Friday, January 29, 2021
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.
Linked From Los Angeles Times at 09:39PMMonday, January 18, 2021
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.
Linked From Los Angeles Times at 01:23PMTuesday, May 7, 2019
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 …
Linked From Los Angeles Times at 10:52PMDavid 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 winn…
Linked From Los Angeles Times at 10:52PMMonday, May 6, 2019
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 s…
Linked From Los Angeles Times at 06:43PMSunday, May 5, 2019
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 pi…
Linked From Los Angeles Times at 09:48AMFriday, April 19, 2019
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 …
Linked From Los Angeles Times at 09:30AMWednesday, April 17, 2019
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 wo…
Linked From Los Angeles Times at 04:40PMWednesday, April 3, 2019
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…
Linked From Los Angeles Times at 05:15PMMonday, March 18, 2019
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 difficu…
Linked From Los Angeles Times at 09:20PMFriday, March 15, 2019
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 Hill…
Linked From Los Angeles Times at 04:30PMWednesday, March 13, 2019
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 med…
Linked From Los Angeles Times at 02:00PMTuesday, August 21, 2018
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 Edn…
Linked From Los Angeles Times at 08:00AMMonday, July 16, 2018
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 o…
Linked From Los Angeles Times at 07:15PMFriday, June 29, 2018
“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…
Linked From Los Angeles Times at 08:00AMThursday, April 5, 2018
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,…
Linked From Los Angeles Times at 08:00AMMonday, March 26, 2018
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 t…
Linked From Los Angeles Times at 08:00AMTuesday, March 20, 2018
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. Bu…
Linked From Los Angeles Times at 08:00AMMonday, March 12, 2018
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 de…
Linked From Los Angeles Times at 09:40PMTuesday, February 20, 2018
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…
Linked From Los Angeles Times at 09:00AMSunday, January 28, 2018
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 th…
Linked From Los Angeles Times at 05:35PMMonday, January 22, 2018
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 me…
Linked From Los Angeles Times at 07:25PMSunday, January 21, 2018
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 …
Linked From Los Angeles Times at 03:55PMTuesday, January 16, 2018
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…
Linked From Los Angeles Times at 05:15PMThursday, January 11, 2018
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 r…
Linked From Los Angeles Times at 11:00AMThursday, January 4, 2018
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…
Linked From Los Angeles Times at 04:45PMSunday, December 10, 2017
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. …
Linked From Los Angeles Times at 04:15PMTuesday, December 5, 2017
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 Hildegar…
Linked From Los Angeles Times at 05:50PMFriday, November 3, 2017
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. I…
Linked From Los Angeles Times at 03:50PMFriday, October 20, 2017
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…
Linked From Los Angeles Times at 05:55PMWednesday, September 13, 2017
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 …
Linked From Los Angeles Times at 05:30PM 
