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SoNA

Symphony of Northwest Arkansas

Across the Silk Road: Scheherazade January 31, 2026 Walton Arts Center Akiko Fujimoto, Guest Conductor

Overture to The Abduction from the Seraglio, K. 384 (1782) Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart b January 27, 1756 in Salzburg, Austria d December 5, 1791 in Vienna, Austria

The best thing Wolfgang Mozart ever did for himself was to leave Salzburg in 1781 and set up shop as a freelance composer-pianist

in Vienna, leading directly to his metamorphosis from a promising young composer into one of music’s immortals. The reasons for Mozart’s Viennese efflorescence are many, but easily the most important is distance from his father, who by 1781 had become an unwitting obstacle to Wolfgang’s further progress. All it took was for Wolfgang to face adult life on his own without his father’s constant interference for his creative volcano to erupt in full.

Mozart’s 1782 marriage to Constanze Weber is lightly connected to the commission he received from Emperor Joseph II for a Singspiel, i.e., music theater in the vernacular with spoken dialog, for his new national theater. Mozart’s choice of a rescue plot set in a Turkish harem reflected both a current Viennese fad for all things Turkish and the fact that its heroine was also named Constanze. The lighthearted romp that resulted helped to establish Mozart on the Viennese scene as one of the most exciting young composers around. The Overture to Abduction, something of a gut-buster by 18th century standards, happily indulges in “Turkish” music via cymbals, triangles, and bass drum, not to mention melodies on the piccolo.

In the Steppes of Central Asia (1880) Alexander Borodin b November 12, 1833 in St. Petersburg, Russia d February 27, 1887 in St. Petersburg, Russia

“You can’t hunt two hares at the same time!” exclaimed Russian chemist Nikolay Nikolayevich Zinin, Borodin’s mentor and professor at the St. Petersburg Medical-Surgical

Academy. Nevertheless, all his life Borodin kept hunting those two hares – one scientific/chemical, and the other musical. That’s not to say that he hunted them with equal diligence; chemistry was the absorbing passion of his life and the source of his income, with his compositions invariably taking a distant second place in his priorities. As a result, Borodin’s musical output is a tangle of abandoned works, revisions, and reworkings. Fully finished pieces, entirely of his own making, are the exception rather than the rule. In the Steppes of Central Asia is one such completed work, written as the accompaniment to one of twelve tableaux vivants intended as a general celebration of Czar Alexander II’s Silver Jubilee. Alas, an assassination attempt put the kibosh on the project, but Borodin’s music lives on. It tells of a Russian song sounding throughout the monotonous steppes of Central Asia, as a caravan makes its way through the landscape and eventually disappears into the distance.

Mother Goose Suite (1911) Maurice Ravel b March 7, 1875 in Ciboure, France d December 28, 1937 in Paris, France

Ravel’s orchestral jewel Mother Goose Suite started out as a piano duet for the gloriously gifted Mimi and Jean Godebski, ages 6 and 7. Naturally, Ravel kept the lid on technical challenges, which correspondingly inhibited the work’s coloristic potential (although less than you might think). Publisher Jacques Durand persuaded Ravel to orchestrate the pieces, which he did with his usual scrupulous attention to detail and nuance, while simultaneously retaining their original clarity, modesty, and smallscale ambition. Ravel’s suite explores five “Mother Goose” stories, some familiar to all, others perhaps a bit less so. Sleeping Beauty has pricked her finger on the spinning wheel and lapses into a deep slumber for Pavane of Sleeping Beauty, followed by a portrait of tiny, doughty Tom Thumb. Laideronnette, Empress of the Pagodas takes the somber tale of “The Green Serpent” on a whimsical fantasy with sparkling chinoiserie. It’s followed by a

“conversation” between Beauty and the Beast, then concludes with a ‘happily ever after’ as a princess is awakened by her Prince Charming in an appropriately enchanted garden.

Scheherazade, Op. 35 (1888) Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov b March 18, 1844 in Tikhvin, Russia d June 21, 1908 in Lyubensk, Russia

Scheherazade might be RimskyKorsakov’s orchestral magnum opus, but it was once dogged by whispered suspicions that it might fall just ever so short of full brahmin respectability. For much of its existence, at least outside of Russia, it was treated mostly as a lowbrow entertainment best employed for showing off the megawattage of the living-room stereo. Fortunately, it has gained considerable ground as a narrative Romantic symphony on par with the best of its era. Determined at any cost to avoid being cuckolded, Sultan Shahryar has acquired the exceedingly unpleasant habit of beheading each of his wives after the wedding night. Before his kingdom runs completely

out of marriageable maidens, his newest wife, the resourceful Scheherazade, employs a nightly strategy of beginning — but not finishing — an engrossing story. The Sultan, determined to hear the rest of the tale, stays her execution for One Thousand and One Nights, as the collection of her tales is known. Rimsky-Korsakov presents the Sultan right at the very beginning via a stern and forbidding theme that positively reeks of malice. But it is followed immediately by a quote from Felix Mendelssohn’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream overture, establishing by association that this is indeed a fantasy, a dream. Then Scheherazade herself enters: she is always played by the solo violin, in an elegant and intricately ornamented theme that provides the gentle voice of the spellbinding storyteller weaving her magic. That magic kicks off with the intrepid Sinbad as he sails the wide seas in

search of adventure and romance. We may safely assume that Shahryar sees himself as Sinbad, given the transformation of his formerly snarling theme into a swashbuckling melody that billows and surges through some of the most aquatically evocative music ever written. Whether Shahryar also puts himself into the shoes of the unjustly persecuted wandering Kalender Prince, or becomes the ardent young prince with his princess, isn’t clear. Everything has to come to an end, so after the festival in Baghdad and the spectacular shipwreck at the work’s climax, we hear a tamed and domesticated Shahryar, his once-fearsome theme now purring quietly in loving satisfaction, as Scheherazade wraps up her thousand-plus nights of storytelling. In the last moments that quote from A Midsummer Night’s Dream returns to assure us that — what else? — they lived happily ever after.