Kyle Kellams: The Symphony of Northwest Arkansas season with guest conductors continues Saturday night at the Walton Arts Center. Across the Silk Road: Scheherazade will be conducted by Akiko Fujimoto, currently music director of the Mid-Texas Symphony. Previously, she held titled conductor positions with the Minnesota Orchestra, San Antonio Symphony and Virginia Symphony.
Yesterday, she came to the Anthony and Susan Hui News Studio along with Ben Harris, executive director of the Symphony of Northwest Arkansas. Ben says with a season of guest conductors, the symphony still establishes a routine.
Ben Harris: We're a pretty well-oiled machine. When we get to concert week, we do it the same way every time. We know where we're going to rehearse, when we're going to rehearse, what we're going to rehearse months in advance because we have a lot of prep work to do to make sure that everything is in place for the musicians and the guest conductor. For us, what we can do is just be here as the stability with the whole thing and provide our guests with what is routine for us so that it feels comfortable for them right from the get-go.
Kellams: Akiko, this program, this has got some heavyweights, some stalwarts. Do you look forward to it?
Akiko Fujimoto: Absolutely. It's a great program and it's got all your favorites, maybe a couple that you don't know, but that's why you come to concerts, to find out. So Rimsky-Korsakov, which is, from just an audience member standpoint, just an exciting piece.
Absolutely. It's a barn burner for the orchestra, as well as a 45-minute adventure. A lot of explosions, a lot of intensity, but also absolutely beautiful lyrical melodies. It's a tour de force for us, for sure. And obviously I'm here to be checked out for my baton technique too. So I'm happy to showcase that through this piece that has a lot of twists and turns and hills and mountains and lots of fun things.
Kyle Kellams: Now, as a guest conductor, as you mentioned, you're being tried out. You didn't select the program.
Harris: She did.
Kellams: Oh, you did?
Fujimoto: OK. Well, it was one of the two suggestions. And I met with Ben and their artistic consultant, and we were kind of leaning toward another idea, but Ben called later and said, actually, can we go back to Scheherazade? And I said, if you like it, I love it.
Kellams: What else will we hear Saturday night?
Fujimoto: We open with a Mozart overture, Abduction to the Seraglio, which was one of his German operas. A lot of spicy Turkish-inspired music, so you can listen for fun percussion instruments that are imitating the Janissary bands.
And then we move on to Alexander Borodin's tone poem. It's only eight minutes, but it's a landscape painting piece from Central Asia. It's a piece that depicts the transfer of a caravan across the desert, and they're being protected by the Russian military. So you're going to hear the Russian tune and you're going to hear a Central Asian, or what Rimsky-Korsakov thought of as a Central Asian melody. And it's the intertwining of those melodies.
And this piece begins from far away and it dissipates into far away. So you're literally sitting there hearing the caravan go across you over those eight minutes. It's very exciting.
And then we finish the first half with one of my favorites, the Mother Goose Suite by Maurice Ravel, the French composer. My dad asked me over the break, I understand why every other piece is on there, the Silk Road reference, but why is this French piece in there? So I am going to share why with the audience before we play this 17-minute work.
But in the middle, there is Chinese- and Japanese-inspired music that Ravel incorporated. And of course, the French were the first to kind of catch on to the Asian exocitism, back in the 1920s, early 20th century. So it's an absolutely gorgeous piece in five movements of different fairy tales that you're all familiar with.
Kellams: I love that. I think it's great when a program has something that we're familiar with, whether we've heard it live recently or not. But I'm really excited about hearing something live that I'm unfamiliar with.
Fujimoto: And actually, the Borodin, whenever I program it, I always have a couple of musicians say, you know, I haven't played this before. So I'm always glad to introduce something that they haven't played because they're usually sick and tired of all the classics. But this one seems to kind of come as a surprise to some of even the more seasoned people.
Now, we've all, a lot of us have enjoyed other works by Borodin, but this is a gem. So I'm really always happy to bring it. And the Mozart is a first for me too. But I put a Mozart overture on there because a year ago I was guest conducting in Charlotte Symphony, North Carolina, and one of the musicians said, you know, how come we don't program Mozart overtures anymore? Like they've kind of gone out of programming fashion lately.
And so that planted a seed in my head. So the next season I programmed a Mozart overture that I hadn't done, La clemenza di Tito, on my orchestra's program in Texas. And then this was my second chance to do a Mozart overture that I've never done. Because we've all done Figaro and Don Giovanni and The Magic Flute, but maybe these two are a little less familiar. So I put it there, of course, because the Turkish reference, but I grabbed the opportunity when I saw it.
Kellams: One of my challenges is you'll hear something I cannot hear again. We're in a time now where you can just hit a button usually and hear or see something again, but you won't be able to. Those eight minutes are those eight minutes.
Fujimoto: And there's something else about this program. At least three of these pieces, they're all masterpieces. But the Ravel and Korsakov are absolute masterclasses in orchestration, so you'll only be able to fully appreciate the power of how they use and combine different instruments, or leave out certain instruments in certain moments, in person.
You can do it on your speakers and hear it pretty well if you turn up the volume in a very quiet place, but it's not the same as hearing the instruments live in combination with each other, in concert with each other, literally.
So it's very important that you hear them live, that you experience the energy in the room of those instruments pumping sounds out and combining in ways that you never expected. Rimsky-Korsakov actually authored a book on orchestration, so he is literally an expert. But the Ravel, I can't even, today is not long enough to talk about how amazing his orchestration is in this piece.
It's a piece that he wrote for four-hand piano for two little kids, and then he later orchestrated it. And man, he's the best. He's one of my favorites.
And the Borodin, we already talked about the magic of the tone painting, and the use of percussion in the Mozart. So every piece on this program really must be experienced live.
Harris: I tell people all the time, you could come listen to them in a rehearsal and they always sound great because they're great musicians and they're playing great repertoire. But they sound very different when the room is full of people because everybody brings all of their own experiences into the room with them.
For musicians, it's like we bring our whole lives into every performance. Your whole life is in every note that you play, and every orchestra is slightly different. So every performance is going to be a little different, and it's only ever going to happen that way one time with that group of musicians and that group of audience members.
Kellams: Ben Harris is executive director of the Symphony of Northwest Arkansas. Akiko Fujimoto is Saturday night's guest conductor for the Across the Silk Road series performance, taking place at Walton Arts Center. More at sonamusic.org.
Ozarks at Large transcripts are created on a rush deadline. Copy editors utilize AI tools to review work. KUAF does not publish content created by AI. Please reach out to kuafinfo@uark.edu to report an issue. The audio version is the authoritative record of KUAF programming.
