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Bramwell Tovey, the principal guest conductor of the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s Hollywood Bowl concerts, is no stranger to the venue, though his ability to give a freshly minted polish to everything he conducts makes his appearances seem all too infrequent.His musicianship is subtle, but the results can be eye-opening – and they’re always deeply satisfying.

In a radio speech given by Sir Thomas Beecham to celebrate Jean Sibelius’ 90th birthday in 1955, the conductor praised the Finnish composer’s tenacity in pursuing his personal musical vision – even if that meant, as Beecham sardonically noted, that the music would go “rather over the head of [...] the public and [...] musical press”.

It takes some brashness (and perhaps just a little bit of megalomania) on the part of a composer to choose Macbeth, of all of the Bard’s plays, to set to music. As if one can ignore that in the hearts and minds of most listeners, Verdi had the first, last, and only word in musical adaptations of Shakespeare’s drama of bloody intrigue.

It is one of those strange – but ultimately fortuitous – ironies of history that a set of poems intended to be a satire of the gloomy, luckless romances that burst forth from Europe in the wake of Goethe’s Sorrows of Young Werther should itself become the heartbroken romance par excellence.

Among among certain classical music cognoscenti, few statements will probably cause one to lose more cred than saying this: “I love Lang Lang.” More than a decade after his debut, the 31-year-old pianist’s fame shows no sign of abating.

The Brooklyn Festival, a week-long celebration of the new music scene from New York City’s “most dynamic borough”, was launched on Tuesday 16 April with a Green Umbrella concert at Walt Disney Hall in Los Angeles.Interestingly enough, the festival came hard on the heels of another festival which ended Sunday, the Hear Now Music Festival.

In an interview I had with composer Gabriela Ortíz last week, she confided that it was The Threepenny Opera – that cynical reflection of Weimar-era Germany – that was at the forefront of her mind while composing her latest opera. Comparisons to that Jazz Age work would seem to invite the expectation that Ortíz’s opera would also be suffused with its bracing fusion of “high” and “low” art.

A tense, Holocaust-inspired orchestral work by Henri Dutilleux followed by one of Mozart’s most chipper piano concertos on one half; a second half consisting of only the Beethoven Symphony no. 5. That's a strange enough combination on paper – and hearing it actually realized is stranger still. You have to wonder what they were thinking.

Adjectives that come to mind for your typical summer concert: fun, friendly, safe. Would any of those have fit last night’s Hollywood Bowl program? “Fun” absolutely works; maybe “friendly”. But “safe”? The centerpiece of the program – Alberto Ginastera’s wild Piano Concerto no. 1 – was anything but that. Try “daring”. Or even “dangerous”.

The Los Angeles Philharmonic, under the direction of Gustavo Dudamel, brought its season to a close with a world premiere of an oratorio the orchestra commissioned from one of today’s greatest living composers. On paper the alignment of the LAPO, Dudamel, and John Adams appeared to augur well for a memorable close to a season abounding in memorable music-making.

New music was the main and sole dish that last Tuesday’s Green Umbrella Concert at Disney Hall laid out, but for some audience members their encounter with these works might not be their first. To paraphrase NBC’s late 1990s marketing for its prime-time TV summer reruns: “If you haven’t heard it, it’s new to you.

Among the most memorable and exciting evenings of my concert-going experience have been some excellent performances by student orchestras. You would think there is a trade-off for this sort of experience and that often is the case: in exchange for that last degree of technical polish you’re recompensed with performances often more thrilling than those by their professional peers.

The program was dubbed “Romance at the Phil”, but the music presented was hardly the sort to set lovers’ hearts aflame. It could even said to be a touch staid. There was Mendelssohn and Mozart in the first half. Richard Strauss is closer to the mark – this is the composer of Salome, after all – but it was his jovial Don Quixote that closed out the night.

Is there a more exciting opera company than Long Beach Opera in Southern California – or even anywhere west of Santa Fe? With the Dorothy Chandler’s house company and even local opera outfits seemingly content with just cranking out production after production of the same three Puccini operas ad infinitum and often ad nauseum, it’s heartening to see a company that views opera not as a dusty museum

The Los Angeles Philharmonic’s January 20 concert, the last in its “Focus on Eötvös” mini-residency, may as well have been called “Focus on Hungary.” The small, landlocked country, with barely over 9 million residents, has exerted – and continues to exert – a powerful influence on music.

