LA Phil announces 2013 Hollywood Bowl season

January 29, 2013 Leave a comment

Hollywood BowlThe Los Angeles Philharmonic released details today of this year’s Hollywood Bowl season (press release HERE and complete chronological list of performances HERE).  Nothing particularly Earth-shattering in the 2013 rendition of the popular Southern California summer venue’s line-up or format.  If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it, I guess.

The biggest surprises for me:

  • The USC Trojan Marching band will NOT be performing as part of the annual “Tchaikovsky Spectacular.”
  • No Rhapsody in Blue or American in Paris, though Gershwin is represented by his Cuban Overture and the Porgy and Bess:  Symphonic Picture.

There are more than a few noteworthy concerts planned.  Here is a brief list of the concerts that caught my eye for one reason or another (listed in chronological order, with all orchestral concerts being performed by the LA Phil unless noted otherwise):

  • The three 4th of July concerts feature the U.S. Air Force Band of the Golden West — besides being a nice patriotic touch, they happen to be a very good band. . . . Oh yeah, also appearing will be the LA Phil and Josh Groban:  let’s hope they perform these gems, which I feel are among Mr. Groban’s best work . . . 
  • July 9 & 11:  Michael Tilson Thomas, Music Director of the San Francisco Symphony and native Angeleno, makes his way back down The 5 (or The 101 and/or PCH, depending on your route of choice) to kick-off the Tuesday/Thursday classical music series; the Mahler 2nd Symphony takes up the first night; the second night includes the Tchaikovsky 4th Symphony, Rimsky-Korsakov’s Dubinushka, and the Sibelius Violin Concerto with Gil Shaham.
  • July 14:  guitarists Rodrigo y Gabriela return to the Cahuenga Pass for the first time since their triumphant 2011 Hollywood Bowl debut.
  • July 23:  The Rite of Spring (!) makes an appearance at the Bowl on a program which also features Stravinsky’s Fireworks and the excellent Augustin Hadelich in Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto.  Rafael Frühbeck de Burgos conducts.

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Youth is served: Krzysztof Urbański and Denis Matsuev make their LA Phil debuts

September 10, 2012 16 Comments

The Hollywood Bowl is often a place for conductors and soloists to make their Los Angeles Philharmonic debuts.  It’s a bit of trial by fire — if you can make a strong impression under the duress of limited rehearsal time and less-than-ideal performing conditions, then you might get invited for a gig downtown for the “regular” season.

Conductors seem to have the higher risk/reward profile in this environment.  Gustavo Dudamel and Simon Rattle are just two conductors who had noteworthy starts to their relationship with the LA Phil at Cahuenga Pass.  The less heralded Juraj Valčuha acquitted himself well enough in a one-night Hollywood Bowl stint in 2009 to get invited back to work with the orchestra and Yefim Bronfman in 2011.  In contrast, Kirill Karabits led two concerts during the same 2009 summer season and hasn’t been seen or heard with the local band since then.

Into the breach this past Tuesday stepped conductor Krzysztof Urbański and pianist Denis Matsuev.  They each left strong impressions in their own very different ways, both having mixed results.

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Shamelessly enjoying “Carmina Burana” at the Hollywood Bowl

September 6, 2012 Leave a comment

Classical music, like life in general, abounds in so-called guilty pleasures.  You know, the kind of stuff that you may not admit to friends that you like, but in the privacy of your own iPod earbuds, you relish with abandon.  Warsaw Concerto is one for me.  Carmina Burana is another one.  Not a whole lot of people know Warsaw Concerto, but everyone knows Carmina Burana, whether they actually realize that they know it or not.  It is this relative ubiquity that makes “serious” musical fans scoff Scoff SCOFF when Orff’s cantata shows up on programs.

“Spend your time listening to something deeper, more profound.  Like the Mahler Eighth Symphony,” an uber-intellectual friend once told me.

As it turns out, I like to think of Carmina Burana as the Mahler Eighth’s evil twin:  both split their libretto between Latin and Deutsche, both start with a booming chord in the orchestra followed by a grand entrance by the chorus, and both benefit from being done big.  Of course, where the Mahler Eighth is all radiance and redemption, Carmina Burana is decadence and debauchery.  Mahler has the Virgin Mary, Orff has the drunken “Abbot of Cockaigne.”

