Changing programs around a little

July 28, 2011 4 Comments

Esteban Benzecry and Gustavo Dudamel before the world premiere of "Rituales Amerindios," Canary Island Music Festival 2010 (image from video edited by Måns Pär Fogelberg)

I received an email from the Los Angeles Philharmonic a couple of days ago informing me that there would be a slight change for their October 20 & 21 programs:  instead of Tromba Lontana by John Adams, the curtain raiser will now be Short Ride on a Fast Machine (also by Adams) in a concert which also includes the Prokofiev Symphony No. 5 and the world premiere of Magnetar, an electric cello concerto written by Enrico Chapela featuring Johannes Moser as soloist.

Some brief additional research revealed that the two Adams fanfares essentially swapped places with each other, with Tromba Lontana now appearing where Short Ride on a Fast Machine was originally scheduled:  on the season opening weekend concerts along with Symphonie fantastique by Berlioz.  In addition, it appears that the Stravinsky Symphony in C has been dropped in favor of the U.S. premiere of Rituales Amerindios by Esteban Benzecry.  (Both of these programs, with the changes, are also scheduled to be performed as part of the San Francisco Symphony’s 100th Anniversary celebration concerts at Davies Symphony Hall on October 23rd and 24th).

I’m almost always up for premieres of new music, but my initial reaction was to be glad that I hadn’t yet bought tickets to the first concert weekend of the season:

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Nostrovia! Vodka flights at Red Square

July 23, 2011 Leave a comment

"Mal-A-Vitch" by Ed Moses, from the collection of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (photo by CKDH)

As mentioned in a previous post, I visited Red Square in Mandalay Bay as part of my latest Las Vegas misadventures.  For those of you who may not be familiar, Red Square is a bar & restaurant with an ostensibly  post-communist Muscovite flavor; a giant, headless, faux-guano adorned statue of Vladimir Lenin stands guard near the main entrance.   It is best known for two features: slabs of ice built into the bar, and a two-story high vodka freezer complete with a dining/meeting room and  private vodka lockers available for lease.  There is a full restaurant menu, and the food turned out to be surprisingly good, though not at all Russian besides the caviar.  No matter; food wasn’t the point of our visit.

I am not much of a vodka drinker.  My taste in spirits tends towards the bolder:  scotch, especially neat or with ice, and bourbon, rum, and even tequila when mixed.  There’s nothing wrong with vodka, mind you, but it’s not typically something I’m ever going to seek out; however, since I was with a group of vodka drinkers, including Mrs. CKDH and Mr. J, in an establishment known for its extensive vodka selection, vodka would be the drink of the night.

Red Square offers an assortment of four-shot vodka flights — all Russian, all New World, all Really Freakin’ Expensive (my description, not theirs), among others.  After some discussion, Mr. J and I decided to split the following flights:

Both of the flights were delivered in frozen red blocks with indents for the individual shot glasses (as CKDH, Jr., pointed out:  ”Hey, it looks like a ‘hard eight’”).  The first shots in each flights were indicated by a stirrer placed in the glass, with the rest of the flight progressing clockwise from there.
All were enjoyable.  I was surprised at how distinct the potato vodkas were from the others.  My favorites happened to be the three Polish vodkas:  all were balanced and went down very easily.  The Russian vodkas — especially the Youri Dolgoruki and Zyr –all had a much more noticeable punch up front, but still finished smooth.
For someone without anything but a casual knowledge of vodka, it was a good education.  I’ll be back for more lessons as soon as possible.

Hard Eight: two sets of Red Square vodka tasting flights

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A Sibelius soundtrack for a Texas storm

July 21, 2011 1 Comment

I visited Texas a few months ago, driving from city to city as I made my way across the state.  On the leg from Dallas to Houston, I found myself chasing one of those Texas-sized storms, the kind of which we just don’t get in California:  lightning bolts flashing back and forth across the sky from one cloud to the other without ever hitting the ground.  It was an impressive sight.

