Las Vegas Music Festival

August 8-18, 2002

University of Nevada at Las Vegas, Las Vegas, Nevada

Ham Hall, site of the grand finale concert

The 10-year-old Las Vegas Music Festival, the creation of the music department at the University of Nevada at Las Vegas (UNLV), is an event that seems pretty oddball at first glance. For one thing, despite the touted art collections at Bellagio and other mega-hotels, Vegas is not yet a center of high culture. People go there to be entertained by the ersatz, not the real.

For another, the festival is heavily oriented toward student performances. This is an event where aspiring high school and college-level musicians, and chamber groups from all over the world come to take seminars, compare notes and give recitals. In other words, with the exception of recitals by UNLV and guest faculty members, it’s a festival of amateurs.

Finally, there’s the heat. The festival takes place in early August, the time of year when even desert-wizened cacti and rattlesnakes seriously contemplate a change in career.

UNLV in autumn

Then you take a closer look, and realize just how sweet and public-spirited a thing this festival is. UNLV not only has created an event where future classical music stars may make their first appearances, it provides generous scholarships and low-cost tuition so that qualified students won’t be denied an opportunity to attend. The festival’s eight recitals (all but one at night) and grand finale afternoon concert, all given on the UNLV campus, are offered free to K-12 students and cost only $8 per ticket for adults. Student chamber music concerts are free.

This year’s orchestral repertoire includes Brahms (Symphony No. 1), Bartok (Concerto for Orchestra), Strauss (Death and Transfiguration) and Stravinsky (Petrushka). The guest artist faculty will draw performers from such organizations as the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the Oregon Symphony Orchestra, the Julliard School of Music, the Houston Symphony and the Eastman School, as well as UNLV’s own resident teacher-musicians.

Centerpieces of Delight

The festival’s recitals can be the touchstones for a delightful Las Vegas trip. The city, despite its excesses – actually, because of them – is one of the most interesting places in the U.S. Everything here is either bodaciously big or out of place. Nearby Hoover Dam is gigantic, and the story of its construction is shake-your-head-and-whistle impressive.

The casino New York, New York, with its compressed Manhattan skyline, is not only out of place by 2,300 miles, it’s a lesson in how post-modern architecture has broken loose from the modernist ideal of form following function, and the classical attitude that facades should never be over-the-top playful.

The 1,149-foot tall Stratosphere Tower, whose top is shaped like a diamond mounted on four prongs, has a roller coaster that runs above it’s observation deck, 1,000 feet above the ground. How out of place is that?

At night, when the heat dissipates, the four-mile-long Strip, Las Vegas’s main street, becomes one of the most pedestrian-heavy lanes in the U.S. Tens of thousands of people go out walking, gawking in amazement and bemusement at an imitation Eiffel Tower, a 350-foot tall pyramid faced in black glass, a recreation of Venice, a simulated pirate fight, a belching volcano, a vastly oversized fairy tale castle, tens of thousands of miles of pulsing neon light tubes and millions of incandescent light bulbs, insanely stretched limos, strutting high rollers, disheveled losers and shorts-clad nuclear families.

All this and low-cost classical music from rising young musicians.

Whatta town! — Patrick Totty