An entire century. Actually, it’s been 101 years and some months if we want to be specific. That’s how long it took for US audiences to hear the magisterial Piano Quintet in B minor, Op. 118 by German composer Philipp Scharwenka. Through no fault of the music, I should add.

It was an auspicious debut; a collaboration that, in time, would propel both orchestra and conductor to the very summit of the classical music world. On the stage of the old Philharmonic Hall in Downtown stepped a 24-year-old conductor at the very beginning of his world career.

At first hearing the idea of the music of Witold Lutosławski as the centerpiece of a Los Angeles Philharmonic “Green Umbrella” concert made a strangely incongruous impression. Music new or difficult is the usual fare of such a program.

The haze of the surreal, somnambulistic nightscape of Witold Lutosławski’s Les espaces du sommeil cast its strange pall over the expanse of the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s December 7 concert at Walt Disney Hall with Esa-Pekka Salonen at the podium.

Can Shostakovich without bitterness still be Shostakovich? Can a performer still do justice to his music if their interpretation does not match the style and tone of Soviet-era musicians? These questions rise to the fore as the living memory of Dmitri Shostakovich fades further with every passing year.

Those closing bars of Alban Berg’s Wozzeck, tottering away into nothingness, is one of the great nexus points in musical history.

If there was any sense that the Marin Alsop was at the end of a particularly harried week for her, she displayed no signs of it at her “Casual Friday” concert with the Los Angeles Philharmonic on Friday 2 November. The Baltimore-based conductor found herself at the center of the headlines last week – albeit for reasons she probably would have preferred to have passed up on.

“It is impossible to find anyone in the world today who is young and not ill,” muses André Breton in Chiaki Kawamata’s novel Death Sentences. “Youth itself is a kind of disease.” There is in youth something that exerts a powerful hold on the imagination. Its freshness, its arrogance, its promise – all of these building a magnetic aura that exerts a powerful hold on our consciousness.

The memory has dimmed somewhat in the past few years. But it remains firmly entrenched in my mind. I wish I could say that this moment was a formative one in my development as musicologist; that destiny took hold of this young boy and led him to the path of his eventual vocation. But no such thing happened.

Long ago in my former life as a teenage record store clerk, I recall a customer who came into the store one chilly, autumn evening.

The total timing of the music on the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s season premiere was barely an hour long. On the page the line-up looked strange. First half: Ravel’s Pavane pour une infante défunte and the world premiere of a work by local composer Steven Stucky. The second half: Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring.

Gripped in the clutches of a persistent heatwave, music-loving Angelenos had a difficult choice to make last Thursday. Stay bunkered down in their air-conditioned homes. Or defy the sweltering heat and choking traffic to make the trip to the Hollywood Hills for the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s last Hollywood Bowl concert of 2012.

The Hollywood Bowl’s annual “Tchaikovsky Spectacular with Fireworks” has become, along with Labor Day, something of a marker denoting the unofficial end of summer in Los Angeles. When bidding farewell to summer, one may as well do so with a bang—in this case both figuratively and literally. Tchaikovsky. Fireworks.

The name of last Tuesday’s Hollywood Bowl concert was “Three Russian Masters.” That’s Prokofiev, Stravinsky, and Shostakovich, whose music made up the program that night, by the way. But it wouldn’t be a stretch to say that the audience got to hear a fourth Russian master: pianist Denis Matsuev. The first half of the program was centered around him. Prokofiev’s Piano Concerto no.

What a stark contrast between the visual and the aural at last Thursday’s concert at the Hollywood Bowl. On stage was the 79-year-old conductor Rafael Frühbeck de Burgos, appearing frail as he shuffled towards the podium; the gauntness of his features accentuated by his suit which hung loosely from his frame.

There might be a shiver of fear in some quarters when the listener is confronted with the name Nicholas McGegan. Mercilessly rushed tempi, slipshod ensemble—and the wool-on-chalkboard horror of vibratoless strings.

A mid-19th-century Italian opera with the sound of the human voice front-and-center, and seemingly dependent on the trappings of the theater.

It was only a year ago when Yuja Wang last visited the Hollywood Bowl, leaving tongues wagging and gray-hairs clutching to their heart medication. The audience may not remember how she played, or even what she played (it was the Rachmaninov Piano Concerto no. 3). But they sure remember what she wore—the "little orange dress.

