I recently was told that it was now officially Autumn. Really??!! Summer couldn’t have passed by that quickly, could it have? The temperature yesterday was still the 90’s as it has been for much of the past few weeks, and the humidity is ridiculous by Southern California standards. But it’s true, Fall is here. There were signs: Football season … Continue reading
Ah, the Hollywood Bowl season. The music under the stars. The celebrity soloists. The reliable if relatively unheralded conductors. The people watching. The pre-concert drinking and picnicking. The mid-concert helicopters. The late-concert fireworks. The post-concert crush of many thousands all trying (and largely failing) to quickly amble downhill to their bus or car at the same time. Good times, good times … Continue reading
It’s an overcast and relatively muggy Saturday morning in Ojai. Still here for the 69th edition of the town’s iconic Music Festival and we’re about 45 minutes away from today’s first concert of Day Four (or Three if you don’t count Wednesday night). Planning on detailed reviews of the entire festival experience, but wanted to … Continue reading
The musicians of the Academy of St. Martin in the Fields, the nomadic London-based chamber orchestra, are no strangers to Southern California. They show up annually on the season schedules of Los Angeles and/or Orange County arts organizations. Two of their most prominent figures — Neville Marriner, founder and Life President, and Iona Brown, former leader and … Continue reading
The London Symphony, 111-year old bastion of UK musical institutions famed for its virtuosity and flexibility, is an orchestra in transition. The peripatetic Valery Gergiev remains its official Principal Conductor through the end of this year, but the LSO created a big splash earlier this month when it announced that Simon Rattle will become its Music … Continue reading
(Publisher’s note: I’m proud to welcome Lauri D. Goldenhersh to the pages of All is Yar. By training and profession, she is a mezzo-soprano, active throughout Los Angeles and a veteran of many local ensembles, including the Los Angeles Master Chorale. She is also the publisher of Lauri’s List (laurislist.net), a website devoted to helping … Continue reading
If you’re trying to pack ’em into a concert hall for a choral concert, the usual course of action involves programming a warhorse, preferably one with a big orchestra. Carmina Burana. Beethoven’s 9th. A requiem by Verdi or Mozart. The Los Angeles Master Chorale has an alternate formula that works just as well: program something written … Continue reading
The ten-week parade of guest conductors at the Los Angeles Philharmonic has begun. First in line: James Gaffigan, the American-born Chief Conductor of the Lucerne Symphony and previous right hand man to Michael Tilson Thomas in San Francisco and Franz Welser-Möst in Cleveland. His program featured one favorite, Rachmaninoff’s Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini with Simon … Continue reading
Gustavo Dudamel’s final Walt Disney Concert Hall appearance of 2014 was all about himself, the Los Angeles Philharmonic, and what they could do together. The program featured three orchestral showpieces laden with built-in imagery for him to exploit. No daintiness was required. No soloists got in the way. A good time was had by all. Continue reading
We in Southern California are so spoiled. We’ve got amazing weather and a diverse geography with which to enjoy it; where else can you spend a couple of hours surfing in the morning and be snow skiing by lunchtime? We’ve got Vin Scully, two Stanley Cups in three years, and two solid college football teams 13 … Continue reading
Admit it: the first time you heard that Los Angeles Opera had decided to pair the Baroque charms of Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas with the expressionistic horrors of Bartok’s Bluebeard’s Castle, you didn’t exactly say to yourself, “Oh yeah, that makes total sense.” No, at best, you probably thought, “Hmmmm — that’d be interesting.” If … Continue reading
Tant y a feme scet bon taire! Femme est dehors religiouse, Dedanz poignaunt e venimose . . . (When it comes to women, men, hold your tongue! On the outside she’s religious, On the inside keen and venomous . . .) — excerpt from “The Vices of Women,” 13th Century poem, used in the … Continue reading
The works of John Williams are as ubiquitous as orchestral music can be in our 21st Century pop-dominated, globally diffuse society. It’d be an interesting experiment to see if a random sampling of people on the street would be as successful identifying such classical music standards as Mozart’s Eine kleine Nachtmusik or Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture as they would the … Continue reading
The Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra and their Music Director, Jeffrey Kahane, can almost always be counted on to present compelling programming, interesting soloists, and thoughtful interpretations. For their 2014-15 season opener, Mr. Kahane and the orchestra rolled out more of the same, care of a new work by Cameron Patrick, an infrequently-heard bit of piano concerto sass … Continue reading
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