The Las Vegas Philharmonic's longest tenured music director, Conductor Donato Cabrera, is our guest this week on Nevada Week In Person.

♪♪♪ Support for Nevada Week In Person is provided by Senator William H. Hernstadt.

-Welcome to Nevada Week In Person.

I'm Amber Renee Dixon.

He grew up in Las Vegas, serves as music director of the California Symphony, and is credited with greatly changing the Las Vegas Philharmonic concert experience.

About to embark on his 10th and final season as the Las Vegas Philharmonic's music director, Conductor Donato Cabrera, thank you for joining Nevada Week In Person.

(Donato Cabrera) My pleasure, Amber.

-First off, why is this going to be your last season, the 2023-2024 season, last at the Las Vegas Philharmonic?

-Well, it is a momentous time for both the organization and for myself.

It's been 10 years, and 10 years is a good milemarker, a good way of sort of taking the time to reflect.

And we both felt that this was a time to move on and very happily so.

It's-- I always feel as an entertainer, I can't remember who said it first, Mae West or someone like that said, "Leave them wanting more."

And it's not to say that this is the end of the relationship by any stretch of the imagination.

I still am in Las Vegas quite a bit.

My family is here, and I plan to be coming back and being a big supporter of the Philharmonic in the future.

And who knows, maybe some music making will happen as well.

-"Leave them wanting more," and I think you certainly are going to do that, because you are credited, as I mentioned, with making some big changes there.

Of the changes you've implemented, what are you most proud of?

-I think-- actually, I know what I'm most proud of is the fact that the audience feels that they're part of the part of the evening; that they're part of the event; that they feel welcomed; they feel that they want to be there; that they are going to come away with enjoying themselves, learning a little bit about this incredible art form that the Philharmonic plays so well, and just a sense of belonging.

That's what I'm most proud of.

-Hmm.

Because I would think and viewers might think that should just be commonplace.

Was it not?

-One would hope so, but you know, unfortunately, classical music over the last century or so has done a horrible job at promoting itself.

I think a lot of these ideas of when to clap, what to wear, only certain pieces of music can be performed and you need to know them in advance, if not, you're left out, that it's only meant for people of a certain income level, all of these things, we did that to ourselves over this last century.

And none of those things are actually true or part of the original experience of what classical music was about.

And so I was intent of breaking all of those myths.

And I feel like I've done that.

-Why would you tell someone who feels that way: It's not for me, it's maybe a little bit too highfalutin.

What would you tell them about why they should come?

-I would say that classical music, the music that the Las Vegas Philharmonic performs, is absolutely no different than their favorite Beatles song, their favorite Rage Against the Machine song, their favorite Louis Armstrong tune.

It's all part of this big family of music makers.

And just come to the concert.

I guarantee you'll love it!

And so you know, it's sort of trying to sell it in a way, but knowing that once they get into those beautiful walls of the Smith Center, they're going to come away feeling exactly like they did at another concert.

-Part of a music director's duties is to educate the public and to educate children as well.

How do you think you've left music education better off in Las Vegas?

-Again, I think it's I treat every concert that we do, whether it's one of our subscription concerts or our Youth Concert series for children, all, they're all the same.

In other words, I am trying to reveal this music for what it is, which can be life changing.

And so for me, these educational concerts that we have done have, are just important, just as important if not more so than our educational concerts, as I call them, for the the grownups.

-How has music been life changing for you?

-It's all encompassing.

I feel in a way that music was for me, it saved me.

It saved me from a life of shades of grey.

When I started-- When I discovered music, it was as if I-- You know in the Wizard of Oz, you know, it's after the, after the finado and, and she walks through, opens the door onto Oz, it was all Technicolor.

That's what life became for me once I started practicing the piano, learning how to read music, discovering the history, the philosophy, the political landscape of 200 years ago, the great traversals these composers had to do, the fact that they had to write this music with no electricity with a quill and candlelight hours and hours and hours.

Everything about music and the arts, in general, can be such a window into not only the world that was, but the world within and the world that can be.

-When you are preparing for a performance, how much research do you do into the composer and what they were going through when they composed that piece?

-It's, it's paramount.

For instance, for this coming season, my last season, I'm already studying.

I'm already reading books about the composers I know less about, let's say.

Or if I'm doing a piece for the second or third time, I am looking at the score that I have used for the last 10 years with my markings, and then sometimes I will buy a new score.

So it's entirely empty, and I revisit it as if I've never seen it before.

So there's-- or I'm reading a historical fiction from that time to sort of get me in the framework of what it was like for Mozart to walk down the cobblestone streets of Vienna before cars and electricity and the loudest thing that you could hear in Vienna at that time was the church bell.

