St Patrick's Day Parade

Downtown Little Rock, crossing the river into North Little Rock...from one Irish pub to the other. We plan to check it out:

IRISH CULTURAL SOCIETY OF ARKANSAS

Loving Little Rock

I hope that you regularly click on the links in my sidebar to the right. Particularly, I hope that you browse the Little Rock and Arkansas related links often. Here are a few more I'll be adding:

InArkansas.com

An excellent online guide to Arkansas from the Arkansas Business Publishing Group. (The editor, Karen Martin, is married to Philip Martin who has hit the fan group lottery by being linked in my previous post.)

Holidays In Little Rock

"The warmth and fun of the holiday season will be especially joyous this year in Arkansas' capital city with the incredible array of activities, festivals and attractions that decorate Little Rock."

Witt Stephens Jr Central Arkansas Nature Center

"The 16,232 square foot building on 3.4 acres in Little Rock, overlooks the Arkansas River and is within the Julius Breckling Riverfront Park."

Pumpkin Patch

On Saturday, we visited Motley's Pumpkin Patch & Christmas Tree Farm for the first time. They've been around for years but we had not tried them out before. I was very impressed with their setup. We picked pumpkins, cheered at the pig races, and toured the Christmas tree area via hayride. The children fed a donkey and some goats and rode the "cow train" (painted barrels being pulled by a tractor). It was a fun time. I would recommend it for a family outing. Here is the link: CLICK HERE

Hidden Valley Farm

When I was a teenager, my family had a tradition every Fall, that after attending a weekend retreat at Ferncliff, we would drive just around the corner on the Sunday to Hidden Valley Farm's Pumpkin Patch. It was quite magnificent for a pumpkin patch, or at least it seemed grand to me, and it was very popular despite the distance from the city. A few years ago, we took our children to the farm and brought home several pumpkins. It turns out that we caught them in one of their final years as a pumpkin patch, quite possibly the last year. Yesterday, after Ella Kathryn's birthday party at Chuck-E-Cheese, we ventured out to the farm again to pick blueberries (having only just missed the picking season for blackberries and raspberries). A young lady came out to greet us (I believe it was the farmer's daughter) and I asked her about the pumpkins. She said they stopped doing it a couple of years ago because the production had grown to a point that it was more than the farmer wanted to continue handling. So for now, they only do the berries, but she did say they are considering watermelons, canteloupe, and cucumbers for next year.

City of Little Rock

Two more links for the sidebar...

City of Little Rock (official website for the city government)

www.littlerock.org

Little Rock Parks and Recreation

"Our city is nestled among a profusion of green open spaces and natural areas set aside for recreational, educational, ecological and aesthetic benefits for the people who live here to enjoy at their leisure."

Grieg's Romantic Piano Concerto

Last night's presentation by the Arkansas Symphony Orchestra was truly dazzling. The guest conductor was one of five candidates being considered to take the permanent position. Fusao Kajima was animated and very entertaining in his direction of the concert. And his candidacy was certainly not hindered by the aid of an extraordinarily talented pianist Valentina Lisitsa (yes the same one who was on The Tonight Show just a few nights ago).

Kajima first led the ASO in performing Sinfonietta No. 1 by Heitor Villa-Lobos (subtitled In Memory of Mozart). The program notes share this insight from Villa-Lobos about the two themes incorporated from Mozart: ...the overall purpose in composing the work was to "describe the conflict between culture, represented by the scholastic prejudices and rules, and the temperament of the free, spontaneous artist, independent from any theory."

The highlight of the night was Edvard Grieg's Piano Concerto in A Minor, Op. 16. This concerto is reckoned as the Norwegian's "only outstanding large-scale creation;" it is in a sense, his life's work since he began it in 1868 and revised it multiple times before it reached its present form shortly before his death in 1907. Valentina Lisitsa not only brought amazing talent to the performance, she also, like Kajima, brought a winsome energy and passion. In my experience with ASO performances, it is not particularly common for the standing ovation to demand and receive an encore, but Lisitsa playfully consented.

Kajima then directed the concluding performance of Antonin Dvorak's Symphony No. 8 in G Major, Op. 88. Following the music of Villa-Lobos and Grieg, the beautiful symphony of Dvorak exhausted me with enjoyment! The program notes at THIS LINK provide an excellent description. I was most impressed by the presence of Ed Owen on the tuba in the last piece, because he was unused and therefore absent from the stage in the first two pieces (I began to fear it would be a completely tuba-less night)!

Here is more about the candidate conductors: CLICK HERE.

Here is the official webiste of Valentina Lisitsa: CLICK HERE.