Tuesday, June 29, 2021
The first notes heard again in the long-quieted Disney Hall were a slow, soft upward harp arpeggio, each pitch a haunting, crystalline moment.
SOURCE: Los Angeles Times at 12:00PMTuesday, June 8, 2021
Tremendous singing propels L.A. Opera's return to the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion in Stravinsky's tough, timely "Oedipus Rex."
SOURCE: Los Angeles Times at 05:47AMFriday, June 4, 2021
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.
SOURCE: Los Angeles Times at 10:23PMSunday, May 30, 2021
We listen in on the first acoustical test of the new Beckmen YOLA Center in Inglewood, which promises to be revolutionary.
SOURCE: Los Angeles Times at 04:44PMMonday, May 17, 2021
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.
SOURCE: Los Angeles Times at 09:35AMTuesday, April 27, 2021
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.
SOURCE: Los Angeles Times at 12:57PMFriday, April 16, 2021
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.
SOURCE: Los Angeles Times at 07:36PMFriday, 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.
SOURCE: 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.
SOURCE: 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 …
SOURCE: 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…
SOURCE: 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…
SOURCE: 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…
SOURCE: 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 …
SOURCE: 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…
SOURCE: 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…
SOURCE: 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…
SOURCE: 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…
SOURCE: 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…
SOURCE: 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…
SOURCE: 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…
SOURCE: 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…
SOURCE: 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,�…
SOURCE: 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…
SOURCE: 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…
SOURCE: 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…
SOURCE: 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…
SOURCE: 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…
SOURCE: 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…
SOURCE: 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 …
SOURCE: 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…
SOURCE: Los Angeles Times at 05:15PM 
