Chamber series gives crowd a ‘gran’ evening

Perhaps you recall the moment in the movie Amadeus when Austrian court composer Antonio Salieri first hears music by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart that he describes as a soaring oboe melody atop a “rusty squeezebox.”

That’s the piece (well, the third movement of the piece), Mozart’s Serenade No. 10 in B-flat major, K. 361/370a, “Gran Partita,” that a baker’s dozen of wind players from the Arkansas Symphony took on Tuesday night at the Clinton Presidential Center in Little Rock for the orchestra’s River Rhapsodies Chamber Music series.

And, boy, did they sound “gran.” (Music Director Philip Mann insisted in his introduction that that is neither Mozart’s title nor his misspelling.)

It was a “band” big enough to require a conductor, so Mann was on the podium, guiding the players (clarinets, basset horns, oboes and bassoons in pairs, four horns and a contrabassoon replacing the double bass in Mozart’s score) in producing gorgeous, balanced tones at just-right tempos.

Besides the heartbreakingly beautiful “Adagio” third movement, highest points of the performance included the folk dance in the second trio of the fourth movement (the serenade’s second “Menuetto”), the lively and playful sixth-movement theme and variations and the boisterous, hell-for-leather finale.

The first part of the concert wasn’t quite so “gran.” The Quapaw Quartet — Eric Hayward and Meredith Maddox Hicks, violins; Katrina Weeks, viola; and David Gerstein, cello — gave a good, but not outstanding, performance of Bedrich Smetana’s autobiographical String Quartet No. 1 in e minor, “From My Life.”

There was quite a bit of sloppiness in the second movement; what is supposed to be the state’s pre-eminent chamber ensemble is certainly capable of better than that, as they showed in their passionate and harmonically sound playing in the third movement, “Largo sostenuto,” and the fine finale.