Reviews

Author:   ERIC E. HARRISON

Saturday night at Little Rock’s Robinson Center Music Hall, pianist Norman Krieger made one of the hardest pieces in the repertoire, Johannes Brahms’ Piano Concerto No. 2, look and sound easy.

Just as he was supposed to do.

With just the right balance of force when the composer called for it and tenderness when he didn’t, Krieger, soloing with the Arkansas Symphony Orchestra and conductor Philip Mann, commanded the keyboard during the titanic piece, less a virtuosic vehicle than a symphonic work in which the virtuoso, though front and center, is fully integrated with the orchestra. (As witness, for example, the absence of lengthy, showy cadenzas.)

It would be impossible to listen to the sunny, sprightly fourth movement without a smile; Mann sure had one on his face when he showed it to the audience, and an even broader one after the performance.

The orchestra, set farther back on the stage than usual to make room for the 9-foot Steinway, sounded a bit thin in spots but gave Krieger superb support. Principal cellist David Gerstein’s cantabile third-movement solo, wreathed in a halo of violas, was absolutely gorgeous.

The program also featured just enough high-energy, excellently performed music by Czech-born composer Antonin Dvorak, Brahms’ friend and protege, to keep the second half from becoming an anticlimax and fulfill the “Bohemian Rhapsody” Masterworks concert title.

That included four of Dvorak’s 16 Slavonic Dances – three from the op.72 (No. 2, in e minor, No. 5 in b-flat minor and No. 7 in C major) and the finale from op.46, No. 8 in g minor – and the once-popular, recently neglected Scherzo capriccioso, op.66.

Krieger, Mann and the “Bohemian” band will reprise the concert at 3 p.m. today at Robinson, West Markham Street and Broadway, Little Rock. Ticket information is available by calling (501) 666-1761 or online at arkansassymphony.org.

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.

Author:   ARTHUR PAUL BOWEN

The Clinton Presidential Center provided a most agreeable venue for the second night of the 2012-13 Parker Lexus River Rhapsodies, which features chamber music performed by members of the Arkansas Symphony Orchestra.

“Duos” consisted of works for duet string players by Mozart, Rossini, English composer Frank Bridge and Hungarian composer Zoltan Kodaly. The program was ably performed by cellist David Gerstein, violinists Andrew Irvin and Geoffrey Robson, violists Tatiana Kotcherguina and Ryan Mooney, along with bassist Barron Weir.

The program led off with Mozart’s Duo No. 1 in G for Violin and Viola, K. 423. The dynamic interplay between Irvin and Mooney was very nice. Their performance is proof that allegro doesn’t mean “play fast.” Conversely, adagio can be played with energy. The duo’s impeccable technique produced a very nice sonorous tone, particularly from Mooney.

Rossini’s Duetto for Cello and Bass proved to be quite the crowd pleaser despite being something of an odd duck musically. Still, the piece requires the performers to display the extreme ranges of both instruments and gave Weir’s bass the rare opportunity to slug it out note-for-note with Gerstein‘s cello.

Kodaly’s Duo for Violin and Cello, Op. 7 offered up by Robson and Gerstein was rhapsodic and lyrical in equal measure, particularly in the piece’s first movement. The entrance to the second movement was especially lovely and proof again that adagio can be rendered as propulsive and powerful.

The Lament for Two Violas by Bridge, more widely known at one time as the tutor of Benjamin Britten, was nothing short of exquisite. The interplay between Kotcherguina and Mooney featured the art of dissonance rendered hauntingly beautiful by the two of them.

A beautiful night with wonderful and challenging music performed by superb musicians, right here under our noses.

Author:   BILL JONES

Augustin Hadelich made a triumphant return to the Clinton Presidential Center in Little Rock on Tuesday night for the first concert of this season’s River Rhapsodies Chamber Music Series. Performing both solo and with members of the Arkansas Symphony Orchestra, the virtuoso violinist gave ample proof once again that there are good reasons for his popularity.

One of the consistently striking things about the ASO’s chamber series is the care taken in the programming, and the Tuesday night concert was neatly balanced. Indeed, a balance of sorts was struck within the first work itself, Franz Joseph Haydn’s String Quartet in C Major, Op. 54, No. 2. In their treatment of the piece, which ranged from mischievous brightness to lyrical, almost Mozart-like introspection, the Quapaw Quartet (Eric Hayward, violin; Meredith Maddox Hicks, violin; Ryan Mooney, viola; David Gerstein, cello) maintained a clean, crisp approach throughout.

