We Came! We Saw! We Smiled! Las Vegas Philharmonic
We Came! We Saw! We Smiled! Las Vegas Philharmonic
Read Jetsetters Magazine at www.jetsettersmagazine.com
To read this entire feature FREE with photos cut and paste this link:
http://www.jetsettersmagazine.com/archive/jetezine/classic/vegas04/harmony/harmony.html
Greek gods! Beasts and birds! Shenanigans! Peace offerings! Toga parties! Tonight’s performance by the Las Vegas Philharmonic, titled “A World in Harmony,” was a veritable fun-house of images. I’ll try to limit my use of exclamation points.
The overture to The Thieving Magpie, by Gioacchino Rossini, can be described in one word: mischief. A maid is accused of stealing a silver spoon from her master’s house and is sentenced to death. Well, it is opera – but fortunately not the tragic kind, in which half the characters die and the other half wish they could. Eventually the culprit is found to be the bird named in the title, and the woman is exonerated. No word on whether the magpie lives, though.
Nothing focuses the mind like an imminent deadline. The opera premiered in Milan on May 31, 1817, and Rossini later said, “I wrote the overture to The Thieving Magpie on the day of its opening, in the theatre itself where I was imprisoned by the director and under the surveillance of four stage hands who were instructed to throw my original text through the window, page by page, to the copyists waiting below. In default of pages, they were ordered to throw me out of the window.” Both the overture and the overall opera were big hits that night, and the stage hands needed to manhandle only the scene props.
Speaking of working under pressure, Sergei Prokofiev composed his Violin Concerto No. 2 just before returning to live in the USSR in 1936. Stalin’s government wasn’t fond of avant-garde experimentation in music, and Russian composers weren’t fond of gulags. The concerto takes the standard three-movement form, contained no wild cadenzas for the soloist, and was “regarded by some as a musical olive branch to the Soviet regime,” according to LV Phil Associate Conductor Dr. Richard McGee.
Award-winning guest violinist Chee-Yun took center stage for this concerto. Her arm pumped like a machine through rapid arpeggios in the energetic first movement.
The solo part was oddly separate from the orchestral accompaniment. The relaxed second movement sounded more integrated and had a pleasant walking tempo. The allegro third movement had tricky
If you enjoyed this post, please consider to leave a comment or subscribe to the feed and get future articles delivered to your feed reader.