There is a time and place for both.

Last Thursday was the time, and the stage beneath the oversized white arches of the Hollywood Bowl was the place for the churning, chugging sounds of Orff’s paen to the whims of fortune and the joys of gluttony, drink, and lust.  The performance benefitted from some standout soloists, smooth and energetic ensemble work by the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the Los Angeles Master Chorale, and Los Angeles Children’s Chorus, all managed by the capable hands of Rafael Frühbeck de Burgos.

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Tonight’s Hollywood Bowl wines

August 30, 2012 Leave a comment

image

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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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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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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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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Le Hollywood Bowl avec un accent français: Denève, Thibaudet, and the LA Phil revel in a Franco-American program

July 30, 2012 Leave a comment

When it comes to standard musical fare at the Hollywood Bowl, it’s tough to come up with two composers more iconic than George Gershwin and Leonard Bernstein.  Besides having their music performed pretty much every summer in the Cahuenga Pass, the two Americans have other close ties to the Bowl:

  • The 1937  memorial concert commemorating Gershwin’s too short life was famously broadcast from the Hollywood Bowl, and featured the Los Angeles Philharmonic with a whole host of performers, likely and unlikely, who came to honor the man who first merged jazz and classical music.  (BTW:  the recording of the concert is a must-have, and includes all sorts of good stuff, including a quirky transcription of the Piano Prelude No. 2 conducted by Otto Klemperer, the LA Phil’s music director at the time.)
  • Bernstein spent a few summers conducting at the Bowl, most notably as one of the founders and artistic directors of the now-defunct Los Angeles Philharmonic Institute.

So seeing their music on last Thursday’s program, along with works from Gershwin’s French contemporary, Maurice Ravel, seemed de rigueur — at least at first.  Leave it to conductor Stéphane Denève to put a slightly different spin on the night:  the theme would be Americans influenced by the French, and French influenced by Americans.  Just for good measure, he brought along French pianist and Los Angeles resident, Jean-Yves Thibaudet.

The Marquis de Lafayette, Josephine Baker,  Frédéric Bartholdi, and Jerry Lewis would have undoubtably approved of the sentiment.  I certainly approved of the outcome.

Mr. Denève proved to be charming, both in his remarks from the stage and in his musical interpretations.  The LA Phil sounded quite nice, with many notable solos being contributed by players within their ranks.  Mr. Thibaudet knocked the stuffing out of a concerto that was right in his wheel house.  Even the Bowl’s temperamental A/V system mostly behaved.  There was much to enjoy, and very little to fuss about.

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This week’s concerts (cross country edition)

July 24, 2012 Leave a comment

This week at the Hollywood Bowl, conductor Stéphane Denève returns to Southern California to lead the Los Angeles Philharmonic in two different programs.

  • Tuesday’s concert features two works not often heard at the Bowl (or anywhere else for that matter):  Stokowski’s “Symphonic Synthesis” of Mussorgsky’s music from Boris Godunov and the lone violin concerto of Julius Conus.  Martin Chalifour, the LA Phil’s Principal Concertmaster, will be the soloist; he has made it a habit to do rarely performed concertos (much like one of his predecessors, David Frisina), and this is another fine example of that.  Rachmaninoff’s Symphonic Dances ends the evening on a more familiar note.
  • Thursday’s concert is a compelling program loaded with much more typical Bowl fare, including  Bernstein’s Candide Overture and On the Town, Gershwin’s An American in Paris, and two works by Maurice Ravel:  the Piano Concerto in G with Jean-Yves Thibaudet as soloist and the Daphnis and Chloe Suite No. 2.

Mr. Denève had been a regular visitor to Los Angeles for a few years, but didn’t appear this last season at Walt Disney Concert Hall, nor is he scheduled to appear this coming 2012/2013 season.  If you want to catch this increasingly prominent conductor, you’ll have to do it this week.