The Rockefeller Quartet presented Anton Webern’s youthful, pre-twelve-tone idyll, Langsamer Satz (“Slow Movement”). A last nod to Romanticism, the short piece was a sort of love poem to the composer’s cousin and future wife, and the players (Christian Baker, violin; Darby Be-Dell, violin; Katherine Reynolds, viola; Daniel Cline, cello) handled it in true ensemble fashion. Even the pizzicato effects were kept somewhat muted so as not to distract from the impact of the yearning melodic phrases.

Hadelich introduced the second part of the evening’s program with Belgian violinist and composer Eugene Ysaye’s fiery, elegant Violin Sonata No. 6 in E Major, Op. 27, “Manuel Quiroga.” From his first touch of the strings, Hadelich owned the piece, making the most challenging turns with his bow appear both effortless and inevitable.

For the final work, Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky’s Sextet, Op. 70, “Souvenir de Florence,” Hadelich was joined by violinist Kiril Laskarov, as well as Reynolds, Mooney, Gerstein and Cline for a four movements that ranged from controlled tumult to soaring melodies.

Author:   PAUL GREENBERG

It’s a beautiful sunset, as always, when seen from the Great Hall of the Clinton Library with a glass of wine in your hand and the chamber music about to begin. The anticipation is palpable. Good things are imminent. You can feel it.

Old friends are here and there in the crowd, new friends about to be made. Everything seems suspended in that moment before the first note. We need only find the right key, and all else will follow. Chord after chord. Beauty awaits. We know it.

Silver-haired ladies, still lovers of music, can be seen scattered like sentinels on guard. So long as they’re here, there is still continuity, there is still civilization.

This is the last concert of the season. Is it my always pessimistic imagination, or aren’t there as many grandes dames as usual in attendance? What will happen when they are gone? A brief shiver runs through me.

Words are superfluous on such occasions; they only get in the way. Like a gentleman’s tie, those who only announce the music rather than make it should never be memorable. Some of them on KLRE, the classical music station in town, forget that. Some even speak over the music. As if it were only a backdrop for their chit-chat.

Just tell us the title of the composition, who wrote it, when and maybe where, and then get out of the way. The music can speak for itself. Everything else distracts, complicates, intrudes. Even some of the musicians called on for longish introductions this evening fall into the same trap.

Here in the Great Hall there are still printed programs. The listener never has to be lost, wondering what he’s listening to. Or what he just heard. He can read or not. The choice is his. He’s not dependent on some announcer who forgets to announce the piece, or announces entirely too much about it-or worse, about himself.

The sun is blinding at this time of day through all the glass, a whole wall of it, in the Great Hall, but it will soon set and the music go on. Sight is a nice complement to sound, just as this chamber is to chamber music. But the visual isn’t essential, comforting and familiar as the sight of the snaggle-toothed skyline of Little Rock is outside. It is the music that counts, that changes everything: the day, daily thoughts, all other perceptions and preconceptions.

Words aren’t needed. Music, like style, isn’t something that’s just applied to art later, an Extra Added Attraction. It is central. It permeates. It transforms. It changes everything. Wallace Stevens’ lines from “The Man With The Blue Guitar” come back:

They said, “You have a blue guitar, You do not play things as they are.” The man replied, “Things as they are Are changed upon the blue guitar.”

Tonight’s first piece, according to the program, is “Corner in Manhattan” by Michael Torke. We’re told it comes complete with taxicab horns. In homage to Gershwin’s “An American in Paris.” In short, it’s been done. I wince. This is going to be awful. As happens with embarrassing regularity, I am mistaken. The first movement, “Sixth Ave. in the Afternoon,” is energetic, engaging, enchanting. Delightful, delicious, de-lovely, as Cole Porter would say. And did.

There’s a rhythmic theme to the piece, like the Mozartian accompaniment to all those stagecoach rides in Milos Forman’s Amadeus. You don’t just hear the hoof beats but feel them. Now you’re in Little Rock., Ark., but you’re on Sixth Avenue in New York, too.

The second movement, “Bedford St. at Night” lacks the same life as Bedford Street at night, as well as the ominous feel it had in pre-Giuliani New York, when to go out in that neighborhood was to be stalked.

Safety returns with the final movement, “Houston St. in the Morning,” even if it doesn’t have the breadth of that street. But it does have some of Edward Hopper’s pre-dawn light.

The impulse behind the music may be derivative, a term now used dismissively. But there is derivative and there is derivative. The difference depends on what a work of art is derived from, and how well. Derive a work from something fine, and it, too, may be fine, even a new and elegant edition of fine. Originality is much overrated in art, continuation underestimated. As this piece reminds.

