181 stories by "Mark Swed"
At the Bregenz Festival, the big attraction is opera spectacularly produced directly on Lake Constance, but there is more to surprise an Angeleno.
"Swan Lake" in Costa Mesa, an Indian-Bach mix with Vijay Gupta in Sierra Madre and ballet on a makeshift Television City stage are all parts of June's dance explosion in and around L.A.
Salonen ends his troubled relationship with the San Francisco Symphony with Mahler's ferocious Second Symphony, leaving the audience roaring and musicians pounding their feet in praise.
New York welcomes Gustavo Dudamel as its future conductor with an honorary doctorate from Juilliard and with cheers after Philip Glass' Symphony No. 11.
Jane Fonda lends her dazzling narration to Rufus Wainwright's enveloping 'Dream Requiem,' which provides some spiritual enhancement to L.A. Opera's flashy 'Ainadamar,' centered on the execut…
Battling brain cancer, Michael Tilson Thomas makes his last stage appearance with a San Francisco Symphony concert that reminded us of a lifetime of greatness.
Visit the embattled Kennedy Center post-Trump purge, and the place can feel abandoned. Leave it to dance provocateur Mark Morris to show a way forward for the national arts center.
L.A. Opera sets 'Così fan Tutte,' Mozart's sophisticated study of love and constancy, in a swanky American country club.
Los Angeles is in the midst of a de facto chamber opera festival with productions across the region tackling the social and political issues of the moment.
Celebrating its 60th anniversary, Twyla Tharp Dance premieres 'Aguas da Amazonia' with Philip Glass' score in Santa Barbara, Costa Mesa, Palm Desert and Northridge before it heads for the Ke…
Long Beach Opera embarks on a risky, unprecedented season centered on pioneering composer Pauline Oliveros. "We're just going for it."
Martha Graham Dance Company reminds us that our city continually reinvents itself, with or without disasters like the Palisades and Eaton fires.
Gustavo Dudamel returns to the L.A. Phil to lead a new production of Beethoven's "Fidelio" with Deaf West Theatre.
The first notes heard again in the long-quieted Disney Hall were a slow, soft upward harp arpeggio, each pitch a haunting, crystalline moment.
Tremendous singing propels L.A. Opera's return to the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion in Stravinsky's tough, timely "Oedipus Rex."
Philip Glass' new 'Circus Days and Nights' is the latest example of the composer's operas proving to be a prime source of experimentation during the pandemic.
We listen in on the first acoustical test of the new Beckmen YOLA Center in Inglewood, which promises to be revolutionary.
With a wrenching tribute to "all the beautiful souls" killed by COVID-19, the L.A. Phil performs a stirring free concert for frontline workers.
Pacific Opera Project's production of Leonard Bernstein's "Trouble in Tahiti" is the city's first major live opera show that's not a drive-in event.
The L.A. Phil's artistic leader has been appointed music director in Paris, where he will join one of the most celebrated opera companies in the world.
Bernstein had friendly and fraught relationships with U.S. presidents. But his White House musical flopped. Missed was its exploration of race and slavery that's more timely than ever.
The overdue creation of a Cabinet-level Secretary of Culture would give the country a lift we all crave. Here's who I think would rise to the challenge.
Writing in his cell as he awaits the gallows, the narrator of Edgar Allan Poe's "The Black Cat" curiously figures that what was to him "little but Horror" will to many appear "a mere series …
David Lang's "the loser," given its West Coast premiere Friday night by Los Angeles Opera at the Theatre at Ace Hotel, is sort of, but not really, about Glenn Gould. Gould's the winner in as…
Plácido Domingo added role No. 151 to his legacy Saturday night. Was this celebrated tenor-baritone-conductor-impresario and all-around operaholic counting all 65 years he has been on the…
