Writing about music, like the art itself, is alive and well in this country.
Around me at the Music Center, the crowd stomped and cheered. The forces onstage had aimed a dazzling rocket into their midst, and the sparks flew. Whatever the more substantial virtues (if any) of the composer Rodion Shchedrin, whose Fifth Piano Concerto got its first-ever performance at last week‘s Philharmonic all-Russian bash, or the pianist [...]
AT 8, MICHAEL ROUSE CHANGED HIS FIRST NAME TO “Mikel” because, he says, he liked the spelling. At 15, he ran away from home — in the “boot-heel” area of southwestern Missouri — and joined a carnival. “I did all kinds of odd jobs,” he remembers. “I ran the carny tricks, handled the fake hoops, [...]
You could arrive at the Los Angeles Opera‘s latest offering with a personal list, rather long, of the works still undeservedly neglected by the company: Verdi’s Forza for starters, Wagner‘s Meistersinger, the two Manons, and on and on. You’d be pretty far down the list before you arrived at Vincenzo Bellini‘s The Capulets and the [...]
Photo by Lisa KohlerDRIVING INTO TOWN TO MEET PHILharmonic honcho-designate Deborah Borda at her first L.A. press conference, I found solace and sadness on KPCC’s Talk of the City, host Linda Othenin-Girard’s valiant daily attempt to elicit intelligent phoned-in comment from concerned citizens. The morning’s topic was the exhibition by young British artists at the [...]
MOSES UND ARON IS ON MY CONSCIENCE. Arnold Schoenberg’s opera, imposing even in its unfinished state, accorded unquestioned masterpiece recognition on the strength of its composer’s own eminence, is still — after 65 years — so seldom performed that its few revivals stand as major events. It made its belated first appearance at New York’s [...]
Alan's Poppies and Sage, photographed by Paul Cabanis, Spring 2010.