Writing about music, like the art itself, is alive and well in this country.
FINALLY, THERE IS CLOCKS AND Clouds. I have entertained a private passion for György Ligeti’s 14-minute gathering of moonbeams and distant thunderclaps ever since Esa-Pekka Salonen performed it with the Philharmonic in 1993. It was scheduled for inclusion in Salonen’s complete Ligeti survey on Sony; the release is assigned a number in the discography in [...]
BARRING A STUMBLE OR TWO, the Los Angeles Opera usually strikes gold in its forays into bel canto comic opera: Don Pasquale and L’Elisir d’Amore, La Cenerentola and The Barber of Seville. This is not, as some believe, an easy repertory; its particular demands – clarity, timing, and an exquisite balance so that every line [...]
EVEN IF WILLIAM BOLCOM’S SONGS of Innocence and of Experience were less excellent than it mostly is, it would rank as a monument to rampant artistic ambitiousness and, for that matter, sheer artistic gall. The fact that last week’s performance at Orange County’s Segerstrom Hall by the Pacific Symphony was the work’s first West Coast [...]
Photo courtesy Opera Pacific THE FLIMSIER THE PLOT, SO IT seems, the greater the urge to meddle. Mozart’s Abduction From the Seraglio, his first real operatic smash, plays on one of the hoariest of opera plots: maiden, captured by tyrant, rescued by heroic truelove. Left to its own devices, it can add up to an [...]
Alan's Poppies and Sage, photographed by Paul Cabanis, Spring 2010.