Darius Milhaud is next, a composer who wasn’t afraid of melody, or even of being popular. He deserves to be. Tonight it’s his “Suite for Violin, Clarinet and Piano. Op. 157b,” which isn’t anywhere as formidable as its title. Like its overture, it’s vif et gai, lively and gay. The way Paris once was.

What a pity nothing can be described as gay any more without a momentary pause, a hesitant moment of self-consciousness. It was a useful, even irreplaceable word, gay. Now it’s not the same. The new definition of the word has overwhelmed, distorted, obscured the old. I hate it when that happens; the language has been impoverished, a gap created where there was charm.

Dangerous practice, pinning words on music. But the music itself remains . . . gay. In the original, much-missed sense. Street scenes in Paris unfold in the mind. Women in scarves with string bags. Greengrocers’ shops and flower stalls late in the afternoon as everyone hurries home. All is seen as if from high in a bus on its way into town from Orly airport in the mid-1950s, just arrived, when everything is still fresh.

Somewhere an accordion is playing and Maurice Chevalier, eternal boulevardier, is strolling down the Champs Elysee in a straw boater, whistling a tune and forever twirling his cane. . . .

The next selection on the program is “Merry Music,” but it’s not very. It’s crass, tinny, derivative in the bad sense, and most of all dull. Its great virtue is that it’s mercifully short. The piece should be cranked out on a carnival ride, not in a spacious hall. What’s it doing wasting our time and the Camino Trio’s? Let’s just say it was an unfortunate choice.

INTERMISSION

Now it’s time for what most of us came for, surely. Schubert’s “String Quartet in C Major,” which is not just a musical but a spiritual masterpiece. Written just before his death, it would wait long afterward to win a just admiration. Now it has come into its towering own.

You can still hear the Angel of Death knocking on the composer’s door. Or is it Mozart’s statue of the Commendatore come for Don Giovanni and vengeance? No, this music summons us not to death but life.

Words just get in the way now. Things are no longer as they were. On the cellist’s features there is written every impulse of this powerful, profound music. David Gerstein, transported, transports us. Schubert does not die but lives. In the music, in us. Nothing great is ever lost.

Thank you, Quapaw Quartet. Well played. We go home exhilarated. Maybe a little exhausted, too, but elevated. The after-concert coffee is sweet, foamy, rich, delicious. But it cannot match the music. Nothing could.

Paul Greenberg is editorial page editor of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.

Author:   ERIC E. HARRISON

“Varied” was the word members of the Quapaw Quartet used to describe the program for Tuesday night’s Arkansas Symphony River Rhapsodies chamber concert at Little Rock’s Clinton Presidential Center. And that’s probably the kindest, most accurate description of it.

Although the quartet’s annual showcase consisted of only about 25 percent music by Ludwig van Beethoven, the orchestra titled it “Ode to Beethoven,” apparently a semisuccessful way of hiding that the first thing on the program was 30 minutes of String Quartet by Witold Lutaslawski.

The Polish composer specifies that his 1964 piece, his only work in the genre, has no meter, no key, no pulse and no cohesion – the four parts are written and published independently of one another, and with the exception of a very few passages, the players are not supposed to be playing together (in token of which, violinist Eric Hayward, sitting first chair, started before his quartet-mates had even sat down).

Much of the piece that sounded like anything at all alternated between a burning beehive and the torture of cats; the composer seems to have been bent on seeing how many things he could do with four stringed instruments that wouldn’t involve actually making music with them.

The minimalist Chalk, a 1992 piece by Michael Torke, the orchestra’s first Composer of the Year, at least involved some actual melody and harmony, though it’s unlikely something anybody in the audience would be able to walk out whistling.

Thank goodness the quartet – Hayward and Meredith Maddox Hicks, violins; Ryan Mooney, viola; and David Gerstein, cello – finished up with a stirring, sometimes brilliant, performance of Beethoven’s String Quartet No. 11 in f minor, “Serioso.”

And Alisa Coffey, the orchestra’s principal harpist, had a fine turn in the charming, characteristically French, tonal-for-20th-century harp showpiece Rhapsodie pour La Harpe by Michel Grandjany.

Author:   BILL JONES

“Summer Vacation” was the theme of the Arkansas Symphony Orchestra’s opening concert in its 2011-12 River Rhapsodies chamber music series. The program, performed Tuesday night at the Clinton Presidential Center, was another delightful offering that emphasized musical variety.

