Tonight’s Hollywood Bowl wines

August 30, 2012 Leave a comment

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For tonight’s concert of incidental music from A Midsummer Night’s Dream by Mendelssohn and Orff’s Carmina Burana, I decided to bring along a couple of 2004 wines: a Late Disgorged Brut from Domaine Carneros and a Ridge Lytton Springs.

Both are drinking damn well. No matter how many times I drink “older” Lytton Springs, I am always surprised at how well it holds up. I think few other zins do as well (Turley comes to mind, but that’s about it).

The Domaine Carneros is less of a surprise, but just as enjoyable — crisp, tangy, and nicely balanced.

And the concert? Quite good so far. More in a couple of days.

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All is Yar gets a little love from the Los Angeles Times

August 26, 2012 Leave a comment

Back in May of this year, I had the good fortune to be able to attend the world premiere performance of John Adams’ new oratorio, The Gospel According to the Other Mary.  In addition to posting a review of that concert, I posted some pre-concert musings on the new work’s title and the identity of the “Other Mary” (read my thoughts at the time HERE).

So it was with some curiosity that I noticed a small link on the “Entertainment” section of yesterday’s Los Angeles Times website titled, “The elusive ‘Other Mary’ .”  I clicked on it and, lo and behold, found that not only had Reed Johnson and the Times taken up the same issue I raised a few months ago and ran with it, they referred to “a lively discussion among a handful of religious scholars and bloggers”  – with a live web link on “and bloggers” which pointed to my pre-concert post (see screen shot below).

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A busy weekend of So Cal classical music

August 25, 2012 Leave a comment

There’s lots going in this weekend.  Pick something you like and go check it out.

World premiere production of The Face
The world premiere staged performance of Donald Crockett’s new chamber orchestra, The Face, is tonight at 8pm at the Aratani/Japan America Theater in the Little Tokyo neighborhood of downtown Los Angeles.  Subsequent performances will be Monday and Tuesday, August 27th and 28th.  The libretto is based on the poems of David St. John, with the action set in another of LA’s iconic neighborhoods:  Venice Beach.

“THE FACE is a deeply compelling story about the price of fame, desire and creativity. The central character, a once famous poet named Raphael, struggles with the recent loss of his lover/muse, while juggling the demands of a movie being made about his life and his increasing notoriety. The narrative is both passionate and raw in its candor, offering an insightful view of the human condition as experienced by an artist/poet.”  – The Face website

Gil Rose conducts the Firebird Ensemble (Kate Vincent, founding Artistic Director) for all three productions.

This summer’s final Southwest Chamber Music concert at The Huntington
The last of Southwest Chamber Music’s four summer concerts at The Huntington are tonight and tomorrow.  This year’s season honors the centennial of Pasadena native and culinary demi-goddess, Julia Child, by focusing on French music.  This weekend’s concerts feature works by Debussy, Ravel, Falla, Milhaud, and an arrangement of songs made famous by Edith Piaf.  Mezzo-soprano Suzanna Guzmán and pianists Ming Tsu and Genevieve Lee are the soloists.

Los Angeles Jewish Symphony celebrates it’s 18th birthday
Noreen Green’s orchestra turns 18, which I guess means it’s all grown up.  It marks its unique role in celebrating the legacy of Jewish music with a concert at the John Anson Ford Amphitheater at 7:30pm on Sunday, August 26th.  Mark Kashper, LAJS Concertmaster (not to mention Associate Principal 2nd Violin of the Los Angeles Philharmonic) is the featured soloist in Reb Mendele Suite by Simon Sargon.

More information and tickets can be found online at the LAJS website as well as the Ford Amphitheater site.  In addition, there was a very nice write-up in the Los Angeles Times about the orchestra and their upcoming performance (HERE).

Diana Krall at the Hollywood Bowl
The celebrated pianist and vocalist — not to mention Mrs. Elvis Costello — join the Los Angeles Philharmonic for one more concert at the Hollywood Bowl tonight.  You probably knew about it, but I figured I’d mention it just in case.

