Jean Sibelius (1865-1957)
Cabrera Conducts Tchaikovsky
Saturday, May 6, 2023 at 7:30pm
Reynolds Hall at The Smith Center
Donato Cabrera, conductor Ilya Yakushev, Piano
Finlandia, Op. 26
Serge Prokofiev (1891—1953)
Piano Concerto No. 3, Op. 26
I. Andante - Allegro
II. Andantino
III. Allegro maa non troppo
Ilya Yakushev, Piano
~ INTERMISSION ~
Piotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky (1840—1893)
Symphony No. 4, Op. 36, f minor
I. Andante sostenuto
II. Andantino in modo di canzona
III. Scherzo: Pizzicato ostinato
IV. Finale: Allegro con fuoco
The program is funded in part by a grant from Nevada Humanities and the National Endowment for the Humanities.
Programs and artists are subject to change. The use of recording devices in the concert hall is strictly prohibited. Drinks are not permitted in the theater.
MUSICIAN ROSTER
DONATO CABRERA, CONDUCTOR
VIOLIN I
De Ann Letourneau
Concertmaster
Martha Gronemeier
Associate Concertmaster
Alexandr Dzyubinsky
Jennifer Eriksson
Ivo Gradev
James Harvey
Mira Khomik
Elliot Lee
Eric McAllister
Rebecca Sabine-Ramsey
Naoko Taniguchi
VIOLIN II
Shakeh Ghoukasian
Principal
Kevork Mikaelian
Assistant Principal
Marty Connally
Lauren Cordell
Hui Lim
Lisa Ratigan
Kay Sanderson
Melanie Schiemer
Lee Schreiber
Yurika Sinoto
Alissa Vercillo
VIOLA
Jason Bonham
Principal
Tiantian Lan
Assistant Principal
Hope Bowden
Ian Long
Omar Shelly
Sharon Street-Caldwell
Hanna Suk
CELLO
Andrew Smith
Principal
Kevin Mills
Assistant Principal
Ted Hartwell
Elena Kapustina
Emily Leavitt
Mert Sermet
Moonlight Tran
BASS
Paul Firak
Principal
Chris Davis
Assistant Principal
Ryan Dudder
Geoff Neuman
Ed Richards
Jake Platts
FLUTE
Christina Castellanos
Principal
Ms. Castellanos is sponsored by the Rosenblum Family Foundation
OBOE
Stephen Caplan
Principal
Nathan Swain
Mika Brunson
English Horn
CLARINET
Cory Tiffin
Principal
Carmen Izzo
Bass Clarinet
BASSOON
Janis McKay
Principal
Alex Rosales García
HORN
Bill Bernatis
Principal
Doug Beasley
Beth Lano
Associate Principal
Mike McCoy
Frank Joyce
Utility Horn
TRUMPET
Tom Wright
Principal
Joe Durk
Larry Ransom
TROMBONE
Nathan Tanouye
Principal
Tyler Vahldick
Jeff Stupin
Bass Trombone
TUBA
Zachary Jackson
Principal
PERCUSSION
Patrick Bowen
Principal
Robert Bonora, Jr.
HARP
Kim Glennie
Principal
PRINCIPAL EMERITUS
Audrey Bush Bass
Felix Viscuglia Clarinet
FOUNDING MUSIC
DIRECTOR & CONDUCTOR
LAUREATE
Harold Weller
The musicians of the Las Vegas Philharmonic are represented by the American Federation of Musicians.
Local 369
Musicians subject to change. A special thank you to The Smith Center’s production stage personnel for executing the technical staging, lighting, and audio for Philharmonic performances.
LEADERSHIP
BOARD OF TRUSTEES
Jeri Crawford, Chair
Rachelle Crupi, Vice Chair
Delinda Crampton, Secretary
Scott Kerestesi, Governance Chair
Patricia Pieper Fink, Development Chair
Michael Bolognini
David Crawford
Dorothy Flagler
Jerry Kohlenberger
Ellis Landau
Dawn Newburg
Ellen Richards
Lia Roberts
Tim Robinson
PHILHARMONIC ADVISORY BOARD
Steve Crupi, Chair
Gayle Anderson
Anthony Newman
Angie Wallin
Cheri White
CJ Woolston
PHILHARMONIC HONORARY BOARD
Andrea Bocelli
Mayor Oscar Goodman
Gary Karr
John Williams
Eugenia Zukerman
EX-OFFICIO
William Freyd in memoriam
PHILHARMONIC STAFF
Alice Sauro, Executive Director
Frederick Hubbs, Director of Development
Robert Chambers, Director of Operations and Orchestra Personnel
Angela Guadagno, Annual Fund & Database Manager
Michael Laurita, Office & Events Manager
Kayla-Jo Rosoff, Director of Patron Services & Ticketing
Samantha Alterman, Head Librarian, Research & Licensing Coordinator
Lauren Zwonik, DMA Intern, UNLV Partnership
DONATO CABRERA, MUSIC DIRECTOR
and has a proven track record in impacting the lives and improving the test scores of hundreds of K-6 children in San Pablo’s Downer Elementary School.
