Visit the embattled Kennedy Center post-Trump purge, and the place can feel abandoned. Leave it to dance provocateur Mark Morris to show a way forward for the national arts center.

L.A. Opera sets 'Così fan Tutte,' Mozart's sophisticated study of love and constancy, in a swanky American country club.

Los Angeles is in the midst of a de facto chamber opera festival with productions across the region tackling the social and political issues of the moment.

Celebrating its 60th anniversary, Twyla Tharp Dance premieres 'Aguas da Amazonia' with Philip Glass' score in Santa Barbara, Costa Mesa, Palm Desert and Northridge before it heads for the Kennedy Center.

Long Beach Opera embarks on a risky, unprecedented season centered on pioneering composer Pauline Oliveros. "We're just going for it."

Martha Graham Dance Company reminds us that our city continually reinvents itself, with or without disasters like the Palisades and Eaton fires.

Gustavo Dudamel returns to the L.A. Phil to lead a new production of Beethoven's "Fidelio" with Deaf West Theatre.

The first notes heard again in the long-quieted Disney Hall were a slow, soft upward harp arpeggio, each pitch a haunting, crystalline moment.

Tremendous singing propels L.A. Opera's return to the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion in Stravinsky's tough, timely "Oedipus Rex."

Philip Glass' new 'Circus Days and Nights' is the latest example of the composer's operas proving to be a prime source of experimentation during the pandemic.

We listen in on the first acoustical test of the new Beckmen YOLA Center in Inglewood, which promises to be revolutionary.

With a wrenching tribute to "all the beautiful souls" killed by COVID-19, the L.A. Phil performs a stirring free concert for frontline workers.

Pacific Opera Project's production of Leonard Bernstein's "Trouble in Tahiti" is the city's first major live opera show that's not a drive-in event.

The L.A. Phil's artistic leader has been appointed music director in Paris, where he will join one of the most celebrated opera companies in the world.

Bernstein had friendly and fraught relationships with U.S. presidents. But his White House musical flopped. Missed was its exploration of race and slavery that's more timely than ever.

The overdue creation of a Cabinet-level Secretary of Culture would give the country a lift we all crave. Here's who I think would rise to the challenge.

Writing in his cell as he awaits the gallows, the narrator of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Black Cat” curiously figures that what was to him “little but Horror” will to many appear “a mere series of house…

David Lang’s “the loser,” given its West Coast premiere Friday night by Los Angeles Opera at the Theatre at Ace Hotel, is sort of, but not really, about Glenn Gould. Gould’s the winner in as much as he�…

Plácido Domingo added role No. 151 to his legacy Saturday night. Was this celebrated tenor-baritone-conductor-impresario and all-around operaholic counting all 65 years he has been on the stage, beginning with…

As the sun was going down Thursday night, the steel of Walt Disney Concert Hall reflected the colors of twilight and an oncoming chill in the air added a sense of expectancy. A baby grand piano on the plaza at …

How would have Yuval Sharon’s bewildering new production of Mozart’s “The Magic Flute” gone over in Los Angeles? That was the first thing that crossed my mind as I walked out of the opera house and into…

Merce Cunningham died 10 years ago at 90. He was easily the greatest choreographer of the second half of the 20th century and a teeny bit into the 21st. He left behind an enormous body of work. He passed on new…

It’s going to be a Stravinsky spring, right? The Los Angeles Philharmonic is about to kick off a two-week Stravinsky festival, Esa-Pekka Salonen celebrating Stravinsky’s association with the orchestra as pa…

As political pawns in a long-running congressional chess game, Dreamers, those children of immigrants with aspirations for a promising life in the United States, make dispassion very difficult for even the most…

Well, that was a surprise! “(M)iyamoto Is Black Enough” — the first in what will be an ongoing collaboration between the Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts in Beverly Hills and Brooklyn’s n…

For whatever reason — a worry about looming dystopia, perhaps — Germany is having its Babylonian moment. Major new opera productions here in Hamburg and in Berlin last weekend proved media sensations that p…

Hollywood has its under the radar, whatever-the-cat-drags-in Fringe Festival. Los Angeles has its fill of venturesome large institutions — notably the Los Angeles Philharmonic, Roy and Edna Disney/CalArts The…

From its earliest days, the Hollywood Bowl has thought of itself as a Hollywood-size opera house. And why not? Opera likes all things outsize. Full summer opera seasons in the amphitheater once drew sizable cro…

“Hamilton” didn’t come out of nowhere. For the past century, American music theater has been struggling with how exactly to represent our national character on stage and who we are. It’s a long story. C…