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Brava, Ms. Balsom! Trumpeter dazzles at the Hollywood Bowl

August 22, 2012 6 Comments

You hear of a night of Haydn conducted by the ever-sunny Nicholas McGegan, and you probably think, “That’s nice.”  You notice that the Haydn Trumpet Concerto will be the centerpiece of the evening and you might say, “Hmmm, haven’t heard that performed in a while.”   You realize that Alison Balsom is the trumpet soloist, and you drop whatever you had planned and you go.

At least that’s what you should have done Tuesday night, but you probably didn’t.  And that’s a damn shame.

Judging by the relatively sparse attendance at the Hollywood Bowl, you weren’t the only one.  Haydn apparently isn’t the draw that Beethoven or Mozart or Tchaikovsky is.  Perhaps the sheer volume of his output waters down any individual work’s popularity, making an all-Haydn night less compelling to the masses.  But if there’s one work that should stand out, it’s the trumpet concerto.  Written as a showpiece for an instrument that in the composer’s time had just recently evolved to be able to play a full chromatic scale, it is compact, lyrical, virtuosic — what’s not to love?

Part of the problem is that we just don’t hear it live often enough.  As trumpet concertos go, the Haydn is bread and butter, but compared to concertos in general, it may as well be foie gras:  rich and juicy, comes in small portions, damn hard to find.

If memory serves, the last time the Los Angeles Philharmonic performed it was in 1995 when former Principal Trumpet Thomas Stevens was the soloist.  In that time, there have been multiple performances of relative rarities like the Lutosławski cello concerto, the Korngold violin concerto, and Rodrigo’s Concierto de Aranjuez for guitar — don’t even get me started on the Lady Gaga-ish ubiquity of the “Rach 3″ or the Mendelssohn violin concerto.   But I digress . . .

On top of all this, you get Alison Balsom.  If there’s a star among classical trumpet virtuosos these days, she is it (and, no, I don’t count Wynton Marsalis since he doesn’t really play classical music anymore . . . OK, maybe you’ve got an argument if you bring up Håkan Hardenberger, but still . . . ).

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Anna Prohaska sings “Exsultate, Jubilate” from this year’s Salzburg Festival

August 20, 2012 Leave a comment

Anna Prohaska, recently appearing as Zerlina in the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s production of Don Giovanni, is seen here at the opening ceremony of the 2012 Salzburg Festival singing some different Mozart:

Exsultate, Jubilate (K. 165)

What makes the performance more impressive is that she was only given a few hours notice that she’d be performing it — which, until this concert, she hadn’t sung in twelve years.

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Photo Credit:   Patrick Walter / Deutsche Grammophon

 

 

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Unofficial announcements: Los Angeles gets a new 2nd Flute, and Orange County gets its music critic back

August 18, 2012 Leave a comment

Just to show that good things can actually happen to good people, music critic Timothy Mangan will once again be the classical music critic of The Orange County Register.   According to his blog, Classical Life,  Tim’s new/old job was definitely — if not yet publicly — confirmed by the newspaper’s new regime.  No word on when that’ll happen, but he sounds convinced that it’s happening — and I doubt Mr. Mangan would have said anything so definitive if he weren’t sure about it.

While it’s almost too bad that we will no longer get the benfit of his caustic wit applied to the Lindsay Lohans of the world, not to mention his mystery celebrity quizzes, his talents were wasted as the paper’s celebrity columnist.    At least they kept him on staff so that he could be reinstated.  No word yet on if he gets to keep his weekly Friday radio gig.

Congrats, Tim!!

But wait . . .  there’s more!!!!

