Orchestra hits jazz notes, shifts gears

Steve Marcus

Eugenie Grunewald, from left, and Cantors Andres Kornworcel, Philip Goldstein, Daniel Friedman and Marla Goldberg sing during the Las Vegas Philharmonic’s program “Celebrating Israel @ 60!” Sunday night at UNLV’s Artemus Ham Hall.

By Joe Brown (contact)

Tuesday, Oct. 14, 2008 | 2 a.m.

You don’t usually get a drum solo at a Las Vegas Philharmonic concert.

But Saturday night was the orchestra’s first pops concert, with a jazz theme and trumpeter Byron Stripling as the soloist. And the Philharmonic clearly enjoyed swinging out and letting its hair down.

The weekend was a doubleheader for the orchestra, which also performed a tribute to Israel on Sunday night.

For one night, the Philharmonic basically became a big band — the biggest band in town, really — with an embedded jazz trio. David Loeb on piano, Geoff Neuman on bass and Robert Breithaupt on drums, and the Philharmonic’s horn section, in particular, sounded sharp, sassy and sensational throughout the evening.

The orchestra took a back seat to Stripling, who emerged as a triple threat, not only as an idiosyncratic horn player, but also as a singer and an actor. Stripling immediately set a lightly humorous tone, dedicating “Flat Foot Floogie” to “our great conductor,” and teasing the crowd: “You remember a club back in the day called Birdland? Well, if you’re clapping right now ... you’re old.” They loved it.

Without imitating or impersonating, he invoked and evoked the great Louis Armstrong with a medley that included “What a Wonderful World.” Delivering a pair of Fats Waller standards, “Honeysuckle Rose” (a shade of Billie Holiday) and “Ain’t Misbehavin’,” Stripling was a daredevil, breathtakingly switching from long solos to vocals.

Conductor David Itkin also tweaked the audience, which applauded before the first number. “It’s the only orchestra I’ve ever worked with that their tuning gets applause,” he said, then turned to the musicians. “I don’t think I’ve appreciated you as much as I should.”

The evening opened with Leonard Bernstein’s overture to the sarcastic/optimistic operetta “Candide,” which could be interpreted as comment on this cynical/hopeful moment. Or maybe Itkin was just in a Bernstein mood, because he had the orchestra play Bernstein’s Lamentation from Symphony No. 1 “Jeremiah” the next night. Whatever the motivation, the energetic, eclectic overture served to warm up the musicians, and really showed what they’re capable of.

Itkin opened the second part of the program with his own musical joke, four “Variations on Hail to the Chief.” He described the presidential anthem as “really an incredibly bad piece of music, all partisanship aside,” and the Philharmonic played it through, straight and stolid. “You didn’t remember it being quite that boring, right?” Itkin said. “You only hear a little bit of it at press conferences. It doesn’t get any better after the first four bars.” He then put it through changes — magically fluty Mozart, dreamy Debussy, Marvin Hamlisch TV series theme song schlock (apt in this day of TV presidencies), and comically portentous Beethoven.

• • •

Introducing Sunday night’s dramatically emotional “Celebrating Israel @ 60!” presented by Sheldon and Dr. Miriam Adelson, conductor Itkin said, “We’re going to celebrate Israel in music and song and very few words.” He introduced Jacob Dayan, counsel general of Israel in Los Angeles, who noted that “the symphony has been played not for 60 years, but for 3,060 years ... There are some who are trying to stop the music, and to turn Israel into an unfinished symphony, but we will never let this happen.”

It was all music — primally stirring, yearning music in a minor key, ancient and contemporary — for the rest of the night. Again, the Philharmonic was essentially the house band for the vocalists at the heart of the program, which might well have been titled “The Four Cantors.”

After the national anthems of Israel and the United States were played, Cantor Philip Goldstein stepped out unassumingly — and stole the show. In Hebrew and English, Goldstein’s dark tenor was gorgeous and true on “Lo Teyda Milchama” and “Sim Shalom,” and anyone would have been satisfied if the evening had continued with him as sole soloist. (Turns out he was the lead singer for 12 years in “Jubilee!” at Bally’s.)

Goldstein was a hard act to follow, but the Vegas-area synagogues of Cantors Marla Goldberg, Andres Kornworcel and Daniel Friedman are also fortunate to hear these voices singing liturgical music every week.

The program also featured tenor Nathan Brian Wine and mezzo soprano Eugenie Grunewald and three songs from the boys and girls of the Adelson Educational Campus Choir, who affectingly sang “Variations on an Israeli Folk Tune” and “Y’rushalalim,” which featured the remarkably expressive young soloist Carly Matt, an 11th grader, who stole the evening right back from Goldstein.

Joe Brown can be reached at 259-8801 or at joe.brown@lasvegassun.com.