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.
Hosted by the roguish Italian clarinet virtuoso, a wonderful live-streamed concert turned into a brilliant entertainment experience that could be a model for concerts online – and live.
There was a delicious chocolate-colored texture to the low bass akin to what Great British Bake-Off aficionados would recognize as the foundation of a great Sachertorte.
One of those performances when the sheer physical beauty of the instruments and the sounds they were making became the organic nature of the music itself.
Brinton Averil Smith, the Symphony's principal cello, approached Haydn's D major Concerto with bold courage and passionate, if inconsistently manufactured, strokes.
Intrada's concert on the Great Feast Day of Orthodox Christmas featured first performances of music by Peter the Great's favorite composer Vasily Titov in more than 300 years.
At a benefit concert to aid the emergency relief fund of the German Orchestra Foundation, Daniel Barenboim and the Staatskapelle Berlin perform Beethoven.
In a program originally scheduled for the Musikverein in Vienna, Martin Haselböck and his Orchester Wiener Akademie played Beethoven and Schubert both familiar and curiously obscure.
The socially-distancing Orchestre Métropolitain blazed forth so magnificently that it sounded like they were at full strength playing in their usual home, the Maison symphonique at the Place des Arts.
Philip Higham and Susan Tomes took on Beethoven, Josef Suk, Janáček, Debussy and Nadia Boulanger without missing a beat, no page turner allowed, and no intermission.
In a world where winter never comes, Ian Bostridge suggested a Cartagenan equivalent of Schubert's Winterreise experiment in which the most unimaginable beauties come at the expense of unbearable pain.
The Academy of Ancient Music played with such stylistic elegance, charm and sheer physical beauty that it was like hearing I Musici and Virtuosi di Roma for the first time in this repertoire in the 1950s.
