MUSIC

Symphony will showcase Robinson's acoustics

Philippe Quint solos in Erich Wolfgang Korngold’s Violin Concerto in the Arkansas Symphony’s “Return to Robinson” this weekend.
Philippe Quint solos in Erich Wolfgang Korngold’s Violin Concerto in the Arkansas Symphony’s “Return to Robinson” this weekend.

Welcome home, Arkansas Symphony.

The orchestra, with violinist Philippe Quint and with Music Director Philip Mann on the podium, will, at 7:30 p.m. Saturday and 3 p.m. Sunday, be the first performers to take the stage of what is now being called Robinson Center Performance Hall.

Arkansas Symphony: ‘Return to Robinson’

7:30 p.m. Saturday, 3 p.m. Sunday, Robinson Center Performance Hall, West Markham Street and Broadway. Inaugural performance in the newly reconstructed hall. Philippe Quint, violin. Philip Mann, conductor. Mikhail Glinka; Overture to Ruslan and Ludmilla; Erich Wolfgang Korngold: Violin Concerto in D major, Op. 35; W.A. Mozart: Symphony No. 35 in D major, K.385, “Haffner”; Ottorino Respighi: The Pines of Rome.

Tickets: $14-$67, $10 for students and active duty military, free for K-12 students to the Sunday matinee with purchase of an adult ticket

(501) 666-1761, Extension 100

ArkansasSymphony.org

It follows a two-year reconstruction project that rebuilt the building interior practically from bottom to top.

For the hall's inaugural concerts (the third in the orchestra's 2016-17 Stella Boyle Smith Masterworks season), Mann has chosen four works that he believes will demonstrate and explore the hall's brand-new acoustics, the work of Mark Holden of the Norwalk, Conn., acoustic firm Jaffe Holden. Mann was an adviser to the project from the get-go.

The biggest will be the concert's final work, Otterino Respighi's titanic symphonic poem The Pines of Rome, which will feature an augmented orchestra -- 83 players, as opposed to the usual 60-something, including an onstage organ, offstage brass and the recorded voice of a nightingale. (The organ, by the way, comes from Birdsong and Erickson Church Organ Service -- an organ console with large stack speakers instead of pipes. It's the same setup the orchestra used the last time it performed the Respighi tone poem and which it will use in February for performances of Gustav Mahler's Symphony No. 2).

What would normally be the centerpiece of a concert program gets second billing: Quint soloing in the Violin Concerto in D major by Erich Wolfgang Korngold.

Mann will open the program with the Overture to Ruslan and Ludmilla by Mikhail Glinka, which he guest-conducted in the Oct. 17-18, 2009, concerts that essentially earned him the job as the orchestra's music director. Ahead of the Respighi work on the second half will be Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's "Haffner" Symphony, No. 35, also in D major.

"Each of the four pieces is serving a different function," Mann says. "The Pines of Rome is the opportunity to fill the space with the full fortissimo forces of the orchestra, with expanded brass and percussion sections. We'll see the power and the dynamic volume range of the hall.

"What I thought would be more poignant and even more special is to hear something leaner, something with great sensitivity in a classical context ... connected to smaller string sounds. So we have Mozart's "Haffner" Symphony." Written for a festive event, Mann notes, it should "match really well for the occasion."

The Korngold concerto, meanwhile, "gives us a chance to hear a soloist in the hall, out in the front of the stage, showing the audience the clarity in which they can hear a single instrument."

And, "I wanted a sense of 'event' in terms of the Grammys or a Hollywood awards ceremony -- you want to feel the red carpet and the spotlight of the hall opener. Korngold's incredible orchestral sheen and this cinematic grandeur plays very well to the notion of a glitzy event."

Quint played Jean Sibelius' Violin Concerto at Robinson in February 2010 with the orchestra and guest conductor Andre Raphel Smith, also a candidate that season (along with Mann) for the Arkansas Symphony podium that David Itkin had recently vacated.

Quint says he was aware Robinson had recently been rebuilt, but didn't know he'd be playing the debut concert there. "I didn't realize it was going to be the first performance!" he exclaimed. "Excellent! Incredible! Unbelievably exciting!"

Mann, who has worked with Quint on this concerto with other orchestras, praised the violinist's interpretation, which he described as "fantastic and captivating." And Quint in his turn, thoroughly welcomed Mann's suggestion that he play the Korngold concerto for these concerts.

"I played this piece with Philippe about five years ago, our first collaboration, so he thought it would be great if I brought this concerto to Arkansas," he says. "And of course, I did not object, not for a second."

Quint received a Grammy Award nomination for his 2009 recording of the concerto, and "I've been playing it a lot. In fact, I think a few seasons ago I did it 33 times," he says.

He agrees that it will be a good way to show off the new acoustics. "It's a great vehicle for everyone," he says. "This is where everybody gets to show off, not to mention so many recognizable themes from the old movies."

Korngold, best known today as a film composer (mostly for Warner Bros.) of epic films in the 1930s and '40s, used themes from his scores for Another Dawn (1937), Juarez (1939) and Anthony Adverse (1935) in the concerto. (It predates some of Korngold's best-known scores, including The Adventures of Robin Hood and The Sea Hawk.)

"The last movement was derived from [1937's] The Prince and the Pauper, and that was a movie I saw way before I had ever heard of the concerto," Quint says.

Korngold family members, he adds, have since told him that "everything he used in those movies was written as classical competitions. It's not that he took those themes and gave them to the Violin Concerto; he wrote those as classical [pieces], then brought them into movies, and [then] took them from the movies and reworked them into the concerto."

Weekend on 11/17/2016

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