Thursday, 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 05:55PMMonday, July 24, 2017
“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 …
Linked From Los Angeles Times at 08:35PMWednesday, June 14, 2017
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 it…
Linked From Los Angeles Times at 06:10PMMonday, May 1, 2017
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 c…
Linked From Los Angeles Times at 09:10PMMonday, March 13, 2017
“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 Gl…
Linked From Los Angeles Times at 08:50PMTuesday, May 31, 2016
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 …
Linked From Los Angeles Times at 08:47AMMonday, May 30, 2016
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…
Linked From Los Angeles Times at 06:43AMMonday, March 28, 2016
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, …
Linked From Los Angeles Times at 07:25AMTuesday, March 22, 2016
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…
Linked From Los Angeles Times at 10:00PMMonday, March 14, 2016
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 a…
Linked From Los Angeles Times at 10:34PMLos 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 P…
Linked From Los Angeles Times at 09:54PMSunday, March 13, 2016
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 CE…
Linked From Los Angeles Times at 06:34PMTuesday, February 16, 2016
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 …
Linked From Los Angeles Times at 04:13PMFriday, January 29, 2016
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…
Linked From Los Angeles Times at 06:41AMWednesday, December 23, 2015
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, ca…
Linked From Los Angeles Times at 11:14AMThursday, November 12, 2015
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…
Linked From Los Angeles Times at 08:45AMMonday, November 2, 2015
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 Guil…
Linked From Los Angeles Times at 10:30PM 