Johannes Brahms' Piano Concerto no. 2 and Edward Elgar's Enigma Variations. Both solidly—not to mention stolidly—popular works. Safe programming choices. Maybe too safe. Both works are well loved. Well worn, too. Think of the Brahms. Every pianist of note that has ever lived (and will ever live) has recorded and played it.

"Freedom fries": no two words could better summarize the crassness that characterized the early years of the American 21st century.In the wake of disagreement over the Iraq War, American xenophobes sought to eradicate from these shores any vestige of the Tricolour.

In the early years of the 20th century, along the streets of Paris, a society of writers, artists, and musicians—among them Maurice Ravel—known as Les Apaches would exchange the secret greeting devised for members to recognize each other.

Limpidity, elegance, sensuality, and charm: virtues that characterize the very best of modern French musical style. The listener, falling under the music’s spell, may find it easy to take its ravishing beauty for granted; unaware that this beauty came at the cost of earnest toil and experimentation of at least two generations of French composers.

It was a night that didn't augur well for those Hollywood Bowl patrons seeking the usual symphonic serenade under starlight. Los Angeles, on Thursday night, was seized by a sudden heat wave that was accompanied with stifling humidity more fitting for Manila or Saigon than the Hollywood Hills.

There was a time, perhaps not too long ago, when music lovers in Los Angeles would look towards New York and its august Philharmonic Orchestra with a mixture of respect and envy. The roster of its past music directors—among them Bernstein, Mitropoulos, Toscanini, Mengelberg, and Mahler—was, alone, enough to inspire jaw-gaping awe.

Returning after an absence of twelve years, Sir Simon Rattle—in his apprentice years back in the 1980s the orchestra’s principal guest conductor, now arguably the most well known and respected conductor of our day—led the Los Angeles Philharmonic on Thursday night after an absence of twelve years.

Late in life, the conductor Bruno Walter would often recall the moment Gustav Mahler first showed him the manuscript to the as yet unperformed Das Lied von der Erde. The work, with its poignancy and profound world-weariness, seemed even to take its composer aback. “But don’t you think it’ll make people want to do away with themselves?,” he said of the work.

The spectacle in Downtown Los Angeles last Thursday night was certainly a sight to see: crowded parking spaces, swarms of people making their way to Disney Hall, and traffic swirling along Grand Avenue and its adjoining streets. Was it a rock band that awaited listeners on the stage at Disney Hall on Thursday night? Not quite.

Disney Hall’s week-long tribute to the music of Franz Schubert came to a grand close last Friday. Or should that be “Great?” As in Schubert’s hour-long Symphony no. 9, also known as the “Great.” And great it certainly is: not merely in the symphony’s musical material, which is some of the finest ever crafted by this composer. But also great in its proportions.

Dangle the term “modern music” in front of your average classical music listener and chances are their reaction will range anywhere from polite indifference to outright bile-spewing hatred.

From across the centuries, the quartets of Beethoven and Shostakovich have come to be regarded as the twin pillars of the quartet repertoire. Think of them as the New Testament and the Old Testament. The Pacifica Quartet offered a program that sandwiched Shostakovich with a pair of quartets by Beethoven.The String Quartet No.

As Philip Glass’ Symphony No. 9 ground to a halt last Thursday night, cellos and basses trailing off into silence, a few things came into focus. First, there was no missing the irony that Philip Glass, once among the outsiders of the musical world, should nearly a half century later find himself one of the American school of composition's most revered composers; perhaps its dean.

After the success of Benjamin Britten’s opera The Rape of Lucretia, Britten and director/librettist Eric Crozier discussed future operatic projects. The composer wanted his next opera to be a comedy and insisted that it be set in England. When Crozier suggested adapting Guy de Maupassant’s La Rosier de Madame Husson, Britten knew he was on to something good. Indeed, it was an ideal choice.

It was a quiet celebration – not uproarious, but contemplative – that Jeffrey Kahane and friends enjoyed on Tuesday night at Walt Disney Hall, Los Angeles. Celebrating the 15th anniversary of the partnership between the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra and Kahane, the concert had Kahane stepping away from the conductor’s rostrum, instead shining the spotlight on Kahane the pianist.