Laurence was born and grew up in Los Angeles; his father was a writer and his mother a teacher. He trained as a cellist, a librarian and a critic. His company was a major supplier to the music and recordings collections of the Library of Congress, Bibliothèque Nationale, British Library, Stanford, Harvard and Yale. He introduced French Harmonia Mundi, Hyperion, Chandos and Naxos to the North American market. Laurence believes that writing about music unleashes the potential of the classical music industry. He writes for the Huffington Post, Gramophone, Bachtrack, Strings, Audiophile Audition, and the Southern California Early Music Society.
The soprano is lifted to lyrical heights by the Filarmonia della Scala and Andrés Orozco-Estrada at the open air Wolkenturm on the final night of the festival.
It was a pleasure to hear the Vienna Philharmonic in Herbert Blomstedt's deeply-invested nonagenarian's view of music he has been performing for nearly seven decades.
The crossed warning searchlights were out and aircraft mostly stayed away, as Gemma New and the Los Angeles Philharmonic got to know each better in Beethoven and Schumann.
When Alisa Weilerstein stepped on stage to play Joan Tower's new cello concerto during a Colorado thunderstorm, it was a case of three elemental powers conspiring to create.
The world premiere of Hannah Lash's Forestallings, rooted in her childhood love of Beethoven's Second Symphony, links to Peter Oundjian's arrangement of the Op.131 string quartet later in the program.
CoCo's players used a minimum of overt embellishment, always effective and appropriate, as if they felt that nothing more was needed than the printed notes.
We take a glimpse into the lives of Barnabás Kelemen and Katalin Kokas, to whom lockdown has brought a newborn son, a newly reformed string quartet and the challenge of a full Bartók cycle for Bartók Spring International Arts Weeks.
Woody's Suite for String Orchestra adroitly transformed charming songs by the 18th-century writer, politician and abolitionist Charles Ignatius Sancho into Baroque dances.
Stravinsky came off more like a distillation of Mozartian than Bachian abstraction and the musicians responded with glee to the music's circus atmosphere.
