Las Vegas composer, Philharmonic collaborate for ‘Twilight’

There are times — such as Saturday’s “Sounds From Twilight” concert, which features Beethoven’s Symphony No. 7 in A major — when Las Vegas Philharmonic music director Donato Cabrera wishes he could have a chat with the composer. (Who, lest we forget, died in 1827.)

“The questions you have,” Cabrera says. After all, “music is a written language, but it’s only a facsimile of the message” created by the composer. And the greater the distance between composer and musicians, the more imprecise the message seems.

“It’s sort of like when you read a Shakespeare play, it’s English, but it’s not” 21st-century English, Cabrera points out. “I’m always wishing, when I’m rehearsing a piece by Beethoven, that I could just give him a call.”

Cabrera doesn’t have that problem with another piece featured in Saturday’s concert: “Sylvan,” by Las Vegas-based composer Michael Torke.

The composer’s presence at rehearsals represents “the greatest thing any performer could ask for,” according to Cabrera. “To have Michael at rehearsal, saying, ‘I kind of want it to sound like this,’ it’s the best thing ever.”

Saturday’s performance of “Sylvan” is the second, says Torke, who wrote it for the 2017 centennial of upstate New York’s Lake Placid Sinfonietta. That premiere seems entirely appropriate, considering that New York’s Adirondack Mountains, where Torke spent several summers, inspired “Sylvan” in the first place.

“The smell of the trees, as the cool air settles from the mountains to the lakes, has lingered as a piquant memory,” the composer writes in the program notes for Saturday’s concert, citing the Eastern white pine, yellow birch and red spruce as the basis for the work’s three movements.

The three trees “have their own distinct music,” Torke notes, “but everything is derived ultimately from the same series of notes, a kind of hummable tune that gradually emerges as the branches reach out to limbs and leaves.”

Torke moved from New York City to Las Vegas in December 2006, when he realized, “ ‘For what I’m paying in rent, I could buy a house in Las Vegas,’ ” which he now describes as “a wonderful, exciting city.”

One with a “first-class” orchestra, he adds.

When Torke attended rehearsals last season for the Philharmonic’s performance of “Ash,” another of his compositions, the composer’s reaction to The Smith Center’s Reynolds Hall was a fervent “ ‘Oh, wow, does this sound good.’ ”

Cabrera’s ongoing quest to program new music alongside established classics also led to this weekend’s performance of “Sylvan,” which exhibits Torke’s “propulsive use of melody and rhythm,” the conductor says. “There’s an emotional aspect, but it’s no heart-on-the-sleeve emotion.”

Torke, 56, has composed opera and ballet scores along with orchestral works. And it all began when he was 5 years old, in his native Wisconsin, with his “amazing piano teacher.”

When he changed the melodies of the pieces he’d been assigned to practice, his piano teacher told him, “ ‘We’ll do more,’ ” leaving blank spaces on musical manuscript paper so Torke could write connecting phrases, he notes. “Pretty soon, I was writing complete pieces.”

That experience proves “we’re all creative,” the composer comments, adding that he’s also been “very lucky.”

That must mean he’s in the right place, because, as Torke observes, “the town of Las Vegas is built on luck.”

New music from a not-so-new composer

Las Vegas Philharmonic music director Donato Cabrera champions new works by living composers.

But he’s also interested in “new music by not-so-living composers,” including Robert Schumann’s one-and-only violin concerto, which the Philharmonic will perform during Saturday’s “Sounds From Twilight” concert at The Smith Center’s Reynolds Hall.

Schumann’s Piano Concerto may be “one of the most often performed,” Cabrera says, but the violin concerto was “a piece I had never seen performed. … Only a handful of soloists have ever bothered to perform it live.”

Alexi Kenney will be one of those few. The 24-year-old violinist, who previously performed Samuel Barber’s Concerto for Violin with the Las Vegas Philharmonic in 2015, returns Saturday to play the Schumann concerto.

“It’s something Donato suggested,” Kenney notes during a telephone interview during a stint as guest concertmaster with the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra. “I’m a huge fan of Schumann,” so “I said yes immediately” — despite the fact that he wasn’t familiar with the concerto.

“It’s been such a discovery to get to know this piece,” says Kenney, who first met and worked with Cabrera in the San Francisco Symphony Youth Orchestra.

Among the things he’s learned: the fact that Schumann “wrote it at the end of his life,” when the composer was “in an asylum” and those closest to him (including his wife, Clara, and his protege Johannes Brahms) “dismissed this piece.” Its first performance wasn’t until 1933 (Schumann died in 1856 at age 46) and the concerto was rediscovered, Kenney says, by violin virtuoso Yehudi Menuhin.

Even so, “it never really received the popularity” of other violin concertos, he adds.

Now that Kenney’s learned it, “there’s something so dark in its soul,” according to the violinist. Yet, “for all of its darkness, there’s such love,” he adds, noting its “haunting, desolate kind of beauty.”

Preview

■ Who:Las Vegas Philharmonic with guest violinist Alexi Kenney

■ What:“Sounds From Twilight”

■ When: 7:30 p.m. Saturday (pre-concert conversation 6:30 p.m.)

■ Where: Reynolds Hall, The Smith Center for the Performing Arts, 361 Symphony Park Ave.

■ Tickets: $30-$109 (lvphil.org, thesmithcenter.com)

Contact Carol Cling at ccling@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0272. Follow @CarolSCling on Twitter.