While both concerts look quite interesting, I’ll only be at Thursday night’s performance — that’s because I currently happen to be in Chicago where, asides from trying to dodge lightning storms and other random stuff, I’m planning on being at Ravinia tonight to catch the Tokyo String Quartet’s final Chicago appearance before retiring.  The program includes:  “The Rider” quartet of Haydn; the original string quartet version of  Webern’s Five Movements, Op. 5, along with his Langsamer Satz (“Slow Movement”); and finally, the third “Razumovsky” Quartet of Beethoven.  Let’s hope the weather cooperates.

—————

Photo credits:

  • Ravinia, Tyler Gate:   courtesy of the Ravinia Festival
  • Hollywood Bowl:  courtesy of Los Angeles Philharmonic Association

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Of wine and white jackets, composing women and killer whales: the start of the 2012 Hollywood Bowl season

July 17, 2012 6 Comments

Composers Anna Clyne, Anne LeBaron, and Cindy McTee

It was time for musicians to break out their summer whites and for the audiences to try to not roll empty bottles of wine down concrete steps.  That’s right:  I’m talking about summer at the Hollywood Bowl.

After a few concerts of playing back-up band to Barry Manilow, the Los Angeles Philharmonic opened the classical music portion of the 2012 summer season last Tuesday in an unlikely fashion:  playing three works written by living composers — living female composers, no less. If you throw in two concerts of playing the world premiere of George Fenton’s Frozen Planet in Concert, this was a non-trivial amount of new music that the orchestra had to digest.

Granted, it wasn’t as a big a challenge as, say, playing Don Giovanni and The Gospel According to the Other Mary in short succession, but it’s not like the musicians could just put it on autopilot even if they wanted to. Considering the usual penchant for warhorses at the Cahuenga Pass combined with the limited rehearsal time in the summer, this was rather noteworthy.  And if you added in the single performance of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, a work that can hardly be thrown together nonchalantly, it all made for a relatively ambitious and auspicious start to the Bowl season.

When everything was said and done, it all worked quite nicely, even in an environment that can be filled with  attention-deficit concertgoers, many of whom were generally unfamiliar with any contemporary classical music and only there for the Beethoven. Credit conductor Leonard Slatkin for putting together a program that gelled and for inspiring compelling performances from the orchestra.  He may not always be the easiest conductor to follow (he tends to conduct waaaay ahead of the beat), but there is clearly enough chemistry between him and the LA Phil that they can give him what he wants with equal parts precision and finesse.

It was a satisfying evening, easy to enjoy and full of musical rewards.

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Quick thoughts on the 2012 Hollywood Bowl Season

January 25, 2012 2 Comments

It’s that fun time of year, a time full of hopes, dreams, and possibilities.   Yes, I’m talking about 2012/2013 Season Announcement, um, season. Lisa Hirsch has been tracking rumors and reality for a few weeks on her blog, Iron Tongue of Midnight; up until now, it’s been limited to opera companies.

The Los Angeles Philharmonic Association became the first major non-opera entity to make an announcement — not the LA Phil’s 2012/2013 Winter Season (to be announced Feb 7th), but rather the 2012 Hollywood Bowl Summer Season.  Their press release can be found HERE; the chronological listing of events is HERE.  Bob Thomas gives his $.02 on his blog, Class Act.

My top of mind reactions:

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Helicopters and the Hollywood Bowl: falling on deaf ears

November 11, 2011 Leave a comment

If you think that the number of helicopters visiting the Hollywood Bowl mid-concert has been increasing, you’re not the only one.  In today’s Los Angeles Times,  Deborah Borda (Los Angeles Philharmonic President) says:   “It’s always been a problem, but now it’s every concert. Not almost every concert, but every concert, multiple times. And it didn’t use to be.”  Appearently, as many as four or five helicopters fly overhead every night during a performance.

The article mentions that as part of an effort to quell  the noise, Rep. Howard Berman (D-Van Nuys) introduced a bill into Congress calling for a reduction in helicopter noise pollution.  The Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors passed a motion supporting the bill.  This is all on top of annual meetings the LA Phil has with the Professional Helicopter Pilots Association (PHPA) during a rehearsal at the Bowl, complete with a helicopter fly-over to show how loud and distracting things get.

