Regime change is often a difficult proposition, and not just when it comes to international realpolitik. Any time, anywhere, that new leadership gets installed, a pretty big bet is being laid down, with no certainty of a payoff. Case in point: Did anybody at the turn of the millennium think that less than eight years later we’d be staring down the barrel of a gas-pump nozzle at four bucks a gallon?
The performing arts are hardly immune to this phenomenon. So the board members of the Las Vegas Philharmonic must have heaved a gale-force sigh of relief when it became clear that their choice of David Itkin as the orchestra’s new conductor was a winner. After his first season here, Itkin and his musicians will be going into the next hands of the game with a considerably taller stack of chips in front of them.
The season, which concludes this weekend, got off to a rousing start last September with Itkin’s sprint through one of the classical repertoire’s sure-fire crowd-pleasers, Berlioz’s Roman Carnival Overture. That the maestro also possesses substance to match his flash was borne out by an impressive Brahms Second Symphony, with the orchestra summoning up surprising weight and power.
A fluke, like the proverbial hot hand the first time somebody shoots craps? Apparently not, given the ensemble’s return engagement in October. A wildly kaleidoscopic Shostakovich Ballet Suite and a deftly jazz-tinged Ravel Piano Concerto demonstrated the conductor’s and the orchestra’s mutual prowess in evoking shades of instrumental color. While the Phil’s woodwind and brass sections have been undoubted stars this past season, the whole ensemble has benefited from its collaborations with the featured soloists on the programs: Ilya Yakushev’s smooth cruise through the Ravel was more than matched by Navah Perlman in the Beethoven Third Piano Concerto that followed in the next concert, and most recently by a blistering run through the Saint-Saëns First Cello Concerto by Gal Nyska, who had the Russian emigrés in the audience comparing him to a young Mstislav Rostropovich. It appears that Itkin not only packed his baton in his luggage, but also a Rolodex stuffed with the phone numbers of tomorrow’s classical heavyweights.
Whatever tickets are left at the UNLV box office should be snatched up while procrastinating music lovers still have a chance to hear what’s been going on at Ham Hall. On Saturday the Philharmonic wraps up its season with a trio of Davids, as sonorous-voiced pop-culture veteran David Carradine joins Itkin on stage to narrate Swiss composer Arthur Honegger’s biggest hit, the cantata King David.
Classical music with a narrator can be a dicey proposition, usually because orchestras can’t resist the temptation to butter up the local powers-that-be by handing the script to whomever’s in office at the moment. Aaron Copland’s A Lincoln Portrait was a nearly inevitable program staple for a long time, though the enthusiasm for it might finally have been killed off by a dreadful recorded version with Margaret Thatcher doing the narration—it sounded like a recruiting pitch for the British Labour Party. While there might have been a surreal frisson to having Oscar Goodman, martini in hand, relating the biblical history of upstart David versus the bitterly aging King Saul, it’s probably better that Itkin and company went instead with Carradine, whose grave yet subtly sly demeanor was all that anchored innumerable hours of insubstantial film and TV from floating off into the stratosphere.
King David established Honegger’s reputation as a composer—not bad considering that he wasn’t yet 30, and the music was a rush-order job that he threw together in a couple of weeks to accompany a long-forgotten play by the equally forgotten Rene Morax, back in 1921. Not many people’s all-nighters have results this good. The version heard in concert halls today was pumped up by Honegger from its original small-combo incarnation, yet retains the emphasis on orchestral soloists, which should give the Phil’s first-chair players plenty of opportunity to shine. Itkin smartly fills out the bill with Robert Schumann’s always-welcome Fourth Symphony.
The recently released lineup for Itkin’s sophomore season, beginning in September, looks just as strong, and includes intriguing pieces such as the Shostakovich Fifth Symphony and Darius Milhaud’s sinuous ur-moderne masterpiece La Création du Monde. So, if you haven’t yet listened in on the LV Phil under its new podium management, this is your last chance until fall for the bragging rights that come with being able to say you were there when something great got underway.
Las Vegas Philharmonic
Masterworks V
May 10, 8 p.m., $26-$73
Artemus W. Ham Concert Hall at UNLV
895-2787; lasvegasphilharmonic.com