann.
It was the first ASO Stella Boyle Smith Intimate Neighborhood Concert for 2014; the neighborhood (as it will also be for the second concert in the series, March 13 at Second Presbyterian Church) was Pleasant Valley. But the title of the program was “Bohemian Festival,” kicking off a concert trifecta that will include Masterworks concerts Jan. 25-26 and a chamber concert Jan. 28, all with a focus on that region of the Czech Republic.
I’m guessing few, if anybody, in the pews had ever heard of Vanhal, a Bohemian cellist-composer whose Viennese string-quartet partners included guys named Wolfgang Mozart, Franz Joseph Haydn and Carl Ditters von Dittersdorf.
And likely even fewer had ever heard this concerto. It’s a charming piece that certainly shows off the soloist’s virtuosity, mostly in the instrument’s upper registers. And Weir, in his fourth season with the orchestra, was more than its master.
Mann extended the theme with the Serenade for winds in d minor by Bohemian-born Antonin Dvorak — not quite as rarely played as the Vanhal concerto, but certainly not played as often as Dvorak’s more popular Serenade for strings. The 10 wind players (plus cello and bass) gave the piece a fine reading, providing a lush, rich sound palette, although Mann’s tempos in the first three movements were a bit slow.
And — Czech, please! — Mann closed with a vigorous, loud, boistrous and thoroughly enjoyable performance of Mozart’s “Prague” Symphony, No. 38.