Cellist eschews jeans, still blows out the hall

Ludwig van Beethoven likely never wore jeans. But the members of the Arkansas Symphony did, and so did a good chunk of the audience, at Saturday night’s uber-casual “Beethoven & Blue Jeans” concert at Little Rock’s Robinson Center Music Hall.

Israeli-born cellist Inbal Segev didn't wear jeans, but black leather pants for her blow-out-the-hall solo in Friedrich Gulda’s Concerto for Cello and Wind Orchestra, part of a very Viennese Masterworks program.

Gulda, a noteworthy though quirky 20th-century giant of the keyboard who collaborated with jazz greats (Chick Corea) and even rock bands (Emerson, Lake and Palmer), blended rock, jazz, classical, neo-Romanticism and even perhaps a little neo-Renaissance into his rollicking, ear-pinning 1980 piece.

Every note, except perhaps for a couple of somber ones in the extended, partially improvised third-movement “Cadenza,” was enormous fun. The orchestra’s wind and brass players, augmented by a jazz-rock combo of amplified guitar, drum kit and rhythm bass, seemed to be having nearly as much fun as the slightly amplified soloist, audience and conductor Philip Mann.

Four curtain calls produced a desired encore, the “Sarabande” from J.S. Bach’s Solo Cello Suite No. 3.

In the wake of this thoroughly enjoyable gem and the brisk, bright, brilliant and bubbly curtain-raiser, Johann Strauss Jr.’s Die Fledermaus Overture, the second half, Beethoven’s sunny Symphony No. 4, was almost, well, an anticlimax. Mann and the musicians labored mightily and well in an unusually muscular and vivid performance, perhaps to demonstrate that this sadly neglected work is as worthy as its titanic siblings (the symphonies Nos. 3 and 5), but the trade-off turned out mostly to be muscle for snap.

Segev, Mann, Beethoven and the orchestra will all be back at 3 p.m. today at Robinson, at West Markham Street and Broadway. A beer-andbrats street party kicks off two hours before “curtain” along the block of West Markham outside the hall. Segev will also be featured in a River Rhapsodies Series chamber concert at 7 p.m. Tuesday at the Clinton Presidential Center, 1200 President Clinton Ave., Little Rock. Ticket information for both concerts is available by calling (501) 661-1761 or online at arkansassymphony.org.