Donato Cabrera is the Music Director of the Las Vegas Philharmonic and the California Symphony and served as the Resident Conductor of the San Francisco Symphony and the Wattis Foundation Music Director of the San Francisco Symphony Youth Orchestra from 2009-2016.
Cabrera has evolved the Las Vegas Philharmonic’s concert experience since assuming the role in 2014 by expanding the scope and breadth of its orchestral concerts, hosting engaging and lively pre-concert conversations with guest artists and composers, and by creating the Spotlight Concert Series that features the musicians of the Las Vegas Philharmonic in intimate chamber music performances. Since Cabrera’s appointment as Music Director in 2013 of the California Symphony, the organization has redefined what it means to be an orchestra in the 21st Century. Under Cabrera’s baton, the California Symphony has reached new artistic heights by implementing innovative programming that emphasizes welcoming newcomers and loyalists alike, building on its reputation for championing music by living composers, and committing to programming music by women and people of color.
Deeply committed to diversity and education through the arts, Cabrera has furthered the scope, breadth, and content of the Las Vegas Philharmonic and California Symphony’s music education programs. In past years, annually reaching over 20,000 Title I fourth graders of the Clark County School District, Cabrera completely reshaped Las Vegas Philharmonic’s Youth Concert Series to be a curriculum-based concert experience, while also integrating a hands-on, complimentary experience with the DISCOVERY Children’s Museum. California Symphony’s Sound Minds program has achieved national attention for its El Sistema-inspired approach
In recent seasons, Cabrera has made impressive debuts with the National Symphony’s KC Jukebox at the Kennedy Center, Louisville Orchestra, Hartford Symphony, Orquesta Filarmónica de Jalisco, Philharmonic Orchestra of the Staatstheater Cottbus, Orquesta Filarmónica de Boca del Río, Orquesta Sinfónica Concepción, Nevada Ballet Theatre, New West Symphony, Kalamazoo Symphony, and the Reno Philharmonic. In 2016, he led the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in performances with Grammy Award-winning singer Lila Downs. Cabrera made his Carnegie Hall debut leading the world premiere of Mark Grey’s Atash Sorushan with soprano, Jessica Rivera.
As Resident Conductor of the San Francisco Symphony, Cabrera worked closely with its Music Director Michael Tilson Thomas and frequently conducted the orchestra in a variety of concerts, including all of the education and family concerts, reaching over 70,000 children throughout the Bay Area every year. During his seven seasons as Music Director of the San Francisco Symphony Youth Orchestra, Cabrera took the group on two European tours, winning an ASCAP Award for Adventurous Programming of American Music on Foreign Tours, and receiving critical acclaim for a live recording from the Berlin Philharmonie of Mahler’s Symphony No.1.
Cabrera is equally at home in the world of opera. He was the Resident Conductor of the San Francisco Opera from 2005-2008 and has also been an assistant conductor for productions at the Metropolitan Opera, Lyric Opera of Chicago, the Ravinia Festival, Festival di Spoleto, the Aspen Music Festival, and the Music Academy of the West. Since 2008, Cabrera has frequently conducted productions in Concepción, Chile.
Awards and fellowships include a Herbert von Karajan Conducting Fellowship at the Salzburg Festival and conducting the Nashville Symphony in the League of American Orchestra’s prestigious Bruno Walter National Conductor Preview. Donato Cabrera was recognized by the Consulate-General of Mexico in San Francisco as a Luminary of the Friends of Mexico Honorary Committee, for his contributions to promoting and developing the presence of the Mexican community in the Bay Area.
ILYA YAKUSHEV, piano
Russian pianist Ilya Yakushev, with many awards and honors to his credit, continues to astound and mesmerize audiences at major venues on three continents.
In the 2019-20 season, Ilya Yakushev performed as piano soloist with Millikin-Decatur Symphony, Pachuca Philharmonic, Fairfield County Orchestra, St. Petersburg Governor’s Orchestra and St. Petersburg Philharmonic in addition to over 30 recitals in North America and Europe.
Highlights of Yakushev’s 2021-22 season include appearances with the Wisconsin Philharmonic and La Crosse Symphony. He will also play recitals in the US and Russia.
