Writing about music, like the art itself, is alive and well in this country.
The Devil in the Deep Blue Pool
The lovers afloat
There is this problem I have, trying to describe almost any production by the Long Beach Opera. Elektra in a Malibu beach house, Boris Godunov in a corporate boardroom … and now I’m up against Orpheus and Euridice in a Long Beach swimming pool. Please believe, at [...]
Paradise Lost and Found
Robert Millard
Verdi’s Otello at the Music Center
“We are not the sole owners of our past,” wrote Jordi Savall, music’s great and original spirit, in a note accompanying his marvelous appearance at Disney Hall last week. His concert, with his ensemble of singers and players upon lovely old instruments, was devoted to music [...]
Gustav Mahler’s Sixth Symphony is the elephant in the parlor, bedecked with garlands of roses. Its every dimension is wrong. From within the 85 minutes of Christoph Eschenbach’s performance with the Philharmonic last weekend, any composition student with an X-Acto knife could shape a nicely proportioned 40-minute symphony. Yet that is part of its singular [...]
Dutch Treat
I envy anyone his first look at Amsterdam. You step out of Central Station and there is the perfect urban landscape: old buildings in grand array, trolleys in front, everything numbered so that you know exactly where to go. Never mind that it’s raining or, at least, damp. That was my Amsterdam arrival, two [...]
