Orchestra rises to challenge

By Kristen Peterson

Monday, Feb. 25, 2008 | 2 a.m.

Conductor David Itkin did something a little daring for his first season with the Las Vegas Philharmonic.

He put Rachmaninoff’s third symphony on the program. It’s a complicated piece, especially for a small, young orchestra. Many of the musicians had never played it, and some had not even heard the lesser-known symphony by the Russian composer.

“The only thing I could think that would be more difficult to do in your first season with a new symphony is Strauss’ ‘Ein Heldenleben,’ ” concert master DeAnn Letourneau says with a laugh.

And Itkin?

“We had to go forward,” he says. “It’s the elephant I plopped down in the middle of the season as a litmus test to see how far we’d come.”

And?

“They more than pulled it off.”

To put it bluntly, Itkin and the Philharmonic rocked the house at the last concert.

This is what Itkin does. He sets high standards, raises the bar, challenges the orchestra as much as the audience, knows there is a chance it could flop and goes forward anyway.

He demands as much perfection from himself as he does his institution. Musicians say he can be intimidating. But the high expectations are why the conductor from Little Rock, Ark., was selected by the Philharmonic last year.

With the orchestra on stable ground and the Smith Center for the Performing Arts on the horizon, Itkin came to take the Philharmonic to the next level, and it seems to be working. Musicians talk about a new chemistry and a higher level of commitment.

“People respond when they’re challenged,” says Philip Koslow, executive director. “We realized that wherever he had been, he had raised the bar of the institution artistically and administratively. He has a track record of building orchestras.”

Audience appreciation of Itkin showed at the last concert, when he announced the orchestra’s first pops series beginning next season.

The warm murmur that followed that announcement elevated to cheerful ‘oohs’ when he said that trumpeter Byron Stripling would open the series, which will conclude with Brent Barrett from “Phantom — The Las Vegas Spectacular.”

And oohs grew into applause when Itkin announced next season’s classical lineup.

“I’ve had concerts where the performance didn’t get this much applause,” a gratified Itkin acknowledged to the audience.

Following that, Navah Perlman and the orchestra performed Beethoven’s third piano concerto, a musically narrative, easy-to-follow, very lovely piece.

But it was Rachmaninoff’s third, a wildly percussive, bizarrely intense symphony with fast, changing tempos, cascading melodies, intricacies and solo parts, that really shook the house.

The orchestra delivered. The audience ate it up. Every morsel.

Violinist Shakeh Ghoukasian says Itkin knows how to get what he wants and that Itkin was more relaxed at the last concert because there is now a trust between the musicians and the conductor. “He’s very intense, very demanding. But he’s a really good musician and if he raises the bar for himself, he raises it for everyone else too.”

Under Itkin, the orchestra is taking measure of itself, looking at where it’s been and where it needs to go, says Karl Reinarz, assistant principal viola.

Reinarz played with the Philharmonic’s predecessor, the now-defunct Nevada Symphony, which had sketchy seasons, poorly attended rehearsals and random concert nights. When Hal Weller co-founded the Las Vegas Philharmonic, he demanded commitment from the musicians, set the concerts for Saturdays at 8 p.m. and built an “institution. But asking for long practice hours wasn’t so easy then.

Now musicians are to come to the first rehearsal prepared. Itkin instructs them to study the color of sound, listen to each other as an ensemble, even play their parts at some rehearsals without benefit of his conducting.

“He demands absolute preparedness all the time,” Letourneau says. “There is no excuse. He tells us that we have to be ready to play in one of the best halls, if not the best hall, in the country and say, ‘We are the Las Vegas Philharmonic. This is our home and we really deserve to be sitting here.’ We walk into the first rehearsal now sounding the way we used to sound one rehearsal away from performance.”

The new expectations extend to the administrative side, where Koslow is leaving his post as executive director to become the full-time director of development. (The orchestra is seeking a new executive director.) This season’s budget is $1.5 million, and will grow next season to more than $2 million.

The Philharmonic hopes to increase its endowment fund from $130,000 to as much as $10 million in the next four or five years.

With more creative marketing, subscriptions have increased to 1,200 from last year’s 1,000. Concerts are sold out or nearly filled. The Philharmonic’s Muse group for young working professionals has grown to more than 100 members. The audience’s increasing diversity is visible at every concert.

Itkin still hasn’t moved to Las Vegas, but plans to this summer. He’s not sure if he will drop one of his other orchestras (Arkansas Symphony Orchestra and Abilene Philharmonic Orchestra). He has a three-year contract with the Las Vegas Philharmonic and is dealing with the uniqueness of performance companies having to contend with the Strip. In Arkansas, he says, “We are the heavyweight dogs.”

Itkin says classical audiences here have a hunger for the most significant mainstream repertoire (rather than contemporary music).

And he’s learning how to do pops here.

“In Las Vegas, where there is a big star on every corner, you have to present the pops in a unique way,” he says. “The rules just don’t apply here because it’s such a pop-entertainment saturated industry. But the Strip doesn’t have a 60-or-70-piece orchestra. You can see Brent Barrett on the Strip, but you can’t see Brent Barrett with a large orchestra.”

Well, that’s changing.