Writing about music, like the art itself, is alive and well in this country.
Photo by Dan PorgesShake Ernest Fleischmann summoned me to lunch a few weeks ago, to share the following concern: Under no circumstances, stated Ernest in his familiar brook-no-opposition tones, was I to miss the forthcoming Hollywood Bowl engagement of the young Venezuelan conductor Gustavo Dudamel, the first-ever appearance in this country of a young man [...]
Marni Nixon is probably best known as the voice of Audrey Hepburn’s Eliza Doolittle in the film version of My Fair Lady. She continues her own stage career as well – most recently in a nationwide tour as Frau Schneider in Cabaret. “Smog is the reason I don’t live in Los Angeles any more,” writes [...]
More or Less Offenbach at the L.A. Opera in the hands of Garry Marshall . . . need I go on? Doom descends even before a note is sounded, when a smarmy character, gotten up to impersonate composer Jacques Offenbach in the flesh, pops up on the podium and tries to wrestle the baton away [...]
Photo by Betty FreemanBoy Wonderful At 35, Thomas Adès continues to surprise, delight, mystify and elude me. If I had my way, everyone on the planet would own the new EMI recording of his recent Piano Quintet, as the indisputable evidence that classical music is still being created as a manner of expression urgent, powerful [...]
To Any Lengths Gustav Mahler has some goddamn chutzpah. Envious of my general good feelings at the evening’s start, he rams a solo trumpet into my ear to kick off his Fifth Symphony. “These are my neuroses, my Weltkvetch,” he screams at me through the agency of a zillion-member symphony orchestra, “and you will pay [...]
Alan's Poppies and Sage, photographed by Paul Cabanis, Spring 2010.