Multiple sources report that the Los Angeles Philharmonic has filled one of their two empty (or soon to be empty) flute jobs:

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An exotic addition to a French summer at the Huntington: Southwest Chamber Music plays Debussy & Ravel, and invites back a Vietnamese virtuoso

August 14, 2012 Leave a comment

Inspired by the centennial of Pasadena-native, Julia Child, Southwest Chamber Music has been focusing  on French music for their Summer Festival 2012 at The Huntington.  Healthy portions of Debussy and Ravel are offered up in each concert.  This past weekend’s programs, the third in the series, paired those two quintessential French composers with works from Vietnam.

It was a natural twist.  Not only have the two cultures long been intertwined due to colonial influences, Southwest has made an ongoing effort to build a relationship with and champion Vietnamese musicians, most notably through the 2010 “Ascending Dragon” Music Festival and Cultural Exchange in conjunction with the U.S. State Department (the largest ever of its kind)  and their inaugural “LA International New Music Festival” held just a few months ago.  Moreover, the music of both Debussy and Ravel is filled with Eastern influences.

That mix of music, combined with the rather balmy evening and views of palm trees in the distance peeking through behind the performers, gave the whole affair an appropriately tropical, exotic feel to it.  As Momma once famously declared, “The night was sultry.”

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Wine to go with Tchaikovsky

August 13, 2012 Leave a comment

For last Thursday’s all Tchaikovsky concert at the Hollywood Bowl,  I had the pleasure of sitting next to Hadley and Tatiana of Grub Street Los Angeles.  They’re wonderful people — I say this for a great variety of reasons, only one of which is their willingness to share with me some of their wine:  a bottle of 2009 House Claret from Christ Church, Oxford.

If you try to search for this wine on Google, you won’t find much helpful information, so I am glad to pass on some of the basics of its story as Hadley told it to me (mind you, a few glasses of wine had been consumed prior to the telling and hearing of this story, so if I mess any of this up, I trust someone will correct me).

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Style and substance in equal measure: Wang joins Dudamel and the LA Phil for some Tchaikovsky

August 11, 2012 1 Comment

Tchaikovsky concerts at the Hollywood Bowl are common occurrences.  Thursday night’s Los Angeles Philharmonic concert was pretty typical, with a program featuring a pair of frequently heard warhorses:  the Piano Concerto No. 1 and the Symphony No. 4.

Then again, in some ways, this wasn’t all that typical.  There were no fireworks, no 1812 Overture, no USC Trojan Marching Band.  Instead, we got Gustavo Dudamel conducting and Yuja Wang playing the piano.  I’d say that’s more than a fair trade.

Some people may not agree, though.  Both Mr. Dudamel and Ms. Wang  benefit/suffer from marketing machines and media attention focusing on things not directly related to their music making.  This leads to claims that either or both are over-hyped, triumphs of fluff over stuff, all show and no go.

Sure, image is a big part of each of their personas.  But don’t believe the naysayers.  Whatever one may think of their style, there is at least as much substance, if not more. Both of them are musicians who already offer some exciting and probing interpretations of major works despite their relative youth.

Thursday night was the latest example of this.  While the performances were not flawless, they were compelling — they didn’t try too hard to make a big impression, nor were they content to settle for the ordinary or cliché.

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Yuja Wang is everyone’s social media darling + “All is Yar” has a Facebook page (finally)

August 9, 2012 Leave a comment

Different people have different habits, especially when it comes to how you like to consume information.  Some of you like to watch Olympic coverage in real time online or read about the results on ESPN or Twitter immediately after gold medals are handed out, while others prefer to sit through NBC’s tape-delayed faux-suspense-laden Olympic coverage on prime time.  I don’t judge — it’s all good.

Similarly, people seem to get their  All is Yar fix in  different ways too:  some of you type the URL into your browsers, others subscribe via email or use Flipboard or other RSS readers, still others get here via links from other blogs or even Twitter.  It’s all good, and I thank you for it.

The one medium that I hadn’t gotten around to building a presence for All is Yar was on Facebook, because as Morrissey once warbled, these things take time.  That Facebook absence was a hurdle for some of you.  Hurdle removed.