A year from now we will celebrate the 80th anniversary of one of the most important concerts in American history. Richard Powers set the scene in his epic novel, “The Time of Our Singing,” by noting that de…

Taylor Mac’s “A 24-Decade History of Popular Music” is a necessary and great American epic for our time. It is, on the surface, like nothing else, a queering of American history with the help of a quirky …

If it’s Tuesday, this must be Huayin, a scenic village in Northern China on a tributary of the Yellow River at the foot of Hua Mountain. OK, it was a Thursday. And it was Santa Barbara. But the Huayin Shadow …

Gluck’s “Orpheus and Eurydice” may be based on the Greek myth of a singer capable of beguiling even hell’s furies, but the opera has long been catnip to choreographers. One of the defining early works o…

How do cultures on opposite sides of the planet interpret the Earth and its mythology? A notebook comparing the mariachi opera "To Cross the Face of the Moon" and the elaborate gamelan/dance production "Bhumi-M…

In his Los Angeles Opera program note for Leonard Bernstein’s “Candide,” which opened at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion on Saturday night, music director James Conlon points out that the original Broadway …

In the annals of Leonard Bernstein, it is common to dismiss the West Coast. The composer was a native Bostonian and a New York icon who didn’t have all that much to do with us. Though a media maven, Bernstein…

New principal guest conductor Susanna Mälkki led the L.A. Phil through a program centered on a extremely difficult 1968 cello concerto by the German composer Berndt Alois Zimmermann, whose killer solo part was…

A mill. A brook. A body. A pretty, fickle daughter. A blithe wanderer. A hunter. Nixies. A broken heart. An atmosphere of underlying weirdness. A strophic soundtrack underscoring all that is inexplicable in woo…

On the first day of 2018, a dozen cities in Germany, from Augsburg to Wiesbaden, celebrated a new year with concerts that included music by Leonard Bernstein. No matter America’s fraught relationship with Ira…

Robert Mann once explained in an interview that, zealously fired up after founding the Juilliard String Quartet in 1946, he went so far as to obtain an orgone accumulator. It wasn’t enough that the feisty you…

Has any country ever suffered victory as Russia did at the end of the World War II in 1945? Loses were incalculably terrible, and the future was as scary as ever with Stalin still in power. The dictator wanted …

The first composer in the Western canon whose name we know and whose voice continues to exert considerable contemporary resonance was a woman — the 12th century Benedictine abbess Hildegard of Bingen. Her mus…

Mendelssohn’s beloved overture to “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” can be used two ways, both wondrous. One is as the standalone piece that the 17-year-old composer originally intended. In this fashion, as i…

When Gidon Kremer has a farsighted cause, it is wise to pay close attention. Over an uncompromising half-century career, the Latvian violinist and one of the last of the legendary artists to come out of the Sov…

He was a very small figure seated on a wide expanse, a large stage empty but for a cellist on a chair. The Hollywood Bowl shell was lighted midnight blue. The amphitheater was probably kept as dark as the fire …

America lacks a truly great international music and theater festival. It's time we create one like the Austrian event where top talents push their art forward.

“Sondheim on Sondheim” is, no surprise, all about Stephen Sondheim. But a new “symphonic version” given its premiere by the Los Angeles Philharmonic on Sunday night at the Hollywood Bowl proved ever so …

When Robert Xavier Rodríguez’s “Frida” had its premiere in 1991 at the American Music Theater Festival in Philadelphia, Frida Kahlo was certainly well known, but not the art-world rock star she has becom…

Now we know. It has been 45 years since Lou Harrison’s “Young Caesar,” an overtly gay opera for puppets with penises, had its hapless premiere in Pasadena, to the outrage of some of its sponsors. But afte…

Peter Brook’s “Battlefield,” which opened at the Wallis on Wednesday for a brief run through Sunday, is itself the ultimate brief run. It is the last word in concentrated compression by theater’s greate…

The music of “La La Land” is not really the music of La La Land. It may be only in the obvious but narrow sense that this was music written for a film made here and celebrating freeway culture. But the musi…

“The Perfect American” is the operatic portrait of an idealist American artist as a less-than-perfect old man, which is to say a blend of sunshine, supremacy and insecurity. In Philip Glass’ most recent p…

The arts and entertainment communities — anticipating government cutbacks, harmed by a presidential travel ban, alarmed by an atmosphere of divisiveness and invigorated by mass protests — have already decla…

It was nasty in Long Beach on Sunday. Record rainfall turned parts of the 710 into an underwater expedition for many on their way to that afternoon’s Long Beach Opera season-opening performance of Henry Purce…

