‘Beethoven & Blue Jeans’: Guest conductor leads comfortable concert with dressed-down orchestra, piano soloist

The Arkansas Symphony Orchestra tunes up and dresses down for this year’s “Beethoven & Blue Jeans” concerts, 7:30 p.m. Saturday and 3 p.m. Sunday in Robinson Center Performance Hall, 426 W. Markham St. at Broadway, Little Rock.

Pianist Conrad Tao soloist in “Piano Concerto” in G major by Maurice Ravel for the orchestra’s second 2021-2022 Masterworks concert, with guest conductor Roderick Cox on the podium.

The program opens with the “Coriolan” Overture by Ludwig van Beethoven — that fulfills the “Beethoven” part — and closes with the “Symphony No. 2” in D major, op.73, by Johannes Brahms.

The orchestra, as the name of the concert suggests, will be wearing denim and logo T-shirts. The audience is likewise encouraged to dress down.

Cox, who says he only recently discovered the dress code on his schedule, explains he’s still weighing what he’ll be wearing.

“I guess I won’t be in my tux,” he says. “But I have not made a decision. I’m all for pushing boundaries, but I confess to being a little bit of a traditionalist” when it comes to concert dress.

Cox, an American-born conductor based in Berlin, has been basically an itinerant after spending 2016-19 as associate conductor of the Minnesota Orchestra, under Osmo Vanska, where he had previously spent a year as the orchestra’s assistant conductor. Among his top honors: the 2018 Sir Georg Solti Conducting Award from the U.S. Solti Foundation. Among his podium appearances this season: the

Symphonieorchester des Bayerischen Rundfunks, the Seattle and New World symphonies and the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra.

Tao, recipient of an Avery Fisher Career Grant and a Gilmore Young Artist (a biennial honor for promising American pianists), has been appearing worldwide as a pianist and composer.

Conrad Tao solos in Maurice Ravel’s G-major “Piano Concerto” Saturday and Sunday with the Arkansas Symphony Orchestra. (Special to the Democrat-Gazette/Brantley Gutierrez)

Cox says he has not worked with Tao, whom he praises as “a top-notch soloist, a fantastic, excellent pianist,” but they’ll be taking on the Ravel concerto together the week of Thanksgiving with the Cincinnati Symphony. “It’ll be a little treat to play this piece twice” with the same artist, Cox says, making things much easier by having established a level of communication on the concerto the second time around.

In between, Cox is replacing conductor Ton Koopman next week on the Boston Symphony podium at Symphony Hall in Boston after Koopman had to withdraw due to covid-19 travel restrictions. It’ll be Cox’s Boston Symphony debut; he’ll conduct Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s “Clarinet Concerto,” with principal William R. Hudgins as soloist, and the “Symphony No. 3,” known as the “Scottish,” by Felix Mendelssohn (in place of Beethoven’s “Symphony No. 2”).

The Mendelssohn symphony is one he has conducted several times, most recently with the BBC Philharmonic in Manchester, England, in mid-October.

It’s not unusual to be called up on short notice in situations like this, Cox says, and while he’s not sure how the Boston folks found him, “I’ve been doing this a number of years now, and I presume they’d know who I am before inviting me.”

Meanwhile, the Little Rock-based orchestra is in the search process for a new music director — Geoffrey Robson, previously the associate conductor and now carrying the title of “artistic director,” has been its shepherd in the interim — but has not identified which of the guest conductors in its 2019 and 2021-22 seasons are actual candidates for the job.

Cox would not say if he was an applicant, especially since “I have never met the orchestra.” (He’ll have four rehearsals this week preceding the two concerts.) “I want to concentrate just on the program at hand.”

However, if he is under consideration, the Boston “gig” has raised his profile.

“That’s very cool,” says Arkansas Symphony CEO Christina Littlejohn. “ASO, Boston, Cincinnati — that’s quite a three-week engagement in November for him.”