| Date and venue | Title |
|---|---|
| 2-May-2013 Walt Disney Concert Hall | Loving Lang Lang: Heroic Tchaikovsky and Nielsen with Dudamel in Los Angeles |
 Among among certain classical music cognoscenti, few statements will probably cause one to lose more cred than saying this: “I love Lang Lang.”
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| 16-Apr-2013 Walt Disney Concert Hall | Brooklyn Festival in Los Angeles a mixed bag |
| 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.
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| 24-Mar-2013 Long Beach Performing Arts Center, Terrace Theater | Fractured legend of Camelia la Tejana jumbles reality and fiction |
 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.
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| 26-Feb-2013 Walt Disney Concert Hall | LA Phil New Music Group plays Adams, Pereira, and Chin |
 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.” John Adams’ Son of Chamber Symphony was heard last December performed by the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra, while Joseph Pereira’s Concerto for Percussion and Chamber Orchestra had its world première at Disney Hall just a little over a year ago.Read full review... | |
| 19-Feb-2013 Walt Disney Concert Hall | Dudamel and Paredes lead Colburn Orchestra in music by Revueltas, Copland, Tchaikovsky |
 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. A very fair price to hear music-making wrought boldly by musicians whose sensibilities have yet to be calloused by the dullness of age, routine, and careerism.
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| 14-Feb-2013 Walt Disney Concert Hall | Dutoit leads LA Phil in Valentine’s Day concert |
 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.
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| 3-Feb-2013 Warner Grand Theatre | Long Beach Opera's curious take on Glass' The Fall of the House of Usher |
 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 piece, but as a living art form capable of speaking to contemporary interests.Read full review... | |
| 24-Jan-2013 Walt Disney Concert Hall | LA Phil and Morlot offer mixed bag of Dutilleux, Mozart, and Beethoven |
 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. And by “they” I mean whoever devised the oddball program that guest conductor Ludovic Morlot conducted last night with the Los Angeles Philharmonic.
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| 20-Jan-2013 Walt Disney Concert Hall | LA Phil finds focus on Bartók, Kodály – but not on Eötvös |
 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. Even discounting Franz Liszt – ethnically Hungarian, but with a cultural outlook more tilted to Vienna and Paris than to Budapest – there is no disputing Hungary’s vast, even outsize contribution to musical culture.
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| 13-Jan-2013 Dorothy Chandler Pavilion: Fifth floor | Bach, Schumann and Scharwenka at Le Salon de Musiques |
 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.
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| 13-Dec-2012 Walt Disney Concert Hall | Mehta and the LA Phil celebrate their 50th anniversary together |
 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 orchestra before him had begun to make headway into global prominence during the short-lived tenure of its previous music director, Eduard van Beinum.Read full review... | |
| 7-Dec-2012 Walt Disney Concert Hall | Lutosławski centenary: The shadows of the night with the LA Phil |
 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. It was appropriate – this was the second concert celebrating the centenary of the Polish composer’s birth – but it also seemed to react in unexpected ways that could be jarring, though no less absorbing.
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| 4-Dec-2012 Walt Disney Concert Hall | Lutosławski and his influences: with the LA Phil New Music Group |
 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. Lutosławski, who would have turned 100 next year (consider that the late Elliott Carter was composing up until his 104th year!), is neither new nor very “difficult” – whatever that may mean – for the most part. With nearly 20 years passing since the composer’s death, it would be difficult to argue a case for the “newness” of his music.Read full review... | |
| 23-Nov-2012 Walt Disney Concert Hall | Hope and defiance in Petrenko's Shostakovich 10 with the LA Phil |
 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?Read full review... | |
| 13-Nov-2012 Walt Disney Concert Hall | Salonen and the Philharmonia deliver a razor-sharp Wozzeck at Disney Hall |
 Those closing bars of Alban Berg’s Wozzeck, tottering away into nothingness, is one of the great nexus points in musical history. Drawing upon the coda of Igor Stravinsky’s Petrushka, where the Russian’s ballet staggers in similar fashion to a stop, it was the signal moment in Berg’s opera that demonstrated, contrary to popular prejudice, the Austrian composer’s openness (as well as that of his Second Viennese School colleagues) to other composers and musics that ran counter to his own melos.Read full review... | |
| 2-Nov-2012 Walt Disney Concert Hall | Quirky Golijov and granitic Tchaikovsky from the LA Phil and Alsop |
 Kym Thomson.jpg) 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. Her home was caught in the sights of the fury of the devastating Hurricane Sandy that passed over the US East Coast that week, with the storm’s powerful winds knocking a large tree over her study.Read full review... | |
| 16-Oct-2012 Walt Disney Concert Hall | Music by Nico Muhly and Daniel Bjarnason with the LA Phil and John Adams |
 “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. Especially so when youth is bound to an artist wielding a mastery of technique that belies the tenderness of their years.Read full review... | |
| 11-Oct-2012 Walt Disney Concert Hall | Dudamel and the LA Phil take Disney Hall Where the Wild Things Are |
 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.
