Author: ERIC E. HARRISON
Audiences are used to seeing two people conducting the Arkansas Symphony Orchestra: Music Director Philip Mann and Associate Conductor Geoffrey Robson. Guest conductors are rare when the orchestra isn’t searching for a permanent guy on the podium.
So it was a very rare treat to experience a guest conductor of the caliber of Guillermo Figueroa, New Mexico Symphony music director and principal guest conductor of the Puerto Rico Symphony, Saturday night at Little Rock’s Robinson Center Music Hall.
The concert also showcased the orchestra’s principal cellist, David Gerstein, in a fine and bright, if not entirely note-perfect, performance of Peter Ilich Tchaikovsky’s Variations on a Rococo Theme. It’s a short work in which the soloist works as hard as he would in a full concerto – once he intones the theme, he doesn’t get a break until after the riproaring finale.
Gerstein, one of the orchestra’s hardest-working members, had a couple of pitchy spots and he took off a little faster than Figueroa and the rest of the orchestra at the top of the second variation. But the finale and coda were sufficiently ripping and roaring to lift audience members out of their seats.
The real gem of the evening, however, was the overwhelmingly outstanding performance of Ludwig van Beethoven’s Symphony No. 2.
Figueroa, working without a score (as he did for the entire concert, including the semiconcerto) was in firm control, expressing with both hands (watch him work and hear the results come out in the music) and deriving excellent results from the orchestra – excellent tempos, superb dynamics and dramatic transitions, and the orchestra sounded – and even looked – livelier than usual. (String-section back-benchers sometimes don’t appear entirely involved; not this time).
The curtain raiser, Ottorino Respighi’s first suite of Ancient Airs & Dances, based on 16th-century lute works, seemed a little bloodless at the beginning, but Figueroa drew a nice arc to provide the missing snap in the “masked ball” finale.
Figueroa, Gerstein and the rest of the musicians will repeat the program at 3 p.m. today at Robinson, West Markham Street and Broadway. The ASO Youth Symphony will take the stage for music by Beethoven and Antonin Dvorak about 5 p.m. Ticket information is available by calling (501) 666-1761 or online at arkansassymphony.org.