In February 2014, British label Nimbus Records published “Prokofiev Sonatas Vol. 1” CD. American Record Guide wrote “Yakushev is one of the very best young pianists before the public today, and it doesn’t seem to matter what repertoire he plays – it is all of the highest caliber”. Volume 2 was published in January 2017, as well as an all-Russian repertoire CD in September 2017.
In past seasons, he has performed in various prestigious venues worldwide, including Glinka Philharmonic Hall (St. Petersburg), Victoria Hall (Singapore), Weill Recital Hall at Carnegie Hall (New York), Davies Symphony Hall (San Francisco), and Sejong Performing Arts Center (Seoul, Korea). His performances with orchestra include those with the Mariinsky Theatre Orchestra, St. Petersburg Philharmonic, San Francisco Symphony, BBC Concert Orchestra, Boston Pops, Rochester Philharmonic, Utah Symphony, and many others.
Winner of the 2005 World Piano Competition which took place in Cincinnati, OH, Mr. Yakushev received his first award at age 12 as a prizewinner of the Young Artists Concerto Competition in his native St. Petersburg. In 1997, he received the Mayor of St. Petersburg’s Young Talents award, and in both 1997 and 1998, he won First Prize at the Donostia Hiria International Piano Competition in San Sebastian, Spain. In 1998, he received a national honor, The Award for Excellence in Performance, presented to him by the Minister of Culture of the Russian Federation in Moscow. Most recently, Mr. Yakushev became a recipient of the prestigious Gawon International Music Society’s Award in Seoul, Korea.
Mr. Yakushev attended the Rimsky-Korsakov College of Music in his native St. Petersburg, Russia, and subsequently came to New York City to attend Mannes College of Music where he studied with legendary pianist Vladimir Feltsman.
Ilya Yakushev is a Yamaha artist.
SEASON SPONSORS
PROGRAM NOTES
Jean Sibelius (1865–1957)
Finlandia, Op. 26 (1899)
In approaching Finlandia it’s best to put aside mental images of the mature Sibelius, he of the stone-like bald head and icily elegant demeanor who wrote profoundly logical symphonies and darkly glittering tone poems filled with Nordic mythology. The Jean Sibelius of 1899 was a skinny redhead with volcanic talent, glittering intelligence, and an almost total lack of self-restraint or common sense. He drank; he smoked; he caroused; he borrowed. And the work we know today as Finlandia—it had a lot of names in its early days—is manifestly the work of a young hothead. It bristles with rebellion, from its steely opening through its long heroic march that signifies the struggles of the Finnish people against their Russian overlords. Towards the end, the Finlandia Hymn arises, an original melody which stands to Finland as Land of Hope and Glory does to England—i.e., an unofficial second national anthem. Even if the heart-on-the-sleeve nationalism of Finlandia isn’t really all that representative of Sibelius’s overall compositional ethos, it holds a genuinely important place in the scheme of things—not only as an expression of Finnish unity, but also as a flat-out bravura showpiece for full orchestra.
Sergei Prokofiev (1891–1953)
Piano Concerto No. 3 in C major, Op. 26 (1913–1921)
Music, like politics, makes for unlikely bedfellows. In 1917 Sergei Prokofiev met Cyrus McCormick, whose father had invented the mechanical harvester that revolutionized farming, at a concert in St. Petersburg. McCormick invited the young composer-pianist to visit him in Chicago sometime. No doubt he was gratified when in 1918 Prokofiev did just that, in town to play his first piano concerto and conduct the Sythian Suite with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, thanks to McCormick’s sponsorship. Prokofiev was back in 1921 to conduct the premiere of his new opera The Love for Three Oranges, when he had the added pleasure of introducing his new Piano Concerto No. 3 in C major, Op. 26 with Frederick Stock conducting the Chicago Symphony.
Both were rapturously received by audiences and (most) critics, but performances a short while later of both opera and concerto in New York were another story: the audiences detested both and the critics peppered him with commentarial buckshot. “It was as though a pack of dogs had broken loose and were tearing my trousers to shreds,” Prokofiev complained. Thus the Prokofiev Third becomes another entry in the distressingly long list of celebrated concertos that started out under a cloud. Fortunately, it didn’t stay there for long, thanks to a triumphant 1922 performance in Paris with Serge Koussevitzky conducting. With that the work quickly entered the repertory, where it stands as the most popular of Prokofiev’s five piano concertos and amongst the undisputed gems of the repertory.
