Tuesday, 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 Edna …
SOURCE: Los Angeles Times at 08:00AM[SHARE]Monday, 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 07:15PM[SHARE]Friday, 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's a l…
SOURCE: Los Angeles Times at 08:00AM[SHARE]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," b…
SOURCE: Los Angeles Times at 08:00AM[SHARE]Monday, 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 the hel…
SOURCE: Los Angeles Times at 08:00AM[SHARE]Tuesday, 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. But …
SOURCE: Los Angeles Times at 08:00AM[SHARE]Monday, 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 defining e…
SOURCE: Los Angeles Times at 09:40PM[SHARE]Tuesday, 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 09:00AM[SHARE]Sunday, 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 the orig…
SOURCE: Los Angeles Times at 05:35PM[SHARE]Monday, 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 medi…
SOURCE: Los Angeles Times at 07:25PM[SHARE]Sunday, 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 03:55PM[SHARE]Tuesday, 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[SHARE]Thursday, 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 rel…
SOURCE: Los Angeles Times at 11:00AM[SHARE]Thursday, 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 t…
SOURCE: Los Angeles Times at 04:45PM[SHARE]Sunday, 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. …
SOURCE: Los Angeles Times at 04:15PM[SHARE]Tuesday, 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 Hildegard …
SOURCE: Los Angeles Times at 05:50PM[SHARE]Friday, 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. In this f…
SOURCE: Los Angeles Times at 03:50PM[SHARE]Friday, 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…
SOURCE: Los Angeles Times at 05:55PM[SHARE]Wednesday, 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 …
SOURCE: Los Angeles Times at 05:30PM[SHARE]Monday, September 4, 2017
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.
SOURCE: Los Angeles Times at 09:00AM[SHARE]Monday, 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 Bowl pro…
SOURCE: Los Angeles Times at 08:35PM[SHARE]Sunday, June 18, 2017
When Robert Xavier RodrÃguez'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 st…
SOURCE: Los Angeles Times at 06:30PM[SHARE]Wednesday, 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 its spon…
SOURCE: Los Angeles Times at 06:10PM[SHARE]Thursday, May 25, 2017
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 thea…
SOURCE: Los Angeles Times at 04:55PM[SHARE]Monday, 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 cultu…
SOURCE: Los Angeles Times at 09:10PM[SHARE]Monday, 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 Glass'…
SOURCE: Los Angeles Times at 08:50PM[SHARE]Monday, January 30, 2017
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 " ha…
SOURCE: Los Angeles Times at 08:35PM[SHARE]Monday, January 23, 2017
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 performa…
SOURCE: Los Angeles Times at 08:10PM[SHARE]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 theate…
SOURCE: Los Angeles Times at 08:47AM[SHARE]Monday, 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-esq…
SOURCE: Los Angeles Times at 06:43AM[SHARE]Monday, 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, …
SOURCE: Los Angeles Times at 07:25AM[SHARE] 