The Rockefeller Quartet (Christian Baker and Darby BeDell, violins; Katherine Reynolds, viola; and Daniel Cline, cello) tackled one of the central works of the chamber-music repertoire, Claude Debussy’s String Quartet in G Minor, op. 10. The quartet produced a combination of tonal richness and technical austerity in each of the four movements. Classical restraint and Romantic passion were conveyed throughout in the strong cello lines and the sweetly expressive violins and viola.

The Etesian Winds (Diane McVinney, flute; Beth Wheeler, oboe; Kelly Johnson, clarinet; Susan Leon, bassoon; and David Renfro, horn) performed Two Girls on the Beach, Looking for Different Places to Put Down Their Towels by Michael Torke, the orchestra’s first Composer of the Year. Torke’s witty 2005 composition was lyrical and comical at once. Accompanied by onscreen narrative titles similar to those used in silent movies (“The sand is awfully hot on their feet”), the musicians, clad in beachwear, provided an exceptional musical treat. Torke’s minimalism was unobtrusive in the group’s fluid handling of the piece.

It is impossible to single out a high point in the concert, but violinists Andrew Irvin, Kiril Laskarov, BeDell and Baker came close with their precision and cohesion in Antonio Vivaldi’s Concerto for Four Violins in B Minor, op. 3, No. 10. Adding impeccable support were Katherine Reynolds and Ryan Mooney, violas; Daniel Cline, cello; and Carl Anthony, whose harpsichord accompaniment supplied solid grounding for the group.

Bringing the evening to a stunning conclusion were the Wild Beats (pianist Tatiana Roitman, cellist David Gerstein and violinist Geoffrey Robson), whose vigorous rendering of contemporary composer Paul Schoenfield’s Cafe Music, a brilliant fusion and sampling of different musical styles, and whose elegant take on tango master Astor Piazzola’s “Summer” from The Four Seasons of Buenos Aires, made one wish the “Summer Vacation” could go on indefinitely.

Author:   BILL JONES

Roll over, Paganini; tell David Oistrakh the news. The day of the virtuoso is not a thing of the past.

Violinist Augustin Hadelich electrified an audience at the Clinton Presidential Center in Little Rock on Tuesday night in the latest of the Arkansas Symphony Orchestra’s River Rhapsodies series of concerts. The Juilliard-trained musician filled his solo and ensemble performances with passion and grace.

Hadelich first took the stage with his 18th-century Stradivari violin in Belgian composer-violinist Eugene Ysaye’s Sonata for Solo Violin No. 4 in E Minor, Op. 27. His elegant control was immediately apparent in the first movement, “Allamanda,” while the contrasting pizzicato style in the second movement, “Sarabande,” delighted the full house. Hadelich tackled the rapid-fire “Finale” with admirable elan.

For Felix Mendelssohn’s youthful Octet in E-flat Major, Op. 20, the young guest artist joined violinists Andrew Irvin, Christian Baker and Darby BeDell; violists Katherine Reynolds and Ryan Mooney; and cellists David Gerstein and Daniel Cline. Although Hadelich blended well in the group, the joyful expressiveness in his playing was evident throughout the piece. All the players combined in a celebration of the full-bodied lyricism of the “Andante.” Their bold, bright approach to the “Scherzo” made the familiar movement as refreshing as a first hearing.

The concert began with the Rockefeller Quartet (violinists Baker and BeDell, violist Mooney and cellist Cline) providing a striking fusion of crisp style and muted effect in Leos Janacek’s String Quartet No. 1, “Kreutzer Sonata,” a work that alludes to both the Beethoven piece and the Tolstoy story. The quartet members maintained a remarkable precision even as they led the listener through a spiraling descent into a troubled emotional realm.

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.

Author:   PAUL GREENBERG

We cannot know his legendary head . . . yet his torso is still suffused with brilliance from inside, like a lamp, in which his gaze, now turned to low, gleams in all its power. . . . Otherwise this stone would seem defaced . . . would not, from all the borders of itself, burst like a star: for here there is no place that does not see you. You must change your life. -Rainer Maria Rilke,

Archaic Torso of Apollo

Dear Diary-

Went to the second of the season’s chamber music concerts the other night at the Clinton Library. Just to see if it would be any better than the first. It was. I didn’t think I could spare the time on a week night-deadlines loomed-but time was never better spent. For the music met the test of any true work of art, which is that it send out Rilke’s imperative: You must change your life. The program was Pan-American so the first selection was as unavoidable as it was enchanting: Manuel Ponce’s string trio. It let loose a string of visual Visit Mexico in the Spring travel posters, familiar but always ready to be refreshed. If music confines itself to the ear, and doesn’t stir the mind’s eye as well, it’s only a score.

