Romantic triumph closes ASO season

Isn’t it Romantic?

The Arkansas Symphony Orchestra and conductor Geoffrey Robson closed out their 2023-24 Masterworks season Saturday night at Little Rock’s Robinson Center Performance Hall with a perfectly balanced program featuring Romantic music by Wagner, Schumann and Brahms.

Not Robert Schumann, but Clara Schumann — her Piano Concerto in A-minor, a too-rarely heard work that pianist Michelle Cann played with considerable brilliance and brio.

The concerto, a virtuoso work for her own performance, shows off the chops of a teenaged Ms. Schumann, a brilliant musician who sublimated her career to favor her husband’s and whose works have been unjustly neglected, in part because of her sex. The second movement is essentially an extended cadenza, partly in dialogue with the solo cello (played superbly by ASO principal David Gerstein).

Cann’s own virtuoso performance earned her an ovation, which quickly earned the audience an encore: a bravura performance of a ’40s jazzedup version of Sergei Rachmaninoff’s C-sharp minor Prelude that absolutely blew the listeners away.

Robson, in putting Richard Wagner and Johannes Brahms, who were in opposite late 19th century musical camps, on the same program, took a bit of a musical risk, but it turned out well.

The orchestra, with the exception of one minor horn clam, was excellent in the curtain raiser, the “Prelude” and “Love Death” from Wagner’s opera “Tristan und Isolde,” and even better in the closing work, Brahms’ Symphony No. 4 in E-minor, his penultimate work for orchestra. Robson’s tempos were spot on; the performance captured much, though not all, of the symphony’s nuances, and the jolly third-movement scherzo particularly stood out, not least because of the obbligato triangle.

Cann, Robson and the orchestra repeat the program at 3 p.m. Sunday at Robinson, 426 W. Markham St. at Broadway. Ticket information is available by calling (501) 666-1761, ext. 1, or online at arkansassymphony.org.