Think about that.

That was the loudest thing in this, in a city was a church bell.

Nothing louder.

So these sort of, these sort of things intrigue me.

-And so what do you do with that information?

-Well, what is-- So the word for "loud" in music is "forte."

So when you're playing Mozart and when you're conducting Mozart and you know that the loudest thing was not an airplane, not a car speeding by, but a church bell.

So is forte, loud, what was that like for an orchestra then, as opposed to a piece that was written two weeks ago and when they say, "Play loud."

That is really important, actually, to know because a loud sound in a Mozart orchestra is not the same loud sound as an orchestra or an orchestral piece from today.

And that's very crucial to know that.

-I want to go back to when you said "a life with shades of grey."

What would that have been?

A boring life?

How would you characterize what your life would have been without music?

-That's a good question.

I think a life without the arts or without music, in my case, it's not to say it would be a life not worth living.

Certainly not.

It's just that I feel that it has made me-- music has made me who I am today.

It has made me smarter.

It has made me realize things about myself that I-- I don't know if I would have realized without, without music.

It certainly challenges me to be the best I can be.

And in that way, you know, I've often compared, and a lot of musicians do, compare it with sports and with becoming great in sports.

You know, the greatest athletes, they have such an insight into the philosophy behind sports or the-- They know everything about the historical ramifications of the people that preceded them.

And so there are a lot of-- there are a lot of things that I find similar between these two endeavors.

-So raised in Las Vegas, born in Pasadena.

But here in Las Vegas until you were 10 years old, then went up to Reno.

You've talked about the importance of serving the community that you're in.

So when you get back to Las Vegas finally, how different was it, and how did you go about determining, How do I serve this community?

-Well, for those of us watching this show, the difference between the Las Vegas of 1980 and the Las Vegas of 2013, I mean, I can't think of a city that has transformed more in those years than Las Vegas.

Now, my family, my grandmother and my aunt and uncle and my sister, actually, at the time, they were all living here in Las Vegas.

So I had visited.

It wasn't as if I hadn't known Las Vegas at all between that big stretch of time.

But, you know, the idea that the Smith Center would even exist, it just completely blew my mind when I walked through those doors for the first time in 2013.

That area, I remember that area.

It was, it was a bunch of train tracks, because my father had a job near there when I was very young, and I remember.

And to see the Ruvo Center, the outlet mall, the Smith Center where these train tracks were, I just, I just couldn't believe it.

So that's just one thing.

There's just so many things about this city that's, that's for the better for the most part.

There's just this incredible growth that has happened.

The idea of Summerlin...

I lived on the outskirts of town, and I lived on Jones, my family.

So anyway, we could go into the specifics of-- -Of how much it has changed?

- --of how much it has changed.

-What about the people of Las Vegas?

I mean, you've been working in California for years and years.

How do you serve this community different than you would serve the San Francisco community?

-Well, the great thing about this audience, and I think it's really particular to Las Vegas, is that they love entertainment.

They have access to the world's greatest entertainers, unlike most other cities.

Maybe you could say all other cities of similar size.

-It's got to make your job harder.

-In a way, it makes it harder.

But on the other hand, they're open to it.

And the fact that the Las Vegas Philharmonic is the only professional orchestra in Las Vegas, gave it a cachet that was so different from all the other things that were available to them, to one on a Saturday night.

So we've always had an incredible audience and a very thankful and curious audience.

And so that is a lot different from a more established community like the Bay Area or especially the East Coast where, you know, there have been symphonies for as long as the city has been around, a couple of hundred years in the case of the New York Philharmonic.

Even in San Francisco, the San Francisco Symphony is 110 years old.

So there's a sense of newness.

So when I, and this is not an exaggeration, when I played Beethoven's 6th symphony, The Pastoral Symphony, which is in the great Disney movie Fantasia , it was the first time that Beethoven's 6th Symphony was ever performed in Las Vegas by a professional orchestra.

So I made the professional debut of a Beethoven symphony here.

That is very special and very unique and something that this community can be proud of, experiencing these great works of art for the first time.

-How was it received?

-Can you imagine?

They were so-- I mean, on that program, by the way, I will say this, and this will be-- This is something else I'm very proud of.

I premiered a piece by a living composer who lives here in Las Vegas, Michael Torke.

The Mozart Piano Concerto No.

23 had also never been performed.

And all three pieces were received with equal, a brand new piece and Beethoven's symphony.

-Donato Cabrera, thank you so much for joining Nevada Week In Person.

To see more like this, go to vegaspbs.org/nevadaweek.

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