The other day, Arkansas Symphony guest conductor Kazem Abdullah described Hector Berlioz's "Symphonie Fantastique" as "a great barn-burner to end the season with."
Well, the orchestra created quite a conflagration in the hayloft at Little Rock's Robinson Center Performance Hall on Saturday night, closing out its Masterworks season in a blaze of glory.
(Abdullah replaced on the podium, not quite at the last minute, Matthew Kraemer, who recently took a job as music director of the Louisiana Philharmonic and withdrew his name from the orchestra's conductor-search consideration. Abdullah might yet be considered a candidate.)
Berlioz's work depicts a lovelorn artist who in despair poisons himself with opium; his beloved weaves in and out of his visions as a melody (aka an idee fixe) and, ultimately, he dreams he is being executed for her murder while witches and demons dance on his grave.
Abdullah and the players pulled out all the stops for the finale, including two tubas putting just the right amount of snarl into the "Dies Irae" motif. Abdullah's tempos were spot on throughout, and the orchestra gave one of its finest performances of this season. The third-movement dialogue between the onstage English horn and just-offstage oboe was a delight.
On the first half of the program, pianist Samantha Ege gave a thrilling performance of a less-than-thrilling piece, Doreen Carwithen's Concerto for Piano and Strings.
The pleasantly tonal work has echoes of two great 20th-century Sergeis -- Prokofiev and Rachmaninoff -- and also Carwithen's 20th-century British contemporaries Gustav Holst and Willim Walton. Ege gave it quite a ride, and the ASO audience, always generous with ovations, gave her one, but got no encore.
Abdullah opened the program with a lively performance of Edward Elgar's Pomp and Circumstance March No. 1, easily recognizable for all the times it has been played for graduations, and particularly appropriate, if not entirely intended so, for the coronation day for King Charles III.
Ege, Abdullah and the orchestra will repeat the program at 3 p.m. today at Robinson, 426 W. Markham St. at Broadway. For ticket information, call (501) 666-1761, Extension 1, or visit ArkansasSymphony.org.