Ted Ayala is a writer and musicologist born and raised in Los Angeles. Aside from classical music he loves literature (especially from Latin America and Japan), learning languages, reading about history, video games from the 1980s-1990s, and cats. You can follow his blog here.
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.
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.
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.
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.
