Symphonic Jazz When 1920s modernity spread through America, wrapped in the jazz sounds of the South and urban life, composers fell in love with the syncopations, chord changes, dance rhythms and dissonance, diving head first into the distinctive styles or layering the elements into classical works. While Leonard Bernstein loved it and insisted on its musical relevance, others dismissed it as not serious enough. This weekend, Las Vegas Philharmonic taps into the time through a symphonic lens highlighting Jazz Age styles and textures that influenced early 20th-century composers.
Gershwin: Music of the Jazz Age swings from Igor Stravinsky to Kurt Weill—far from ground-zero purity (and including Paul Whiteman commissions), but unique enough in its own hybrid form to capture the conversations.
Stravinsky's stately and pomp "Scherzo à la russe"—his first composition in America, and originally a film score—dips into Russian folk sounds.
Tender, poetic and at times robust, Darius Milhaud's "La Création du monde" lunges into the complex sounds, textures and jazz fugue chaos of an African creation myth. Bernstein's spirited "Prelude, Fugue and Riffs" mixes classical and jazz with playful, swingy blues and Latin drumbeats. Weill's "Little Threepenny Music"—fun, lyrical and complex—became one of the German-born Broadway composer's most popular pieces, launching the melody of "Mack the Knife.”
And George Gershwin's "Rhapsody in Blue," written at a breakneck pace (a famously abrupt commission from the easy-listening dance-band leader Whiteman), is a showy piece of serious music with pop and jazz elements that delves into the dramatic.
Conducted by Donato Cabrera and featuring Andrew Armstrong on piano and Cory Tiffin on clarinet, the Phil promises to relive the “sassy excitement of the Roaring Twenties.” April 2, 7:30 p.m. and April 3, 2 p.m., $26-$96, Smith Center’s Reynolds Hall, 702-749-2000.
Seven Magic Mountains The Nevada Museum of Art in Reno, working in partnership with New York-based Art Production Fund, recently launched its website for Ugo Rondinone’s “Seven Magic Mountains,” a public art piece consisting of seven towering Day-Glo totems near Jean Dry Lake that will be visible on the desert landscape from I-15.
The two-year installation, located not far from the site where Michael Heizer and Jean Tinguely created works in the 1960s, pays homage to Nevada’s land-art history and comments on Las Vegas-style simulacra and the surrounding natural and artificial landscape.
The site highlights the process of creating a work of this scale and magnitude (the stacked boulder totems stand more than 25 feet) through videos of workers cutting, coring and stacking boulders that, when complete, will stand 10 miles south of Las Vegas Boulevard and St. Rose Parkway.
The totems—somewhat veiled on the site's homepage, unpainted and silhouetted against the sky—have been nearly five years in the making, and are planned for completion in May.
In Transition: Female Figurines from the Michael C. and Mannetta Braunstein Collection UNLV’s Barrick Museum, known for its rotating contemporary art exhibits and collections, is dipping into one of its earliest acquisitions with a new show that examines Pre-Hispanic figurines and their role in Mesoamerican, South American and Central American cultures. The figurines—female representations, young women, mothers and expectant mothers—is part of a Pre-Columbian collection established in 1979 with a loan from the Dr. Michael C. and Mannetta Braunstein Collection. Monday-Friday, 9 a.m.-5 p.m. (until 8 p.m. on Thursdays); Saturday, noon-5 p.m., 702-895-3381.
