Las Vegas Philharmonic falters in pops concert

Oh, that’s right: Because it was a Las Vegas Philharmonic pops concert, it meant that Conductor/Music Director David Itkin would be wearing a white tuxedo jacket, leaving the black tails of a "formal" concert on the hangar. It also meant he’d have a wireless handheld microphone at the podium, and he wasn’t afraid to use it in the all-Gershwin program.

He began by explaining that within the vast library of George and Ira’s legacy, there are some pieces "you can’t not include" — but did that mean they needed to be included twice? Seriously: soprano soloist Lisa Vromen’s operatic delivery of "Summertime" (by all means adequate) should have sufficed. But, no. Itkin’s choice of "The Catfish Row Suite" to open the concert’s second half meant that the audience would be treated to a second helping of the same tune (albeit instrumental and as just part of Itkin’s convoluted explanation about the best of the best of Gershwin repurposed for different audiences who just couldn’t get enough of the melodic hooks). Concertmaster DeAnn LeTourneau’s solo was fine, indeed, but I can’t imagine I was the only one in the house wondering why other selections couldn’t have been made .

The repetition of tunes had been done once before in the program — at least humorously acknowledged by piano soloist Dave Loeb who, following his superb "Rhapsody In Blue" (props to clarinet soloist Cory Tiffin’s saucy/sassy note bending), dashed back on stage to joke with Vromen about hearing his part all over again in a medley.

An unintended comedic aside? The stagehands tasked with moving the grand piano from stage right to center stage for Loeb generated laughs and applause as they accidentally plunked piano keys and nearly drove the instrument over the stage’s edge (in slow motion) before righting the ship and tightening the brake on a leg wheel to lock the puppy down, leaving LeTourneau and Itkin to lean over and lock down an upstage wheel to yet another smattering of giggles and brief applause. Itkin’s side-by-side, four-handed piano duet with Loeb after "Rhapsody" was cute even though he "didn’t know why" they did it.

Back to Vronen for a moment. Her nonoperatic voice was much better suited to Gershwin than the out-of-place shrill delivery beyond "Porgy and Bess." And can we talk microphone technique? Wow. You’d think a professional of her experience would know the difference between "eating" the mic (with resultant P-popping and overmodulation that brought the magnificent Reynolds Hall sound down to the level of a high school gym) and the stylings of a Clint Holmes who knows all there is to know about moving the mic closer or farther from the mouth at just the right moments.

Itkin’s well-played joke about how being a professor to grad students pursuing the baton-wielding profession meant he was in charge of "semi-conductors" was ruined for me when he appealed to the snob set by snarking that such humor was beneath him.

And a note on concert etiquette from a patron rightly appalled by a seatmate’s ongoing texting during the program: unless it was an emergency, couldn’t it have waited?

But as harsh as this review may sound, it was a pleasant concert that matter-of-factly could have been better. Indeed, one of the Gershwin tunes seemed apt: "Isn’t It A Pity."