Wagner love songs smooth, subdued under candlelight

Most folks think of Richard Wagner only as the composer of five- hour operas with casts of thousands and pit orchestras in the many dozens.

Thursday night at Little Rock’s Trinity Episcopal Cathedral, the audience for the Arkansas Symphony’s Intimate Neighborhood Concerts “Haydn By Candlelight” program, got to hear another facet of Wagner, the quiet, smallscale Wagner of the Siegfried Idyll and of numerous beautiful songs for solo voices.

Wagner’s Wesendonck Lieder, five lovely love poems by the wife of a patron ( Wagner’s muse and possibly his lover), aren’t performed all that often with piano; you almost never hear it done with an orchestral accompaniment.

Soprano Maria Fasciano, in front of 28 members of the orchestra and conductor Philip Mann, simply blew away listeners in the dimly illuminated church. Fasciano’s full voice is gorgeously suited both to the setting and the music; balance between singer and players was excellent, though her gestures reflecting the passion of the pieces were a little hard to read by the light of candles and subdued overheads ( so was the small type of the song texts in the program).

The “Haydn” portion of the program was an enjoyable performance of Franz Joseph Haydn’s Symphony No. 43 in E- flat major, “Mercury,” most of which Mann took at moderate tempos. He finally let the players do a little romping in the more mercurial final movement.

The 19 string players soaked the audience in heavenly harmonies in the curtain raiser, Celestial Fantasy by Alan Hovhaness.