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 05:15PMThursday, 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…
SOURCE: 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…
SOURCE: 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. …
SOURCE: 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…
SOURCE: 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…
SOURCE: 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…
SOURCE: 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 …
SOURCE: Los Angeles Times at 05:30PMMonday, 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 09:00AMMonday, 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 …
SOURCE: Los Angeles Times at 08:35PMSunday, June 18, 2017
When Robert Xavier Rodríguez’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 roc…
SOURCE: Los Angeles Times at 06:30PMWednesday, 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…
SOURCE: Los Angeles Times at 06:10PMThursday, 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 b…
SOURCE: Los Angeles Times at 04:55PMMonday, 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…
SOURCE: 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…
SOURCE: Los Angeles Times at 08:50PMMonday, 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 �…
SOURCE: Los Angeles Times at 08:35PMMonday, 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 perfor…
SOURCE: Los Angeles Times at 08:10PMTuesday, 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 …
SOURCE: 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…
SOURCE: 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, …
SOURCE: 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…
SOURCE: 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…
SOURCE: 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…
SOURCE: 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…
SOURCE: 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 …
SOURCE: 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…
SOURCE: 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…
SOURCE: 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…
SOURCE: 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…
SOURCE: 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…
SOURCE: 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 …
SOURCE: Los Angeles Times at 10:51PM 
