It’s been said before that the mark of true artists isn’t that they make you see new things, but that they make you see things in a new way. The wisdom of that observation was borne out by the Las Vegas Philharmonic’s season finale last Saturday, May 10, as the orchestra’s newly appointed conductor David Itkin took one of the most familiar warhorses in the 19th century Romantic concert repertoire and made it sound as fresh as if the ink from the composer’s quill pen were still drying upon the manuscript page.
Robert Schumann’s Fourth Symphony is one of those pieces that long-time classical music lovers have heard more times than they can remember, both live and out of their musty vinyl collections. More than virtually any other piece in the standard repertoire, it lays claim to being the true pivot between the Classical and Romantic eras, the point where established rules that bound earlier composers finally became subordinate to pure expressiveness.
Its musical and dramatic prowess can often be overlooked, however, like a friend from high school who we only remember when it’s time to send out the Christmas cards. And frankly, a lot of performances of the Schumann Fourth probably should be overlooked: when played by bored musicians who can barely conceal their yawns at seeing it for the thousandth time, and conducted in mechanical, over-reverent fashion, it can come off as a snoozer museum-piece. It’s not one of those orchestral sure-fire cannons, where either the big melodies can be just about sung by the audience, à la Rachmaninov, or the psychodrama is so hard-wired into the notes, as with much of Gustav Mahler, that all the conductor has to do is push the start button and let the orchestra thrash itself to a bloodied conclusion. It takes a lot more effort to enable audiences to hear Schumann for the prophetic genius he was. Given the results last Saturday evening, Maestro Itkin is in line to inherit the late James Brown’s mantle of Hardest Working Man in Show Business, or at least the Classical Music division.
There are a lot of talented first-chair soloists in the Las Vegas Philharmonic, but the Schumann Fourth really requires the conductor to shape and control the entire orchestra. The richness of sound that Itkin was able to draw from the orchestra’s string sections is proof that he’s mastered the art of balancing the forces under his command. The orchestra simply sounded like one instrument, albeit one capable of an expressiveness, both supple and massive, beyond the reach of a single player. While there might not have been any star turn solos for the wind players, such as one might expect in the later, more folk-derived symphonies of, say, Antonín Dvořák, the brass and woodwinds were undoubtedly present in the Schumann, allowing Itkin to subtly shade the long melodic lines from the string sections.
The concert’s main event, Arthur Honegger’s Biblical cantata King David, was more of a collection of parts, though, with Itkin and his musicians valiantly attempting to keep everything from spilling out of the box in which they came. The David versus Saul saga is one of the most disjointed, one-damn-thing-after-another stories in the Old Testament, and Honegger would have needed more duct tape than there is in the world to structure the bits and pieces that he cobbled together from the accompaniment he wrote to a play from the early 1920s. Lots of great tunes, though, and the orchestra’s soloists made the most of them. If Honegger had been chased out of Europe by the Fascists the way Kurt Weill had been, he could very well have had the same sort of pre-Andrew Lloyd Webber Broadway career as Weill.
While Maestro Itkin got impressive results from his auxiliary forces, the Las Vegas Master Singers, the University Concert Singers and a quartet of vocal soloists including the silken-voiced mezzo-soprano Lynnette Chambers, the performance was somewhat deflated by a could-have-phoned-it-in narration by David Carradine. Itkin and the orchestra managed to inspire an occasional display of emotion from Carradine, but in general his cool, aging hipster demeanor did Honegger no favors. The piece really requires more of a scenery chewer; recently deceased Bible-epic hambone Charlton Heston would have been perfect for the part. Still, local classicists should just be grateful that Itkin and the Philharmonic can tell all the stories they want to, with music alone.