One vision-memory succeeded another: The beach at Mazatlan under an overcast sky. The softly crashing waves. The rustle of worthless pesos back in the ’70s, when any American with a few dollars in his pocket was a millionaire courtesy of the exchange rate. The one ticket in the loteria nacional that would change everything. Somewhere outside Creel in the Sierra Madre en route to the Copper Canyon, a worker at a rail siding casually tosses a chunk of unrefined gold from a coal car to a thrilled tourist on the Chihuahua al Pacifico line. The patina of the years is brushed away by the strings of violin and viola, and the luster of Mexico shines again, brash as mariachi music.

For sophisticated critics, Ponce’s music is insufficiently abstract, dense, minimalist, teutonic-name your favorite curse. Sophisticated: a word akin to sophist. Manuel Ponce is, in a word, too Mexican. Oh, if only he could free himself to compose like a European. All he’d have to do is cut out his heart. This much Mexicans and Americans share: a cultural inferiority complex. Anything foreign must be better because it’s foreign.

The third movement of the string trio (Cancion: Andante expressivo) is indeed a song sung slow and expressive, as sad and noble as a long ago time still burning us with its gaze, demanding: You must change your life.

You can hear it all in Ponce’s music, Todo el Mexico. The way the campesinos look in the barren flats, silent and sullen, the violence stirring within. The way the businessmen deal and the politicians speak (endlessly), the families gathered around the table, the beggars outside the cathedral. . . . Then comes the Rondo-scherzoso, and business picks up. You can almost hear the Gershwin-like taxi horns around the Zócalo.

Funny-funny strange and funny just funny-how you remember just where you were when you first read a great book. In this case, R.H. Tawney’s Religion and the Rise of Capitalism. I can see the typeface of the paperback now as I turned the pages while getting a shoeshine on the edge of the great plaza. I told the bootblack my father had been a zapatero, a shoemaker, and thought it would give us something in common. As soon as I said it, I knew how stupid and condescending it sounded, an impression confirmed by his glance at this gringo with his neglected shoes. Besides, a zapatero would have been a step up from his vantage point. I fled back to my book, hiding my face. I really must change my life. . . . How long had that scene been marinating in my memory, 30 or 40 years now? But there is no time in a song sung andante expressivo.

Why must they have the musicians at such concerts deliver an always toolong introduction to each composition and composer? It’s the same mistake the announcers on Little Rock’s KLRE make. My, they do go on. But it’s worse when musicians do it. When they can play so well, why waste their talent talking? . . . Happily, the microphone had gone out this evening, and between the electrical malfunction and my less than acute hearing, I was spared much of the introductory chatter. . . . But, ah, the music! Thank you, Geoffrey Robson on violin, Ryan Mooney on viola, and David Gerstein, cello.

Interspersed on the program was some work of composers Mexican only in name. The pieces could have been written at any upto-date conservatory. Like so much of modern music, they were more modern than music, more exercises than compositions. There’s nothing wrong with exercises; they sound beautiful overheard in the hall of a music school, or listening to a symphony orchestra warm up. But they should not be confused with the kind of art that speaks, and lets you know: You must change your life.

The high point of the evening, since a Pan-American program must include America, too, is the Dvorak quartet. (No. 13 in G, Op. 106) Naturally the most American number on the program would be by a foreigner. We’re a Nation of Immigrants and all that. It’s a truism, but at the heart of every truism is a truth.

Antonin Dvorak discovered and discoursed on America in his music-much as Tocqueville did in his prose. Few things introduce an American to his own country as well as the works of foreigners. They see things with fresh eyes, and listen-as Dvorak did-with fresh ears to jazz beats and gospel hymns and the sound of dynamos. Throughout his American pieces there is the undisguisable, inexhaustible, unerasable American sound. It is the sound of hope. Hope ever renewed generation after generation, fulfillment after fulfillment, disappointment after disappointment, lull after storm. Thank you for the full panorama, Rockefeller Quartet. (Chris Baker, Darby DeBell, Katherine Reynolds, Daniel Cline.)

Then the players walk away, and the audience disperses into the cold, now music-charged night air. The concert ends. The music doesn’t. Neither does its power, its demand, its imperative. I really must change my life.

Paul Greenberg is the Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial page editor of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.