You could make a Broadway show about the making of the musical “On the Town.” It’s got everything. Then again, no one would believe it. In 1944, a 26-year-old composer and a couple of theater-world pals l…

Calixto Bieito is Catalan for Eurotrash. Not really.  But Bieito is the provocative opera director who first comes to the mind of many worried about an art form sinking into Tarantino-esque sex, violence and o…

A prodigious builder of musical bridges, Jennifer Koh is a violinist with a number of ongoing projects meant to connect people, disciplines and eras. To gain insight into a musician's mind, for instance, she re…

With "Hopscotch" last fall, opera roamed to parts of downtown and Boyle Heights the art form had never ventured, its audiences escorted in safe environments of limousines. Sunday evening the downtown opera scen…

All war is hell. But it is a special hell for those expected to fight without understanding why, as it is a special hell for civilians caught up in the battle, unsure who are the good guys and who are the enemi…

Los Angeles Opera came into being in 1996 with a stellar production of Verdi's "Otello." It was a historic occasion at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion. The next evening the company presented Puccini's "Madame But…

I have a long history with the Music Center. I know the nooks and crannies of the campus' four theaters. But the one place I had not been until recently is the office of the president and CEO. I had no reason. …

Barely two years after Los Angeles Opera first mounted Barrie Kosky and Suzanne Andrade's popular silent-movie take on Mozart's "The Magic Flute," the company brought it back to the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion on…

The announcement that Los Angeles Philharmonic music director Gustavo Dudamel will conduct members of Youth Orchestra Los Angeles in the Super Bowl halftime show is big news for the world of classical music. No…

Christmas, we like to remind ourselves, is about family. But the season tends to offer surprisingly little familial music of any real significance. The subject matter of holiday oratorio, cantata, opera or song…

In "Fase, Four Movements to the Music of Steve Reich," which Flemish choreographer Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker brought to Royce Hall on Tuesday night, one plus one equals two, allowing for an almost imperceptibl…

On the cover of its July issue, Opera News dubbed Jake Heggie "U.S. opera's most successful composer." It was an odd pronouncement for the in-house publication of the Metropolitan Opera Guild. As of last summer…

The Los Angeles Philharmonic turned to New York of the 1940s and '50s Tuesday night at the Hollywood Bowl, for which Bramwell Tovey drolly apologized to his Angeleno audience. I certainly noticed no objection t…

Unlike the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and the Boston Symphony, which have outdoor summer homes, the New York Philharmonic wanders when the weather gets hot. In June, America's olde…

On a day in which this city ecstatically celebrated the Supreme Court decision to legalize same-sex marriage, "Two Women," you might think, could mean only one thing Sunday afternoon.

On April 19, 1943, a Swiss chemist in Basel treated himself to a small sample of a fungi-based substance, LSD-25, and rode his bicycle home, taking the first acid trip. A month earlier, a onetime hobo who had j…

Berlioz' "Les Troyens" -- a five-hour epic opera after Virgil's "Aeneid" with touches of Homer, Shakespeare and music like none ever written before for the lyric stage -- is the grandest French opera. Every per…

The idea of reviving a 32-year-old collaboration between composer John Adams, choreographer Lucinda Childs and architect Frank Gehry that had been commissioned by the Museum of Contemporary Art to open its Temp…

Could “Anna” come home to America? I would like to think that with the example of John Adams and Peter Sellars, Americans might object to the opera's lack of a woman’s point of view and its ge…

John Zorn is a defiant, protean musician, inescapable on the American scene everywhere it would seem except Los Angeles. But after a 25-year absence, he was back this weekend to proteate.

The myth that opera was born of a miracle dies hard. Musicologists no longer insist that what has proved to be a uniquely innovative art form for four centuries was the exclusive product of scholars in Florence…

From the day it opened, Lincoln Center, one of the world's grandest arts complexes, has struggled to get it right. That first night in 1962 in Philharmonic Hall (now Avery Fisher Hall and soon to be renamed aft…

Claire Chase, a flutist and MacArthur "genius," on Saturday afternoon did what only a brilliant flutist and MacArthur "genius" could do: She turned UCLA's Schoenberg Hall into a giant lung.

"We live in unsettled times," the president sings at the beginning of John Adams' opera "Nixon in China." He has just arrived in Peking (now Beijing) for his 1972 meeting with Chairman Mao, thus opening up rela…

I have not seen so happy an audience at Los Angeles Opera this season as the crowd in the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion on Saturday night. The company revived its slapstick 2009 production of Rossini's "The Barber …