Earlier this week, the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra released details of their 2026-27 season. It will be their last one with Jaime Martin as Music Director before he steps down and becomes Music Director Laureate. (Incidentally, the prior Music Director, Jeffrey Kahane, had been Music Director Laureate since he stepped down in 2018, and now …
It wasn’t supposed to be an all-Mozart program. What was originally announced as a Tchaikovsky/Sibelius program morphed a couple of times over the course of this season before landing on its final form. One of the subscribers wasn’t happy about all the repeated changes and made her opinion known during the “Casual Friday” post-concert Q&A. With … Continue reading
Tonight is the final concert of Southwest Chamber Music’s LA International New Music Festival. In honor of Memorial Day and the men and women who have worn the uniform, Southwest is offering free admission to veterans. The concert at Zipper Hall at the Colburn School begins at 8pm, with a free 7pm pre-concert discussion with … Continue reading
A four-concert event called “The Inaugural LA International New Music Festival” certainly sounds like a big deal. You can forgive Southwest Chamber Music for giving their nascent new music series such an official, highfalutin’ sounding name. With the city’s long-standing reputation as an incubator of new music and home to many prominent composers, you’d think an event … Continue reading
As if there hasn’t been enough big, crazy musical news out of New York this week, the announcement came earlier today that Glenn Dicterow, Concertmaster of the New York Philharmonic since 1980, will join the faculty of the USC Thornton School of Music in Fall of 2013 and then step down from his NY Phil … Continue reading
It was not your average Sunday afternoon at Walt Disney Disney Concert Hall. Gustavo Dudamel was still on the podium for the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s unofficial Mozart Month, but that was pretty much where “business as usual” ended. The LA Phil had decided that their first-ever complete performances of Don Giovanni would be full-blown productions, … Continue reading
I’ve been looking forward to attending the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s fully-staged Don Giovanni for a number of reasons: First of all, well, because it’s Don Giovanni and who doesn’t want to see and hear that under pretty much any circumstance? The appearance of Mariusz Kwiecien in the title role. It’s been a very good season for … Continue reading
Care of the folks at Composers Datebook at American Public Media: On today’s date in 1969, Leonard Bernstein conducted his last concert as the Music Director of the New York Philharmonic. Bernstein had been named the orchestra’s Music Director in November of 1957, and was the first American-born and trained conductor to hold the position. … Continue reading
A week or so ago, I was having a discussion with a distinguished reader of All is Yar about evaluating conductors, and I was reminded of a rather amusing conductor rating survey that was circulated a few years back among members of an organization of which I was a part. The form itself was not … Continue reading
Brian Lauritzen — radio personality extraordinaire, under-appreciated cellist, and friend of All is Yar — is known primarily for his smooth, easy-going voice on Classical KUSC (that’d be 91.5FM for all of you who still listen to terrestrial radio in Southern California), as well as podcasts for the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra, Los Angeles Opera, … Continue reading
Giacomo Puccini’s La Bohème is as popular and reliable a seat-filler as you can get in opera. In Southern California alone, it has been programmed by both the Pacific Symphony and Los Angeles Opera within weeks of each other this spring. It shows up so often that opera-going veterans see La Bohème on the calendar and grumble and moan … Continue reading
I’ll be back in a Los Angeles Opera “Tweet Seat” for tonight’s final dress rehearsal of La Bohème. If you’re already on Twitter, you can follow along my observations along with those of the rest of the Tweet Seat crew (and even perhaps some of the opera cast) with hashtag #LAOBoheme. If you’re not already … Continue reading
There was a time not too long ago that had you mentioned that a fair-haired, mop top, wunderkind conductor was standing on the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s podium, your image would have been of an Englishman rather than a Venezuelan. Simon Rattle (not yet knighted) was Principal Guest Conductor from 1981 to 1994, though as the … Continue reading
Since 2005, Martin Haselböck has been Music Director of Musica Angelica, Los Angeles’s premiere period instrument baroque ensemble. He’s been a prominent organist and conductor in his native Austria longer than that. So it was perhaps a little surprising that, until this past Thursday, he hadn’t yet appeared with the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra in any … Continue reading
I had been really looking forward to these concerts. It was supposed to feature two masterful Spaniards in a night featuring a good chunk of Spanish music. Unfortunately, that went by the wayside as Rafael Frühbeck de Burgos, conductor and friend of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, cancelled for health reasons. Pepe Romero, the distinguished guitarist (not … Continue reading
Saturday’s Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra concert in Glendale featured music about places (New England, Brooklyn, and London) as set in two older pieces and one West Coast premiere. The theme worked very well, each piece on the program setting up the next one nicely. Jeffrey Kahane led everything joyously. If you were paying attention, … Continue reading
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