One of the 30 pianos that will be part of the "Play Me, I'm Yours" art exhibit spread across LA County.
Long before Madonna was the most famous American in self-imposed exile in the UK, another noteworthy American-turned-Brit wrote some unkind words about April (or at least that’s what the Thunder said). Whatever. Don’t believe the hype — April is a kick-ass month, and this one in particular is full of all kinds of stuff for a music-loving Southern Californian to do:
Pianos, pianos, everywhere, thanks to the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra
The art installation, Play Me, I’m Yours, featuring 30 pianos spread across Los Angeles County for the public to play and enjoy, officially launches on April 12th with simultaneous performances of Preludes from Bach’s The Well-Tempered Clavier, Book 1, on all 30 pianos. Many thanks to LACO for bringing it to Southern California. More details in a later post, but if you want a head start on deciding which pianos you want to visit, click HERE.
School only started a few weeks ago, but the members of the Colburn School Conservatory’s flagship ensemble, The Colburn Orchestra, held their first concert of the year this past Saturday night. Yehuda Gilad, music director and wold-renowned clarinet pedagogue, led the first in a five concert series at the famed Ambassador Auditorium in Pasadena. Thanks to the offer of free tickets combined with a publicity campaign rare for a student orchestra, the house was full. Attendees that you’d expect to see at a classical music concert were joined by others that were atypical: families with multiple small children, 18-year-old-ish young ladies in remarkably tiny dresses (Mark Swed would have had an absolute coronary). No riots ensued — all were enthusiastic, but well behaved.
From my seat in Row L of the orchestra section, the venue’s legendary acoustics highlighted all that was best with the orchestra. There were times when you forgot you were listening to a student orchestra, with the impressive string section maintaining a unified, athletic tone throughout the evening. On the other hand, there were moments when the Ambassador’s acoustics gave the orchestra nowhere to hide, providing challenges with regards to blend within sections and balances between them — one example: the percussion was either overbearing or thin, with very little in between. It’s likely things will improve in future concerts as the players become more accustomed to their surroundings.
Modest Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition (in the ubiquitous Ravel orchestration) provided the ideal showcase for the evening. Maestro Gilad led a mostly middle-of-the-road interpretation that pleasingly avoided excesses of any kind, though his choice to take full pauses in between the individual sections sometimes led to losses in momentum. That said, he took time to emphasize some interesting texture here and a rhythmic tug there to give the work some personality and avoid it sounding generic; his choices with “Tuileries” were particularly effective in adding an extra bit of air and whimsy to the movement. When he gave individual sections an opportunity to shine, they didn’t let him down.
Notable individual contributions were many. Trumpeter Joseph Brown gave the opening “Promenade” verve and nobility, then later played the muted piccolo trumpet solo in “Samuel Goldenberg and Schmuyle” with incisive flair. The dialogue between the hauntingly plangent saxophone of Christopher Bartz (on loan from USC’s Thornton School of Music) and Andrew Brady’s beautifully nuanced bassoon during “Il vecchio castello,” with support by the rest of the woodwinds and strings, was easily my favorite part of the evening. Spencer Brown played the tuba solo in “Bydlo.” The entire woodwind section shined during “The Ballet of Unhatched Chicks,” led by Franceso Camuglia (Principal Flute), Titus Underwood (Principal Oboe), Sang Yoon Kim (Principal Clarinet), and Mr. Brady.
Francesca dePasquale
Earlier, the lone violin concerto of Antonin Dvořák served as the evening’s centerpiece, with solo duties gamely dispatched by Francesca dePasquale, a senior in Colburn’s Bachelor of Music program and scion of the prominent Philadelphia musical family. Full disclosure: I’ve never been a fan of the Dvořák concerto; there’s nothing particularly bad about it, just nothing compelling about it either. Regardless, Ms. dePasquale deserves praise for a fine performance. While she seemed to be able to navigate the thornier passages without trouble, she was at her best during the second movement Adagio, playing with tenderness and suavity without ever allowing it to sound like mush. When she completed the hum-along finale, the vast majority of the audience rewarded her efforts with a standing ovation. It will be interesting to see where her career takes her.
WARDROBE WATCH: For the record, Ms. dePasquale looked quite lovely, her sleeveless floor-length tiered ecru dress with black sash fashionably highlighting her statuesque frame. Even prudish Los Angeles Times music critics should have no problems giving her outfit a G-rating (unless perhaps he thought the skin exposed by her bare arms were a bit too much) .
The concert began with Berlioz’s Roman Carnival Overture. The orchestra gave a rousing performance, and when it was done, Mr. Gilad asked English Horn soloist John Winstead to acknowledge the audience’s applause – and soon after, asked the entire viola section to do the same.
Overall, it was a very enjoyable evening for which the Colburn School, Mr. Gilad, and the orchestra should be proud. Was everything perfectly played? No. There is certainly room for improvement. But despite the occasional misstep, the orchestra invested their playing with musicality and energy, Mr. Gilad never settling for just mechanical perfection even when his musicians were able to clear all the technical hurdles placed in front of them. It will be interesting to see how the orchestra grows and develops over the course of the year.