Prokofiev wrote the concerto from the inside out; the theme that is subjected to an extensive series of variations in the middle movement dates back to 1913 for a subsequently abandoned project. Like all practical composers, Prokofiev never wasted good material and recycled the theme and variations into the new piano concerto that occupied him during the summer of 1921.
The first movement borrows from the classical symphonic tradition by beginning with a slow introduction, but the melting lyricism of the opening doesn’t last long; the tempo picks up, the orchestra snaps into alertness, then the piano enters with electric Baroqueinfused figurations that kick off a headlong rush that is occasionally interrupted by so er passages employing the introduction’s theme.
A er the aforesaid theme and variations—and they’re quite extensive and varied—the finale stalks in, more industrious skulduggery than outright menace. A warmly effusive middle section follows, then comes a whirring tick-tock scamper to the concerto’s exuberant, athletic conclusion. (con't)
PROGRAM NOTES
Prokofiev had le Russia in the wake of the 1918 revolution. He could have stayed in the West permanently, but in the later 1920s he began to visit Russia with ever-increasing frequency. In 1936 he made the fateful decision to return home for good. Although the stresses of the War years gave rise to a procession of masterpieces, Prokofiev by no means exempt from the prejudices of ignorant Party functionaries. The nightmarish “Zhdanov Decree” of 1948 included Prokofiev in its savage denunciation of Soviet composers whose work was deemed unacceptably modernistic. He and his career never really recovered from that catastrophe, and when he died on March 5, 1953—the same day as Stalin—he was a broken man. But just as Prokofiev kept working under even the most trying circumstances, so his music retained its fundamental optimism and hope even as post-War European and American music retreated into frigid cerebralism and obtuse sterility. “There are still so many beautiful things to be said in C major,” he declared.
Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky (1840–1893)
Symphony No. 4 in F minor, Op. 36 (1878)
The story of the F Minor Symphony is interwoven with two women’s associations with Tchaikovsky—one relationship long-lasting and nurturing, the other brief and catastrophic.
First up, the catastrophe: Antonina Ivanovna Milyukova, a former pupil of Tchaikovsky’s at the Moscow Conservatory who, smitten, made advances of marriage. In what surely ranks high on the list of impulsive follies amongst the great composers, the homosexual Tchaikovsky married Antonina Ivanovna on July 6, 1877 a er a ridiculously brief quasi-courtship. It wasn’t long before he fled in near-panic. Naïve, unsophisticated, and mentally unstable Antonina Ivanova may have been, but she deserved neither her new husband’s overwrought boorishness nor the face-saving vilification eventually heaped on her by the Tchaikovsky clan. Pyotr Ilyich and Antonina Ivanovna separated a er six weeks, although they remained legally married until Tchaikovsky’s death in 1893.
Tchaikovsky’s self-inflicted marital wounds made for ripe fodder in his burgeoning epistolary relationship with Nadezdha von Meck, an iron-willed matriarch who subsidized him to the tune of 6,000 rubles a year, a lavish income for the time. She and Tchaikovsky exchanged frank, affectionate, and surprisingly intimate letters back and forth over the span of her thirteen-year sponsorship of Tchaikovsky’s career, her only proviso being that the two were never to meet in person.
“Our symphony progresses” wrote Tchaikovsky to von Meck in August 1877, then in December assured her that “I am working hard on the orchestration of our symphony and am quite absorbed in the task.” Our symphony—No. 4 in F Minor, dedicated to “my best friend” von Meck—marks a breakthrough not only in Tchaikovsky’s development as a symphonist, but also in the history of the genre itself. Particularly in the extended first movement Tchaikovsky shook himself free of his earlier notions of just what was and what was not proper in a symphony.
The Fourth makes brilliant use of a motto theme—i.e., a statement that is heard throughout the symphony and acts as an overall unifying device. It’s impossible to miss, stated fortissimo right at the beginning in the horns and bassoons. “This is fate, that inevitable force which checks our aspirations towards happiness ere they reach the goal,” wrote Tchaikovsky to von Meck in an ill-advised programmatic description that teeters on the border between silliness and surrealism.
The second movement states a gentle melody in the old troubadour “bar” form of ‘a a b’—familiar to modern listeners in its incarnation as the 12-bar blues—then embarks on a journey of elegant variations. The third-place Scherzo: Pizzicato ostinato was a blockbuster hit from the get-go, thanks to its novel orchestration with plucked strings for the main reprise, a wind band for the first contrasting episode, and a brass band for the second. That gives way abruptly to the torrential Finale, in which a little folk song There Stood a Little Birch serves as the primary theme. Nobody is likely to miss the recurrence of the great fanfare motto theme, a er which the Fourth hurls to its spectacular conclusion.
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