Philharmonic wants to know a little about you, too

By Kristen Peterson (contact)

Friday, Nov. 16, 2007 | 7:24 a.m.

A little while ago the Las Vegas Philharmonic started posting tidbits about its staff and musicians. Oboist Joan McGee is a certified diamontologist and a guild gemologist, Executive Director Phil Koslow was a billiards champ, and Keith Neel is an avid golfer and a Buckeye ...

Now the Philharmonic wants to know about its audience - namely age, gender, musical tastes, cultural interests and number of years lived in Las Vegas.

Although the survey, downloadable from the Philharmonic Web site, is clearly a marketing effort to help the Philharmonic understand its audiences, it's a little, well, exciting that we're all getting to know one another.

And as long as we're all sharing, let's look at the lineup for Saturday's Masterworks II concert: Schubert was a poetic wild man who loved Goethe and Beethoven, had syphilis and died at age 31, possibly of typhoid fever. Ravel, a French composer and pianist, was an atheist and fond of jazz. He wrote a concerto for the left hand and never had the opportunity to perform one of his greatest works, Concerto in G, because of illness. Shostakovich, who enjoyed post-revolution popularity in his native Russia, had his modernist tendencies quelled by the regime and resorted to writing propaganda pieces and lighter works for film.

Now that everybody's opened up, Saturday should be a most heartwarming experience. The symphony is kicking it up with Shostakovich's Ballet Suite No. 1, a lively number that incorporates the waltz and the polka. Russian pianist Ilya Yakushev is the guest artist performing Ravel's Piano Concerto in G Major and the evening's finale will be Schubert's Symphony No. 9, "The Great."

Details: 8 p.m. Saturday, Artemus Ham Hall, $73, $50, $29, 895-2787 or www.lvphil.com.

Sculpture park

Jack Solomon's longtime dream for bringing a sculpture park to Boulder Avenue between South Main Street and Casino Center Boulevard is a step closer to reality. This month the City Council approved plans for a sculpture plaza that will feature Yaakov Agam's grid of 36 illuminated 18-foot glass columns.

The approval comes more than three years after Agam, hearing news of the sculpture garden, came to Las Vegas with a miniature model made of painted matchsticks to meet with Mayor Oscar Goodman. The city gave Agam, an Israeli artist living in Paris, $30,000 to create a scale model of the sculpture. The model has been sitting at the offices of S2 Art for nearly three years. But even with the approval of site plans, much needs to be done. Solomon, who refers to the sculpture as a forest of color and light, says $4 million must be raised for the park. That is in addition to money the city is kicking in for infrastructure. No contracts have been signed.

Las Vegas Sculpture Plaza, a neighborhood association, will be raising funds.