Coincidentally adding to the sense of drama that night was the fact that I just happened to have the Sibelius 2nd Symphony cranked up on the sound system.  I always listen to music LOUDLY when driving cross-country, though it tends to vary between genres depending on my mood (somehow, I don’t think Foo Fighters or New Order would have backed up the video quite as well).  The more I drove towards the storm, the more the music and visuals seemed tailor-made to each other.  I eventually grabbed my phone and made the video above.  Just as I started recording, the lightning seemed to slow down a little — if I were lucky enough to have started the video one-minute earlier, it would have been even more striking.

The final result was not quite as auteur-like as Salonen & Sellar’s re-imagining of The Wind, but I thought it was worth sharing nonetheless.

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News of Mr. Hooten and Miss December: how the LA Phil may have found a new Principal Trumpet and CKDH a new favorite blackjack dealer

July 18, 2011 5 Comments

Long before the closure of Interstate 405 allegedly threatened to end the world as we know it, I had planned to spend this past weekend with family and friends in Las Vegas.  High temperatures were a surprisingly mellow 98-degrees in the shade,  so days were spent outside at the Mandalay Bay lazy river with cold drink in hand; evenings involved praying for “hard eights” at the craps table, comparing the subtle differences between various potato vodkas at Red Square, and finding out that our neophyte blackjack dealer at the Playboy Club was Miss December 2005 (more on all that below).

Thomas Hooten, well-known "trumpet monster"

Back in Southern California, Gustavo Dudamel and the Los Angeles Philharmonic spent this past weekend playing Turandot and trying to find a new Principal Trumpet.  If I could have placed a bet on who would have won the auditions, I would have put my money on Thomas Hooten.  Turns out, it would have been a smart and profitable wager:  Mr. Hooten was awarded a trial with the orchestra.

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Free French-related Fun for Bastille Day

July 14, 2011 1 Comment

Brigitte Bardot, French actress and possible one-time real-life French maid (Urban Daddy)

It’s very easy to make fun of the French because . . . well, because they are so very French.  You don’t get saddled with a nickname like “cheese-eating surrender monkeys” without having deserved it in some way, shape, or form.  Still, they helped us win our nation’s independence, they shipped a nice big copper statue of a woman holding a torch that people appreciate, and of course, they got really good at cultivating, fermenting, and bottling grapes like Pinot Noir and Cabernet Sauvignon — so clearly they aren’t all bad.  On top of that, they gave the world some kick-ass composers like Debussy, Ravel, Berlioz, and many more.

So in honor of Le Quatorze Julliet, allow me to offer up three little bits of free French-related fun, having equal parts classic, sublime, and naughty (ok, maybe not all of them have equal parts naughty, but at least one of them does):

  1. “La Marseillaise”, care of Casablanca:  
  2. Free download (click HERE) of the Symphony in C by French composer, Georges Bizet:  To help celebrate Bernard Haitink’s 80th birthday, the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra released this recording available for free download online (free registration required).  The series also included Schumann’s Symphony No. 1 and Beethoven’s Symphony No. 3 — but those two guys were from the wrong side of the French border, so let’s not talk about them right now.
  3. And finally (drum-roll please) . . . French Maids of Bastille Day :  As our friends at Urban Daddy put it, “celebrating with a tribute to what is probably France’s most heroic contribution to international culture . . . some of the world’s most beautiful women with the French maid costumes they were born to wear.”  Vive la France, indeed!