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| 5-Oct-2012 Walt Disney Concert Hall | Andsnes joins Dudamel and the LA Phil in Beethoven |
 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. A ruddy-faced man in his 50s wearing a beige cashmere coat approached the counter with a bundle of box sets in his arms; his face nearly disappearing between his scarf and his wool hat, with only the tips of his black, horn-rimmed glasses seemingly visible amidst the swirl of plaid.Read full review... | |
| 28-Sep-2012 Walt Disney Concert Hall | Opening night with LA Phil and Dudamel a thrill ride |
 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. Yet not only did the program on Friday, 28 September prove to be a fine one to formally open the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s season.Read full review... | |
| 13-Sep-2012 Hollywood Bowl | Perlman, Tovey, and the LA Phil bid farewell to summer 2012 at the Hollywood Bowl |
 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. Some 9,000 people opted to brave temperatures that felt just a couple degrees short of baking even at night. For most of them, the incentive of seeing and hearing Itzhak Perlman was, no doubt, an incentive to travel they couldn’t turn down.Read full review... | |
| 8-Sep-2012 Hollywood Bowl | Tchaikovsky Spectacular with the LA Phil and Bramwell Tovey |
 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. A better way to fill up all the rows of seating at Hollywood Bowl has yet to be devised. And fill those seats they did—over 16,000 music lovers converging onto the Bowl last Saturday night.Read full review... | |
| 4-Sep-2012 Hollywood Bowl | Denis Matsuev and Krzysztof Urbański at the Hollywood Bowl |
 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.
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| 30-Aug-2012 Hollywood Bowl | Rafael Frühbeck de Burgos' crushing Carmina Burana at the Hollywood Bowl |
 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.Read full review... | |
| 21-Aug-2012 Hollywood Bowl | Balsom tightly coiled; McGegan all smiles in Haydn program at the Hollywood Bowl |
 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. Fortunately for his Hollywood Bowl audience last night, McGegan proved to be a genial, good-humored guide through the music of Franz Josef Haydn—and the antithesis to the period performance stereotype.
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| 16-Aug-2012 Hollywood Bowl | Sergio Tiempo plays Ginastera with the LA Phil and Dudamel |
 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”.
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| 12-Aug-2012 Hollywood Bowl | Verdi's Rigoletto at the Hollywood Bowl with the LA Phil and Dudamel |
 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. If we want to keep the program conservative why not go with an opera by Mozart, Bizet, Wagner, or Weber instead? All of them used the orchestra with greater freedom and independence than we associate with Italian composers, many of whom composed for the orchestra as if it were little more than a giant guitar. Or so you would think.
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| 9-Aug-2012 Hollywood Bowl | Yuja Wang and Gustavo Dudamel in an all-Tchaikovsky program at the Hollywood Bowl |
 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." It took only that little bit of clothing to shake up the sometimes sleepy summer concert season. Her Hollywood Bowl concert became one of the most discussed in classical music last year; even gaining attention from the general public.
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| 31-Jul-2012 Hollywood Bowl | Powerful Brahms, lithe Elgar with Bronfman, Bringuier, and the LA Phil |
 Oded Antman.jpg) 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. Can you blame the listener if they cringe just a little at the sight of the program and groan "not again?"
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| 26-Jul-2012 Hollywood Bowl | Music French and American: Denève and Thibaudet at the Hollywood Bowl |
 "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.