Colburn Orchestra September 24, 2011
Yehuda Gilad, music director and conductor
Francesca dePaquale, violin
Berlioz: Roman Carnival Overture
Dvorak: Violin Concerto
Mussorgsky: Pictures at an Exhibition (orch. Ravel)
—————
photo credits:
The Colburn Orchestra: The Colburn School
Francesca dePasquale: courtesy of Francesca dePasquale
Welcome to September (special thanks to Pomplamoose for helping to ring it in with style). We officially still have a few weeks of summer left, but this month is when all sorts of seasons (musical and otherwise) start anew:
Dr. Art Bartner rallies the troops (photo: Mel Melcon/Los Angeles Times)
My beloved USC Trojans kick-off their 2011 football season tomorrow at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum against the Minnesota Golden Gophers. Here’s hoping that the new offensive line holds up and the defense gets a LOT better — that shouldn’t be so hard considering how disappointing they were last year. In anticipation of the game and the annual Hollywood Bowl appearance of the USC Trojan Marching Band (TMB) with the Los Angeles Philharmonic in the Tchaikovsky 1812 Overture, the Los Angeles Times profiled Dr. Arthur C. Bartner, the very vocal director of “The Spirit of Troy” for the past 42 years. There also happen to be side interviews with two former TMB players who are now both in the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra (LACO): Principal Horn Richard Todd and Principal Trumpet David Washburn.
Speaking of interviews with LACO musicians, Music Director Jeffrey Kahane chats with Brian Lauritzen about the first half of the upcoming 2011/2012 season on a podcast that can be downloaded or streamed from the orchestra’s website. Their first concert is on September 24 & 25 in a program featuring Music Director Jeffrey Kahane as conductor and soloist in the Beethoven Piano Concerto No 4, with works by Mozart, Golijov, and an electric guitar concerto by Derek Bermel featuring soloist Wiej Hijmans. If you can’t wait that long to see them, September 17th marks the beginning of an interesting series, “LACO à la carte:” concerts featuring one or two LACO solo players, performed at residences of various foreign Consul Generals (Australia, Azerbaijan, Belgium, Austria) plus an “Iran” themed evening at the Brentwood home of Ahmad & Haleh Gramian. Each concert comes complete with a dinner of the respective country’s cuisine. Not surprisingly, tickets aren’t cheap: $250/seat for the Australian evening and $200/seat for all others, with multi-concert discounts available.
If you want something a little more affordable, you can’t get much better than the five concerts by the Colburn Orchestra this coming year: $0. Yup, that’s right, my favorite price, “Free Fifty-Free” for general admission seats (Premium seats front and center cost a still-reasonable $25/ticket). Clarinet pedagogue extraordinaire and Colburn Orchestra Music Director, Yehuda Gilad, conducts three of the concerts including mostly warhorse works by Dvorak, Mussorgsky, and Brahms. Gerard Schwarz leads the orchestra in the Mahler 5th Symphony, and Bramwell Tovey is on the podium for Ein Heldenleben by Strauss. Featured soloists include distinguished Colburn students Francesca dePasquale (Dvorak violin concerto), Estelle Choi (Shostakovich cello concerto no. 1), and Sichen Ma (Brahms piano concerto no. 2), plus mezzo-soprano Sasha Cooke singing works by Adams and Mahler, and percussion ensemble, “Smoke and Mirrors” in From Me Flows What You Call Time by Takemitsu. All concerts this year will be at the Ambassador Auditorium in Pasadena.
For something a little more adventurous, try “New Music for String Quartet and Electronics,” a concert on September 17 presented by People Inside Electronics, featuring The Eclipse Quartet performing new compositions. This info is taken from their press release:
Last winter, People Inside Electronics, a concert series directed by Aron Kallay and Isaac Schankler, put forth an international call for scores, seeking work that combined the traditional instrumentation of a string quartet (the award-winning Eclipse Quartet) with electronics. They were delighted with the response of over 60 entries, and set to work preparing a concert of their favorites.NEW MUSIC for STRING QUARTET and ELECTRONICS is the culmination of that work.
The concert, at MiMoDa Studio in Culver City, comprises five exciting pieces of new music. Three are arranged for the full quartet and electronics: Zeena Parkins’ spellbinding Persuasion, Dan Visconti’s dynamic, eclectic Love Bleeds Radiant, and Kotoka Suzuki’s atmospheric Vestigia. Rounding out the program are Jason Heath’s enchanting Rain Ceremony, arranged for viola and electronics, and Panayiotis Kokoras’ mercurial Shatter Cone for violin and electronics.
Do you prefer your electronic music in the form of New Wave? Southern Californians can head over to the Hollywood Bowl tonight for a concert by the Human League, Berlin, The Fixx, and The B-52′s. If you miss them there, The B-52′s and Human League will head to Las Vegas for a beach-side concert at Mandalay Bay on Sunday; the others will drive up to the Bay Area where they’ll be joined by the likes of Men Without Hats, Kenny Loggins, The Romantics, and many more at the Sausalito Art Festival this weekend. That won’t be quite the one-hit wonder fest that appeared at Mandalay Bay last month, but it holds its own.
The Los Angeles Philharmonic will NOT be joining the New Wave fun at the Hollywood Bowl (imagine Chris Hanulik doing the bass riff on a special orchestral arrangement of “Rock Lobster” or better yet, Fred Schneider doing his trademark sprechstimme to Pierrot Lunaire), but they did take part in a different kind of fun: they were the beneficiaries of a cake-making challenge in this week’s episode of “Top Chef — Just Desserts.” If the TV show’s judges were to be believed, they tasted pretty good. Unfortunately, theirs are the only opinions we have to listen to since the show decided to show absolutely no footage of LA Phil musicians actually commenting on the creations; save for some out-of-focus shots of second violinists in the background, they barely got any screen time to speak of. I guess their SAG cards will have to wait.
RT @alyssonholt: Why is being pregnant glamorized?
I'm super old fashioned about that; you either marry the fucker or move home with mom an…: posted by CKDH 1 day ago
Someone should tell the giggling girls on the @LAOpera step&repeat that u can't see the logos or red carpet if u take selfies. Ask for help.: posted by CKDH 1 day ago
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