Allow me to introduce to you . . . (insert your favorite trumpet fanfare here) . . . the All is Yar Facebook page, conveniently located at www.facebook.com/allisyar.

Even more convenient is the new button on the top right-hand side of this page that will allow you to “Like” the new Facebook page without even having to break a sweat.  That way, you’ll not only be able to get faster notice when I create a new post, it’ll be easy to pass my remarkable insights (or whatever you might call them) along to your friends.

I know, I know — it’s all very 2010 of me and such, but despite what Wall Street’s skepticism about Facebook’s future growth might be doing to Mark Zuckerberg’s net worth, there are still one billion people on Facebook.  This’ll make it even easier for everyone (including readers  in the Netherlands, the Philippines, and the United Arab Emirates, among other places with and without “the” in front of their names) to read and share.

So “Like” away, and then tell your friends to do the same.

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Yuja Wang, star pianist and stilletto-heel fan extraordinaire,  has never had a problem attracting attention.  Tim Mangan, music critic and blogger extraordinaire, once pointed out that the mere mention of her name was enough to dramatically increase hit count on his blog, Classical Life.

So I was more than a bit amused when I opened my Facebook newsfeed to find these two posts listed back to back:

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Rest in Peace, Mark Petix

August 5, 2012 6 Comments

There are few people I have ever known for whom all was truly yar, who really did live the good life in all of its many forms, more than Mark Anthony Petix.

A gifted writer, he was most familiar to the world for his many years at The Press-Enterprise of Riverside, covering the Inland Empire in all of its glory — especially all of its food-related glory.  My favorite of Mark’s many foodie pieces is his behind-the-scenes look at making the family’s Easter Bread.

Of course, he wrote about much more than food; his ability to crystallize any moment in time was best evidenced in his multi-part series following an Army Reservist from Riverside around Bosnia in 1999.

His easy-going charm and wit translated well to the page, but to see the mischievous glint in his eyes  and wry smile on his face as he spun his stories was a privilege given to those who knew him personally.   He was the kind of guy everyone genuinely liked being around because he always made you feel good, always made you laugh, and always made you hungry as he talked about something yummy.

A few weeks ago, he began to complain of back pain, so he and his lovely wife, Tena, saw a doctor to find out what was troubling him.  To their shock, they learned that Mark was suffering from cancer in a very advanced stage that had spread throughout his body.  With Tena’s loving support, he tried his best to fight it, but being the pragmatist that he was, knew that he didn’t have much time.

Yesterday afternoon, Mark passed away in his own home, surrounded by family and friends.  He was only 57 years old.

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NEWSFLASH: CKDH actually manages to enjoy some Brahms, care of Fima Bronfman, Lionel Bringuier, and the LA Phil

August 3, 2012 Leave a comment

I have more than a few things to say about last Tuesday’s Los Angeles Philharmonic concert at the Hollywood Bowl, as usual.  But let’s get one thing out of the way, shall we?

Yefim Bronfman is a bad-ass.

Ok, perhaps this is old news, but even if that’s the case, it’s worth repeating.

So many reasons why this is true, not least of which because he happened to break his finger in the midst of playing the Prokofiev Sonata No. 8 last year — and still managed to play through the pain and finish the concert (read Rick Schultz’s very nice interview with him HERE where he discusses his broken finger and subsequent recovery).

Broken finger or not, Mr. Bronfman (AKA “Fima”) never ceases to amaze with his combination of refined taste, superior musicality, impeccable technique, and ferocious power that he wields like an AC-130 gunship — staying in the background until called for, at which time thunder is unleashed and woe be to those who dare get in the way.

To use another analogy, he treats piano works like Walter Payton treated defenders:  as appropriate, he can speed around them, he can pound right through them, or he can bob and weave his way through a thicket of obstructions — always making the right choice for the moment, and always with grace and class and dignity.

All of that is true on any given night, but last Tuesday, he managed to pull off something rather remarkable:  he managed to get me to truly enjoy a major work by Brahms.

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