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Cellist to surf the big waves
April 2, 2008
by K.W. Jeter
The Phil takes on Saint-Saëns
The Las Vegas Philharmonic has been doing a good line in guest soloists—if not household names yet, they soon might be. Which of course gives local classical-music audiences bragging rights about seeing and hearing them before they hit the international big time.
Coming up next on the bill is the intimidatingly young Israeli Gal Nyska, taking on Camille Saint-Saëns’ full-tilt virtuosic Cello Concerto No. 1. Nyska comes with a sheaf of Juilliard credentials, but the Saint-Saëns requires more than mere academic chops. While it might not be programmed as frequently as some of the more familiar war-horse concerti—and kudos to the Phil’s new director David Itkin for continuing to take his musicians at least a few steps off the symphonic beaten path—it nevertheless ranks among the cognoscenti as one of the greatest pieces ever written for the cello. Or maybe any instrument, for that matter.
The Saint-Saëns can be a cruel test of a soloist’s technical abilities. The scoring for the orchestra is notable for its transparency, allowing the cello to be heard top to bottom through its entire register; there’s never a moment when the cellist can just let the other instruments carry him along like a surfer on top of a 10-foot wave. Some big-name cellists have wiped out on the piece by playing it exact and clinical, instead of piling on the emotion that makes the tunes come alive. Nyska might have just the right combination of technique and youthful bravado to make it all work.
Bracketing the Saint-Saëns will be a pair of orchestral masterworks. Les Préludes is the most popular of Franz Liszt’s tone poems, though not because of the party-stifling meditation that it gets its title from: What is our Life but a series of Preludes to that unknown chant, the first solemn note of which is sounded by Death? Ohh-kay; well, that might not be what you want to spend your weekend thinking about (sounds more like Monday morning, actually), but the mesmerizing beauty of the piece makes it worth your while. Come for the angst; stay for the big, sweeping chords.
Wolfgang Mozart only had about another three years to live when he wrote his 40th and next-to-last symphony. Usually referred to as his “great” G-minor symphony, mainly to distinguish it from an earlier “little” symphony in the same key, it’s one of the works that nails into place Mozart’s well-deserved reputation as the guy who conjured the high-drama Romantic revolution into existence, even if he didn’t live long enough to see it come about. Music from the classical period gets a bad rap for being nothing but the sort of bloodless tinkly minuets erroneously ascribed to Antonio Salieri (actually a pretty good composer himself, and more of a pal than an enemy to Mozart, despite what you see in Peter Shaffer’s Amadeus). The noted musicologist Charles Rosen got it right when he wrote that Mozart’s Symphony No. 40 was full of “passion, violence and grief.”
Maestro Itkin has been turning up the heat lately with our local Philharmonic. With incendiary Mozart for a finish, this Saturday’s program is likely to be a four-alarm event.
Las Vegas Philharmonic
April 5, 8 p.m., $26-$73
UNLV Ham Hall, 895-2787
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