French cheeses? Au revoir!
French wine? Hélas—adieu!
Yet Gallic civilization has permeated American culture far deeper than the adoption of certain foodstuffs.
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| 24-Jul-2012 Hollywood Bowl | Stephane Denève leads LA Phil in all-Russian program at the Hollywood Bowl |
 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. When one Apache would approach the another, they would whistle the first theme from Borodin's Second Symphony, knowing that when the other whistled back the rest of the theme, they were one of their own.
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| 14-Jul-2012 Huntington Library, San Marino | Southwest Chamber Music pay tribute to the France of Debussy, Ravel, and Jolivet |
 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.
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| 12-Jul-2012 Hollywood Bowl | LA Phil with Leonard Slatkin at the Hollywood Bowl |
 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. Grey clouds looming on the horizon, which grew and dissipated as the day progressed, swelled and darkened as the sun set. Later they tore open with a downpour that caused many in the audience to flee for the exits, soaking those not lucky enough to come prepared with ponchos.
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| 31-May-2012 Walt Disney Concert Hall | World première of Adams' The Gospel According to the Other Mary in LA |
 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. In its own way—or despite itself—the composer's The Gospel According to the Other Mary proved memorable indeed, but for reasons perhaps not intended by its creators.Read full review... | |
| 9-May-2012 Walt Disney Concert Hall | The New York Philharmonic's Walt Disney Hall debut |
 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. It was hard not to look to one’s East Coast neighbors without thinking the grass was greener there. Things have changed since then and the grass, while different, may not necessarily be greener in Manhattan.
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| 3-May-2012 Walt Disney Concert Hall | Welcome back, Sir Simon: Rattle leads LAPO in their first concert together in twelve years |
| 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. It was his first appearance with the orchestra at Disney Hall, his last directing a program of Ravel and Mahler during the orchestra’s final years at the old Dorothy Chandler Pavilion.
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| 20-Apr-2012 Walt Disney Concert Hall | Goerne and Eschenbach Close Out Schubert Series with “Great” Finale |
 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. This is, after all, the symphony fêted—and gently tweaked—by Schumann for its “heavenly length.” Schubert out-Beethovening Beethoven; prefiguring the massive symphonic frescos of Anton Bruckner.Read full review... | |
| 19-Apr-2012 Walt Disney Concert Hall | Seoul Philharmonic Receives Warm Welcome at Disney Hall |
 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.
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| 18-Apr-2012 Walt Disney Concert Hall | Bitterness and Beauty: Goerne and Eschenbach Perform Winterreise |
 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. Much the same could be said of Franz Schubert’s final song cycle, Winterreise. Less a group of songs and more a kind of extended operatic monologue, Winterreise is Schubert at his most tragic.Read full review... | |
| 16-Apr-2012 Walt Disney Concert Hall | Goerne and Eschenbach perform Die schöne Müllerin at LAPO’s Sublime Schubert series |
 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. Such is the case with Franz Schubert’s Die schöne Müllerin, a work surpassed in melancholy introspection only by his final song cycle, Winterreise.Read full review... | |
| 11-Apr-2012 UCLA: Royce Hall | The “Pacifica Quartet Experience” at Royce Hall |
 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.
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| 10-Apr-2012 Walt Disney Concert Hall | Stockhausen, Cage, and Bettison at Green Umbrella concert |
| 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. Even after the advent of minimalism, neo-romanticism, the “new tonality”, and scores (pardon the pun) of composers who affect to write “accessible” music for the masses, the sometimes-gritty music of the mid-20th century avant-garde refuses to go away. If anything, it’s found a more secure footing than ever, enjoying a dedicated legion of young followers for whom such music holds no terrors. Read full review... | |
| 5-Apr-2012 Walt Disney Concert Hall | LAPO and John Adams perform West coast premiere of Philip Glass’ Symphony No. 9 |
 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.Read full review... | |
| 8-Mar-2012 Dorothy Chandler Pavilion | Britten's Albert Herring: A sardonic delight at LA Opera |
 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.
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| 7-Mar-2012 Walt Disney Concert Hall | Jeffrey Kahane and LA Chamber Orchestra: Celebrating 15 years together |
 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.
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