Not An Audition

Busy conductor filling in for ASO Masterworks opener

JoAnn Falletta wants to make sure audiences don’t regard her Arkansas Symphony podium debut this weekend as an audition for the orchestra’s vacant music director position.

She already has enough to keep her busy; she’s the music director of the Buffalo Philharmonic, a position she has held for 20 years, and the Virginia Symphony. She’s also the principal guest conductor of the Brevard Music Center and artistic adviser for the Hawaii Symphony.

She also does a lot of guestconducting, which is what’s bringing her to the Arkansas Symphony Orchestra to open the 2019-20 Stella Boyle Smith Masterworks season.

“I’m really looking forward to it,” Falletta says of her first experience with the Little Rock-based ensemble. “I hear some very good things about their artistic excellence and their personality as well.”

Genre-crossing trio Time for Three joins Falletta and the orchestra for Concerto 4-3, which Jennifer Higdon, the ASO’s 2012-13 Composer of the Year, wrote upon their commission (reflected, of course, in the name of the composition).

This will be the second time she has worked with the trio. “After hearing about them for years, I had a chance to work with them last summer at the festival at Brevard, and I’ve just fallen in love with this group,” she says.

“We did the same piece, the concerto by Jen Higdon. Jen has managed to write a serious piece that is absolutely virtuosic and light-hearted. It’s well suited to them because that’s their personality.”

Bookending Falletta’s program are two orchestral showpieces — Maurice Ravel’s “La Valse” and “Scheherazade,” Nicolai Rimsky-Korsakov’s fourmovement musical retelling of “1,001 Arabian Nights.”

Solos abound in “Scheherazade,” she adds. “It’s really a tour de force for so many of the musicians.

“The Ravel is also an extraordinary piece; it’s not very long, but it’s emotionally riveting. A lot of people think [it’s] going to be kind of a light-hearted Viennese waltz, but it’s not that at all — it’s very dark. Only Ravel could make something so dark so beautiful from beginning to end.”