Tuesday, 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 10:30PMWednesday, September 2, 2015
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 no…
Linked From Los Angeles Times at 10:46PMWednesday, August 5, 2015
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 …
Linked From Los Angeles Times at 10:51PMTuesday, June 30, 2015
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.
Linked From Los Angeles Times at 08:06PMMonday, June 22, 2015
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 on…
Linked From Los Angeles Times at 06:53PMTuesday, June 9, 2015
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 Fre…
Linked From Los Angeles Times at 10:21AMSunday, June 7, 2015
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 …
Linked From Los Angeles Times at 11:12PMMonday, May 25, 2015
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 poin…
Linked From Los Angeles Times at 05:58PMMonday, May 4, 2015
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.
Linked From Los Angeles Times at 07:00AMTuesday, April 28, 2015
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 …
Linked From Los Angeles Times at 07:45AMFriday, April 24, 2015
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 so…
Linked From Los Angeles Times at 01:00PMMonday, April 6, 2015
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.
Linked From Los Angeles Times at 07:00AMMonday, March 16, 2015
"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, …
Linked From Los Angeles Times at 07:15AMSunday, March 1, 2015
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 Ro…
Linked From Los Angeles Times at 10:09PMSunday, February 22, 2015
Opera as an art form about investigation might seem a radical idea in a modern world where so much about contemporary arts and entertainment is defined by conventional narrative. But such wa…
Linked From Los Angeles Times at 08:40PMThursday, February 12, 2015
In Tchaikovsky's last opera, "Iolanta," a blind princess who knows nothing of sight learns to embrace threatening light. In Bartók's early opera, "Bluebeard's Castle," a young bride seeking…
Linked From Los Angeles Times at 08:45PMSunday, January 25, 2015
Tobias Picker, whose "Thérèse Raquin" was revived by Long Beach Opera on Saturday night at the Warner Grand Theatre in San Pedro, is a New Yorker with a melodramatic style that seems to su…
Linked From Los Angeles Times at 09:40PMMonday, October 27, 2014
Four cautious years after staging Achim Freyer's cutting-edge but coffer-draining "Ring" cycle, Los Angeles Opera has once more sharpened its edge, and dangerously so. On Saturday night, it …
Linked From Los Angeles Times at 08:30AMTuesday, October 21, 2014
The Metropolitan Opera had a mess on its hands.
Linked From Los Angeles Times at 11:15PM 
