Writing about music, like the art itself, is alive and well in this country.
Starting From Here December wasn’t much; you get so many sing-alongs. One night, a young man of scholarly mien, Jonathan Biss, tried out his fingers, but not apparently his heart, on the Beethoven Fourth Piano Concerto at Disney. Afterward, he sat in front of me, and many people, rather rudely it seemed to me, crawled [...]
More Sharp Than Flat Long faces greeted the last new year. Record stores went broke; so did the manufacturers; so did symphony orchestras; so (sob!) did music critics. Long faces were soon replaced around here, however, with one that was round, cherubic and positively agleam, when Gustavo Dudamel came to town. He ascended the Disney [...]
Art Thou Not Kent? In Munich one week last month, Kent Nagano conducted three operas on that many nights. Unsuk Chin’s Alice in Wonderland in Achim Freyer’s staging was as delightful the second time around as when I’d seen it last summer. Tristan und Isolde began with Isolde on a modern yacht and ended with [...]
Spectral Delivery With a brassy blast onstage and an ethereal sigh from violas as if from another planet, the Monday Evening Concerts proclaimed their return in full force at Zipper Hall last week. Last year’s concerts had been a tentative set of “what if?” programs under guest curators, designed to see whether this basic and [...]
Small Perfection I like the L.A. Opera’s La Bohème, as I usually do. Hearing Puccini’s infinitely appealing score at Mrs. Chandler’s Pavilion the other night, in a generally excellent performance under Hartmut Haenchen, who had also led an okay Don Giovanni the night before, I found myself amazed once again (for perhaps the 500th time) [...]
Dirty Business Afoot “Don Giovanni,” the question ran, “is it the world’s greatest work of art, or merely Mozart’s greatest opera?” The late Winthrop Sargeant raised it, but left it dangling, in the old Life magazine in its juiciest days as pop-culture avatar. The Don Giovanni question – greatest vs. near-greatest – had already been [...]
Those Were the Days As we waited for Alex Ross to show up to talk about his new book at the Los Angeles Central Library a couple of weeks ago, the hypnotic sounds of Steve Reich’s Music for 18 Musicians came over the PA system: one masterpiece filling in for another. Here is Ross on [...]
Worth the Wait Martha Argerich is a force of nature, pure and undiminished. Perhaps it’s true that she cancels out of many of her engagements; she has been ill a lot in recent years. But when she does appear, in the condition she was in last Thursday night at Disney Hall – boy oh boy, [...]
Strength in Numbers Chances are that the Philharmonic’s new music director, when he takes over the podium a couple of years from now, will not ask the orchestra to perform in patriotic jackets, nor will he ask the players to fling them out into the audience after the last encore. He is unlikely to demand [...]
The Glorious Fourth The six blows of Thor’s hammer – the metaphor is Donald Tovey’s, not mine – resounded through Disney Hall on Friday night, and then we were done with Sibelius. Esa-Pekka Salonen had chosen the Fifth Symphony to end his three weeks of “Sibelius Unbound”: all seven symphonies, most of the tone poems, [...]
Alan's Poppies and Sage, photographed by Paul Cabanis, Spring 2010.