(All pictures and their associated captions below are taken directly from Urban Daddy.  To view the complete slide show in its original format, click HERE)

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Summer Whites in the great outdoors; avoiding Lang Lang

July 13, 2011 3 Comments

Decidedly NOT a picture of Lang Lang (Gustavo Dudamel, July 12, 2011) (photo: Lawrence K. Ho, Los Angeles Times)

Though the Hollywood Bowl has been open for about a month, the Los Angeles Philharmonic play did not play in their white jackets (and blouses) under the venue’s iconic white arches until this past Friday and Saturday when they gave the word premiere performances of the full film score to West Side Story.  They followed it with more movie music on Sunday, this time a cross-cultural endeavor playing compositions of A. R. Rahman.  Traditional “Symphony Under the Stars” concerts finally  were on the bill last night as Gustavo Dudamel and the orchestra played music by Borodin, Mussorgsky (with orchestral help from Ravel), and Prokofiev (with pianistic help from Lang Lang).

I am not a fan of Lang Lang.  I respect his amazing technical ability at the keyboard, but his interpretations and visual machinations are not to my taste.  After seeing him perform a gooey rendition of Tchaikovsky’s First Concerto in 2000 with Zubin Mehta and the LA Phil, I vowed to avoid him in the future.  A subsequent encounter six years later was more of a veritable free-gift-with-purchase of tickets to see Esa-Pekka Salonen conduct Le Sacre du Printemps at Walt Disney Concert Hall; the good news was that Lang Lang brought a piece I liked, Bartok’s 2nd Concerto, to WDCH; the bad news was that he didn’t bring much that I liked to Bartok’s 2nd Concerto.

With this in mind, my strong desire to experience Mr. Dudamel’s take on Pictures at an Exhibition and the happy thought of picnicking with yummy food and wine at the Bowl were overruled by my even stronger desire to avoid Lang Lang; the thought of fighting with stack parking and the Bowl’s hit-and-miss sound system certainly made my decision that much easier.   After reading reviews by Tim Mangan, Mark Swed, and Richard Ginell (links below), it seems like I didn’t miss anything from the 29 year-old pianist that I now regret.   The three gentlemen writers seemed to agree on many things about the concert . . .  if I may summarize:

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Writing Pseudonymously

July 9, 2011 2 Comments

My friend, Carmela Ciuraru (not a pseudonym), continues to gain much positive attention for her most recent book, Nom de Plume:  A (Secret) History of Pseudonyms (Harper Collins).   Carmela is a wonderful writer with an arrestingly dry sense of humor*, and she takes an interesting concept (which, not-so-shockingly, is near and dear to my heart) and expands upon it to share new stories and points of view about writers we thought we already knew.

Some links to the various coverage about the book:

. . . and many, many more.  So without further ado, I strongly suggest you follow the distinguished Ms. Atwood’s lead and get yourself a copy of Nom de Plume right now: Read more of this post

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LA Phil’s Peter Stumpf praised for Indiana recital

July 6, 2011 Leave a comment

Peter Stumpf, Principal Cello of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, gave his first recital in Indiana since being announced as a new full-time professor of music at Indiana University Jacobs School of Music.  The review of the Jun 29th concert in the  Herald-Times (Bloomington, Indiana)  was unequivocally glowing, with Peter Jacobi calling Mr. Stumpf “a musician of outstanding talent and heart. . . .  There can be no doubt about Stumpf’s artistic stature following his program on Wednesday.”  Additional quotes regarding each of the specific pieces that the cellist, along with accompanist Chi-Yi Chen at the piano, performed:

  • Debussy — D Minor Sonata for Cello and Piano:  ”Technically tricky to handle, the piece, even during its lighter late moments, was meant to leave a melancholy impression . . . Stumpf had the music’s moods and measures.”
  • Britten — Suite No. 1 for Solo Cello, Opus 72:  ”. . . extraordinary, a brilliantly realized presentation.”
  • Brahms —  Sonata in F Major, Opus 99:  ”There’s passion in its music. There’s turbulence. There’s allure. Stumpf, with Chen a complementing partner, offered an interpretation gratifyingly finished and intense.”
  • Chopin — Introduction and Polonaise brillante:  ”The planned ending for the concert served like an encore, a selection meant to give listeners a final taste of the performer’s virtuosity and send them home happy. . . . as Stumpf and Chen played it, did just that.”
The full text of Mr. Jacobi’s review can be found at the Herald-Times website HERE (subscription required)
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2011 Los Angeles Guitar Festival

