Nibbling at the corners

SEVERAL seasons back, then-Las Vegas Philharmonic Music Director Hal Weller did something that completely flummoxed his audience. He programmed a work from -- gasp! -- 1955. The seemingly shocking symphony in question was Alan Hovhaness's Mysterious Mountain. Now, while Hovhaness's use of Armenian and Oriental modalities might seem a trifle exotic to most ears, a more consonant and tonal composer you could not want.

Unless you're a Las Vegas Philharmonic subscriber, that is. Seemingly baffled by something merely unfamiliar, concertgoers summoned a perplexed smattering of applause that scarcely covered Weller's retreat from the stage. Eek! Scary modern music!

Given such history, one understands Weller's successor, David Itkin, is but nibbling gingerly around the fringes of the last century in his second season as music director. While he's got a responsibility to lead his audience forward, martyrdom isn't in his job description.

The season's kickoff piece, Maurice Ravel's 1928 Boléro (Sept. 6), is thrice-familiar, even if its "orchestral tissue without music," as the composer called it, is the forerunner of Minimalism. Unfortunately, if people hear fore-anything in it now, it's foreplay, thanks to Blake Edwards's 10.

Three of the composers featured this season -- Ravel, Darius Milhaud and Henri Tomasi -- wrote music energized by the influence of jazz. Tomasi, the least-known of the three, is represented by his Concerto for Alto Saxophone, from 1950 (Nov. 15), with Eugene Rousseau as soloist. While it predates the politically charged final phase of Tomasi's career, it was composed at a time when his faith in man and God were still reeling from the dual apocalypses of the Holocaust and Hiroshima.

Milhaud's ballet La création du monde ("The Creation of the World"), which precedes Beethoven's Ninth Symphony on the May 16 season finale, hails from a more carefree time: 1923, with the Jazz Age in full swing. This is Milhaud at his funkiest, setting African creation mythology to the sounds of Harlem. Perhaps it's just coincidence, but Beethoven's Ninth is a piece whose opening bars the late, great conductor Carlo Maria Giulini likened to the nothingness that begins the Book of Genesis, erupting into "Let there be light." (And, to tie it back to Boléro, Milhaud's ballet ends with the primal man and woman exchanging a kiss and preparing to, uh, get better acquainted.)

The biggest chunk of modernity comes April 4, with the career-reviving Fifth Symphony (1937) by Dimitri Shostakovich. It's the central work in Shostakovich's evolution into a Janus-faced composer, writing triumphal "public" works and anguished, smaller-scaled "private" ones.

It was a survival technique learnt the hard way in the Soviet Union. Joseph Stalin fancied himself a music critic and took great umbrage to Shostakovich's opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk. The ensuing opprobrium was so intense that Shostakovich suppressed his Symphony #4 for 25 years. He wasn't fully restored to favor (and even then it would be tenuous) until his Symphony #5 made the positive noises the Soviet regime liked to hear. However, "coded" in its final bars -- if played at the correct tempo -- is a graphic representation of the emotional beatdown he'd absorbed from Stalin's minions. That double meaning went unheard at the time and the Fifth would become Shostakovich's breakthrough piece in the West, its popularity never rivaled by any of 10 subsequent symphonies, great though some of them are.

Actually, 2008-09 is a Russia-suffused season for the LVPO, including Rimsky-Korsakoff's "Arabian Nights" evocation, Schéhérazade (Nov. 15). For Valentine's Day, when the dead of winter makes concertgoers loath to stir, an all-Tchaikovsky program is rolled forth. It begins, somewhat perversely, with Tchaikovsky's gloomy, pre-suicidal Pathétique Symphony. After the Pathétique, the rest of the program -- which ends with the star-crossed corpses of the Romeo and Juliet tone poem -- can only seem like light relief. Even so, as a Valentine's Day offering, it's perversely morbid. Not that there's anything wrong with that.