Best of luck for all of these combined efforts.  Judging by a recent article in The New York Times about helicopters in So Cal, they’re going to need it.  Badly.  An excerpt:

Ask the Federal Aviation Administration, city officials, the police department, beleaguered residents or the tourist pilots who are more than willing to fly low for the promise of a tip. This is, for all intents and purposes, an unregulated industry, an increasingly frustrating realization for Los Angeles as it experiences what many people say is the most intense period of helicopter use in memory. One neighborhood leader said he was afraid of complaining too loudly for fear that the helicopter operators would retaliate — legally — by parking over his house.

“See how we are flapping right now?” said Esteban Jimenez, a pilot for Hollywood Helicopter Tours, as his four-passenger Robinson R44 Raven II circled at an unnerving 90-degree angle, barely 100 feet over houses below. “That is upsetting everybody. We are at a safe enough distance. But it makes people really upset. I get calls all the time.”

Mr. Jimenez kept his helicopter, its blades thumping the air, eye-level with the Hollywood sign.

“People don’t understand what’s really going on,” he said. “They really can’t do anything. I could buzz you as long as I keep my distance. We are legal. They don’t control the air space. . . .

. . . On July 19 evening, a helicopter clacked loudly over the Hollywood Bowl at the very moment Gustavo Dudamel was leading the Los Angeles Philharmonic through the adagio in the overture to Mozart’s “Abduction From the Seraglio.” The day before, Mr. Jimenez had pointed to the Hollywood Bowl operators as some of the biggest complainers as he flew his helicopter over the famous amphitheater.

“These people here are always crying,” he said. “They are always calling the towers telling them to get us away. These people are the worst. It’s sad, but they can’t do anything. All they can do is complain.” (emphasis mine)

(“Helicopters Jam the Skies Above Los Angeles,” Adam Nagourney, The New York Times, July 25, 2011)

In case you are interested:

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Rodrigo y Gabriela (et al) at the Hollywood Bowl

August 14, 2011 10 Comments

Gabriela Quintero and Rodrigo Sanchez — known together as “Rodrigo y Gabriela” — open their set at the Hollywood Bowl while conductor Miguel Harth-Bedoya looks on (photo: CK Dexter Haven)

A near-capacity crowd filled the Hollywood Bowl to the brim this past Saturday night.  Gustavo Dudamel was in the house,  along with the Los Angeles Philharmonic and some other folks.  But for once, the crowd was not really there to see The Dude.  Sure, there were a few screams of “We love you, Gustavo!” but the loudest cheers were saved for the night’s headliners:  Rodrigo y Gabriela.

I’m not going to pretend that I knew who Rodrigo y Gabriela were before Friday, let alone did I consider myself a fan.  A little bit of YouTube footage and one amazing concert later, and I am definitely now a fan and will be doing a great deal to learn more about them and their music.

Rodrigo y Gabirela (Gabriela Quintero and Rodrigo Sanchez) in a less introspective moment (photo: CK Dexter Haven)

As the story goes, Rodrigo Sanchez and Gabriela Quintero met when both were non-classically trained hard-core rockers in Mexico.  They become disenchanted with the local scene and decided to shed extraneous bandmates and instruments before ending up as an instrumental duo in, of all places, Ireland.  They survived by busking and doing small gigs until the their break led them to appearances all over Ireland and the UK.  Their eponymous 2006 release entered the Irish charts at #1, and they have not looked back since.  U.S. exposure was helped along by appearances on late night TV and a profile on MTV, among other things.  Their last appearance in Los Angeles was in 2010 when they triumphed at the Greek Theatre.

When they first stepped onto a darkened Hollywood Bowl stage on Saturday with their amplified acoustic guitars in hand, this uninitiated listener expected traditional latin-styled playing tinged with perhaps some more modern influences.  At first blush, I seemed to get what I was expecting as the pair started with “Hanuman” and “Triveni” demonstrating their usual setup:  Gabriela displays her uncanny flamenco-tinged ability to strum rhythm on the strings while simultaneously beating complex percussion on the body of the guitar, all while Rodrigo  picks lead guitar.  However, within a few minutes, it became clear that their musical sensibilities had as much in common (perhaps more) with English folk-rock stars Mumford & Sons as they did with the pop-flamenco likes of Gipsy Kings.

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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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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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