Writing about music, like the art itself, is alive and well in this country.
A Broken Vow Brett Dean and his music burst rather politely upon the local scene over the past two weeks. Australia born, with several seasoning years as a violist with the Berlin Philharmonic and now a full-time composer back home, Dean produces a kind of internationally amiable music, which is not at all bad. At [...]
The Ring? Wrongly Rung The performance annals of Wagner’s Ring of the Nibelung abound in tales of solemn ritual, of audiences driven to ecstasy thousands at a time, of published philosophical analyses by the ream. To George Bernard Shaw’s Perfect Wagnerite, the heroic Siegfried is the nihilist Mikhail Bakunin reborn; to Anna Russell, he is [...]
Zero Decibels About an hour before the start of the Philharmonic’s subscription season on September 29, a friend and I were ushered into the empty Disney Concert Hall by an orchestra official. My friend had never seen the hall; I, of course, have made it my second home. Even so, I needed the reminder of [...]
Best Fiddler’s Friend Down the pathway beside the house on the West L.A. hillside, past the red door and down the steps, Kyozo Watanabe sits surrounded by bright, gleaming, brand-new stringed instruments: s, violas, cellos, perhaps a few double basses – enough to start up a full-size philharmonic, with enough for a chamber-music concert to [...]
Alan's Poppies and Sage, photographed by Paul Cabanis, Spring 2010.