July 5, 2011 Leave a comment

Dick Dale, surf-rock legend (photo: Melissa Bobbitt)

Sometimes, there is just too much good stuff to do.  Such was the case with the 2011 Los Angeles Guitar Festival held at the Redondo Beach Performing Arts Center this past weekend:  despite wanting to see the vast array of performers on both July 2nd and 3rd, other priorities held sway and I could not squeeze it onto the schedule.  Fortunately for me and any of the rest of you who may have missed it, the festival is likely to be an annual event; start planning ahead for a dash down to the South Bay next year.

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Free patriotic music for the 4th of July

July 4, 2011 1 Comment

Happy Independence Day, everyone!  What better way to celebrate the 235th birthday of the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave than with a little bit of FREE patriotic music, care of the United States Air Force Heritage of America Band (FKA the USAF Tactical Air Command Band) based in Langley AFB, Virginia.  Their website offers free downloads from their two Ceremonial Music CDs HERE and HERE, which can come in handy if you:

  • Are a Boy Scout or Girl Scout troop leader and need “To the Colors” and “Retreat” for your flag raising & lowering ceremonies
  • Are a pair of buglers who have never played “Echo Taps” and have been asked to participate in a Memorial Day ceremonies or some other solemn activity
  • Happen to have, say, a major general over for dinner and need to play the right set of honors as you introduce him to the assembled throngs (BTW:  the proper music to avoid a faux pas would be two Ruffles & Flourishes and the General’s March)

There are downloads available of popular marches by the likes of E. E. Begley (“National Emblem“), C. E. Duble (“Bravura“), and Henry Fillmore (“Men of Ohio“), among many others.  There are also all of the armed service’s songs (e.g. “The Air Force Song“) and even a version of John Newton’s “Amazing Grace” played on bagpipes.

Of course, no July 4th celebration would be appropriate without music by The March King himself, John Philip Sousa, most especially “The Stars & Stripes Forever.”  The USAF Heritage of America Band offers many of his other marches, too, so check them out, download them, and crank them up on your favorite MP3 player as fireworks blaze tonight.

Speaking of “The Stars & Stripes Forever,” check out these links:

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LA Phil comings and goings (part 3 of 3): new faces — and two familiar ones — come to town

July 2, 2011 7 Comments

Nathan Cole, new LA Phil First Associate Concertmaster (photo: Chamber Music Festival of Lexington)

Ahhh, it is July, and a classic Southern California Summer is brewing: the sun is shining with no clouds in sight, there is a slight breeze in the air to keep you cool, and the water temp is in the high 60′s and climbing. Once the waves grow higher than their current ankle-slapper status, conditions will be ideal.

Of course, another harbinger of Summer in So Cal is the beginning of concerts at the Hollywood Bowl. The Playboy Jazz Festival kicked this off in mid-June, and the official season at the famous Cahuenga Pass venue was launched a few days later with the annual HB Hall of Fame inductions. Since then, we’ve had Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra, Mariachi USA Festival, and a Grease sing-a-long (as a sewn-into-her-leggings Olivia Newton John would say, “Tell me about it, stud . . .”), among other things. The Hollywood Bowl Orchestra join Hall & Oats — yes, they’re still around — this coming 4th of July weekend for some 80′s pop standards complete with FIREWORKS!!!!! (If you want to chime in on how awesome it will be to scream “I can’t go for that — no can do” at the top of your lungs, click HERE to vote over at Tim Mangan’s blog)

The Bowl is also the official Summer home of the Los Angeles Philharmonic.  The orchestra has had a few weeks off from concerts and doesn’t begin its residence until next weekend when they perform the music to West Side Story live as the film plays in HD on the big screen over their heads.

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