Cellist Zuill Bailey absolutely captivated the audience at Saturday night's Arkansas Symphony Orchestra concert at Little Rock's Robinson Center Performance Hall with his performance of Antonin Dvorak's Cello Concerto.
With brisk tempos and a warm connection with the supporting players, Bailey, who has a more than three-decade relationship with Arkansas audiences, showed off his more than brilliant musicianship from his first notes. The audience, once it caught its breath at the end of the first movement, broke into well-deserved applause.
More so than in most concertos, the solo line is wrapped in orchestral context; Bailey's 1693 Matteo Gofriller cello was, most of the time, more than enough to fill the hall, yet there were a few moments in which conductor Geoffrey Robson might have pulled the band back a little for better balance.
In just about any other concert that doesn't have the most massive cello concerto in the repertoire on the program, the Symphony No. 3, "Rhenish," by Robert Schumann would have been joyful closer; as it was, Robson extracted every ounce of joyfulness in the five-movement work before intermission.
The program opened with a well-played Overture in C major by Fanny Mendelssohn; fans of her younger brother, Felix, would certainly notice the family resemblance.
Bailey, Robson and the orchestra will re-create the program at 3 p.m. today at Robinson, 426 W. Markham St. at Broadway. Ticket information is available by calling (501) 666-1761, Extension 1, or online at ArkansasSymphony.org.
And you can hear Bailey again playing chamber music, as he and the orchestra's Quapaw Quartet play Franz Schubert's C-major String Quintet at 7 p.m. Tuesday in the Great Hall of the Clinton Presidential Center in Little Rock.