Writing about music, like the art itself, is alive and well in this country.
With the grand, brassy rhetoric that ends Johannes Brahms’ First Symphony, Esa-Pekka Salonen and the Los Angeles Philharmonic also sounded the final notes last Thursday for the 78th season of “Symphonies Under the Stars” at that one-of-a-kind piece of real estate known as the Hollywood Bowl. There was more to come at the Bowl: two [...]
This is the week of Los Angeles’ annual identity crisis. On Tuesday and Thursday, in shorts and tee-shirt, I load the picnic basket and head for the Hollywood Bowl. On Wednesday I fish out a pair of matching socks and head downtown to the Music Center, where the Los Angeles Opera starts off its season [...]
Adventurous, exasperating, illuminating and just plain off-the-wall: the 21-year saga of the Long Beach Opera has been all of these and more. Its operation is strictly shoestring; its stagings over the years have included a “Boris Godunov” done in street clothes around a large bureaucratic desk, and a “Death in Venice” whose only scenery was [...]
Tucked into a valley northeast of Ventura (which served filmmaker Frank Capra as site for the original version of “Lost Horizon,”) the town of Ojai (pop. 7500) is no more than a 90-minute drive from downtown Los Angeles. One weekend a year, however, as this rural enclave of horse farms and orange groves houses one [...]
An all-in-one festival of the Beethoven Nine is one of music’s can’t-lose propositions. The size is right: five concerts of leisurely length, with room here and there for an overture or two. The music, needless to say, is also right: “the most sublime noise that has ever penetrated into the ear of man.” wrote E. [...]
Alan's Poppies and Sage, photographed by Paul Cabanis, Spring 2010.