Culture

Looking back to look forward

The Las Vegas Philharmonic gives a performance that encapsulates the modern

K.W. Jeter

The landscape of modern concert halls is still marred with the tracks of the Second Viennese School atonalists and even worse, the hardcore, so-called “modernist” Boulezinistas who came afterward with more agenda and less talent, vowing to chase Tchaikovsky off symphony programs and substitute their own ear-grinding noise. The unfortunate result wasn’t hordes of converts to the new regime, but simply a lot of previous concert-goers who would scan their local orchestras’ schedules for anything that smacked of the 20th century, assume—too often correctly—that it would be something disagreeable, and decide to stay home and watch the Ed Sullivan show.

Those particular dinosaurs might have died off by now, or been chased back to their taxpayer-supported university music departments, but in a town such as this, where symphonic culture has only been precariously established, it definitely shows courage on the part of the Las Vegas Philharmonic’s new director, David Itkin, to have put the one-time colossus of the last century, Dmitri Shostakovich, on the bill of last Saturday’s concert.

Of course, the über-modernists, from their Führerbunker buried beneath Paris’s Centre Pompidou, campaigned as hard against Shostakovich as anyone; still-living atonal ideologue Pierre Boulez sneered at him as “warmed-over Mahler.” (Joke’s on Boulez, since Shostakovich is still programmed regularly all over the world, whereas the business managers of most orchestras would pull out a knife if their directors threatened to perform any of Boulez’s audience-vanishing sonic catastrophes.) Not only did Shostakovich get all the press coverage—surviving not just World War II (he showed up on the cover of Time magazine) but also the Kulturkampf edicts of Stalin’s Zhadonivist enforcers—but he also resolutely stuck to his tonal guns, not even flirting with the 12-tone system as much as Igor Stravinsky, that other 20th-century musical icon, did in his twilight post-neo-classical years.

That’s a background that can seem pretty grim for today’s audiences, who would generally rather not think about the wars that are going on now, let alone the ones that happened back then. Maestro Itkin might have intended the Ballet Suite No. 1 as nothing more than Shostakovich Lite, playful bits of dance-oriented charm that could be enjoyed by audiences that might have been terrified by the composer’s heavy-duty wartime symphonies. As it turned out, Itkin and the LV Phil’s musicians wound up making a good case for Shostakovich having presciently looked forward to our own postmodernist era. With its slam-bang, unmodulated rocketing back and forth between emotions, from delicately arching waltzes to demented circus polkas, the Ballet Suite eerily embodies our own Tivo-ized, too-many-choices culture. Itkin and his musicians highlighted the spin-the-dial effect with a dazzling display of orchestral colors: Percussion sections always look forward to performing Shostakovich because they get to pull all the weird mallet instruments out of the back room. Special kudos to the Phil’s lead trumpet, Tom Wright, for not only sailing through the Suite’s rapid-fire staccato sections with aplomb, but also channeling the distinctive blatty (in the good sense) “braying” tone usually heard nowadays only on crackly old Soviet Melodiya vinyl records.

The Phil’s musicians might have been a little too captivated by Shostakovich the orchestral colorist, as it took them a few measures into the following Ravel Piano Concerto to tune themselves into the slightly less pungent, cooler range needed to support soloist Ilya Yakushev’s smoothly jazz-inflected interpretation. By the concerto’s middle section, though, they were spot-on.

Itkin wrapped up the concert by dropping back a century or so to Schubert’s epic Ninth Symphony, an oddly effective bookend to the Shostakovich suite. As Itkin commented to the audience before raising his baton, Schubert was an earlier visionary, looking forward to what the symphony would become, from light salon entertainment to heavyweight Beethovenian cultural commentary. The orchestra’s taut, fiery performance was only betrayed by the numerical thinness in its string sections—Itkin would probably be the first to agree that he could use another dozen or so players, to give him the big fortissimo swell he needs when he jams the volume pedal down. In the meantime, though, our local band is certainly setting their sheer-guts dial to 11, and not just in terms of what their fiddles are strung with.

Las Vegas Philharmonic

****

November 17

Artemus Ham Concert Hall, UNLV

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