MUSIC REVIEW: Arkansas Symphony Orchestra’s night of firsts wraps up in rollicking finale

Saturday was a evening of firsts for the Arkansas Symphony Orchestra at Small Rock’s Robinson Heart Functionality Hall.

The earth premiere of “Pasajes” by Tania Leon was a delightfully obtainable musical experience, reflecting, as the composer defined, “flashes in my memory of what has been the trajectory of my lifetime.”

As these kinds of, it consists of distant but pleased childhood memories, bits of birdsong, rhythms of her native Cuba and what she precisely describes as a “bombastic ending that [shows] what I have develop into as a musician.” Oh, and a timpani cadenza to kick off that finale (a tour de force for timpanist Rick Dimond). Commissioned by Amplifying Voices, it’ll have subsequent debuts by fifty percent a dozen other “bands.”

Pianist Martina Filjak, in a shimmering golden robe that was in marked distinction with the orchestra’s “concert blacks,” sought, and shipped, a great deal of nuance in Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s C-main “Piano Concerto No. 21” (a bonus for individuals who have listened to the piece a hundred times or a lot more). She engaged in a great musical dialogue with the gamers and with initially-time visitor conductor Akiko Fujimoto, and her self-penned cadenzas were shorter, punchy and extremely vivid.

But it took right until the rollicking finale for almost everything to thoroughly mesh and for the functionality to be as considerably fun as it should to have been through. The subsequent ovation, alas, failed to create an encore.

Fujimoto, songs director of the Mid-Texas Symphony in Seguin, Texas, and former associate conductor of the Minnesota Orchestra and the San Antonio Symphony (and the wife of former ASO Associate Conductor Israel Getzov), ultimately received to exhibit what she could do as a conductor in the brief concert’s finale, a glorious efficiency of Richard Strauss’ “Death and Transfiguration.”

Fujimoto, Filjak, Leon (presumably) and the orchestra will repeat the software at 3 p.m. Sunday at Robinson, 426 W. Markham St. at Broadway. Ticket facts is available by contacting (501) 666-1761, Extension 1, or on the internet at ArkansasSymphony.org.