Author: ERIC E. HARRISON
The Arkansas Symphony Orchestra’s River Rhapsodies chamber series gives audiences a chance to hear unusual works from combinations of instruments.
Take, for example, the Cross Town Trio, whose members – Jackie Lamar, saxophone; Karen Griebling, viola; and John Krebs, piano – teach at colleges on opposite sides of Conway (Lamar at the University of Central Arkansas, the others at Hendrix College).
Tuesday night at the Clinton Presidential Center in Little Rock, they presented what was billed as the premiere of Donald Grantham’s Music for the Cross Town Trio, a somewhat quirky but entirely serious work for alto saxophone, viola and piano that the three musicians executed well.
They did it with fine balance, not an easy trick for three such widely diverse instruments. High points were the slightly, but sweetly, melancholic second movement, “Meditation,” and the rather droll “Scherzo” finale.
Griebling’s Yggdrasill, named after the Norse tree of life, featured Lamar on tenor sax, a sound that surprisingly complemented that of the viola, and the good-humored arrangement of a traditional Thai folk song called The Bat Eats Bananas, which sort of resembled a Scott Joplin-esque two-step with an Asian accent.
Equally off the beaten path, oboist Lorraine Duso, cellist Daniel Cline and pianist Carl Anthony took on the one-movement Trio for Oboe, Cello and Piano by Ernst Mahle, a German transplant to Brazil who managed to work in some portentous chords between a rather twittery opening and a Bela Bartok-like fugal finale.
Pianist Tatiana Roitman, violinist Geoffrey Robson and cellist David Gerstein, as a newly formed piano trio called “Wild Beats,” opened the concert with the Piano Trio by Claude Debussy, whose pre-Impressionist, late Romantic music at age 18 was charming, not challenging. That pretty well sums up the excellent performance, as well.
To close, the Quapaw Quartet – Eric Hayward and Meredith Maddox Hicks, violins; Ryan Mooney, viola; and Gerstein, cello – got a workout in musical and extra-musical effects in an engaging performance in Sergei Prokofiev’s String Quartet No. 2.