Guest conductor lively on podium, musicians respond

Guest conductor Carolyn Kuan was very expressive and evocative on the podium Saturday night at Little Rock’s Robinson Center Performance Hall. And the members of the Arkansas Symphony Orchestra gave it all right back to her.

For the third concert of the orchestra’s 2019-20 Stella Boyle Smith Masterworks season, Kuan, music director of the Hartford (Conn.) Symphony, led the orchestra in a short but busy program of folk-music-focused, 20th-century showpieces, and if the audience wasn’t dancing in the aisles, it showed the usual signs of warm approval.

It was a short program — one work short of a full basket, perhaps. The second half, Four Dance Episodes from Aaron Copland’s ballet Rodeo, was actually shorter than the intermission.

Kuan juggled the printed program order, moving the Dance Suite by Bela Bartok to the curtain-raiser. She and the players handled the piece’s difficult Eastern European rhythms and some musical special effects — for example, the strings playing col legno (bouncing their bows on the strings) in the opening passages — with comparative ease. The woodwinds were having obvious fun with the rowdier elements of the “Allegro vivace” third movement; the brass got to go a little bit wild in the finale, in which the battery was extremely busy.

Solo players also got to shine in the Variaciones Concertantes by Argentine composer Alberto Ginastera, a set of 12 pieces that starts with a poignant theme on harp and cello and includes nine “mini-concertos” — a “joke” for flute; a scherzo for clarinet; a dramatic aria for viola; a canon for oboe and bassoon; a rhythmic moment for trumpet and trombone; a “moto perpetuo,” with pizzicato finale, for violin; a pastorale for horn; and a reprise of the theme for harp and, this time, contrabass. Again, the piece’s tricky rhythms gave the players no trouble, and Kuan marshalled the forces with flair and aplomb.

If the concert fell short at all, it was the four Copland pieces, certainly one part of the program with which almost all the audience members were familiar. On the one hand, Kuan made sure the performance kept things fresh and lively, but her tempos were just a little slower than we’re used to — though it worked well in the two slower episodes, the “Corral Nocturne” and “Saturday Night Waltz.” There were some sloppy moments, including a few surprising trumpet clams. Adding “crowd noise” — contributed by orchestra members who didn’t have an instrument at their lips or under their chins — to the “Hoe-Down” finale was a nice touch, and the audience gave the performance an ovation nonetheless.

Kuan and the orchestra repeat the program at 3 p.m. today at Robinson, 426 W. Markham St. at Broadway. Ticket information is available at (501) 666-1761, ext. 1, or online at ArkansasSymphony.org.