As the sun was going down Thursday night, the steel of Walt Disney Concert Hall reflected the colors of twilight and an oncoming chill in the air added a sense of expectancy. A baby grand pi…
How would have Yuval Sharon's bewildering new production of Mozart's "The Magic Flute" gone over in Los Angeles? That was the first thing that crossed my mind as I walked out of the opera ho…
Merce Cunningham died 10 years ago at 90. He was easily the greatest choreographer of the second half of the 20th century and a teeny bit into the 21st. He left behind an enormous body of wo…
It's going to be a Stravinsky spring, right? The Los Angeles Philharmonic is about to kick off a two-week Stravinsky festival, Esa-Pekka Salonen celebrating Stravinsky's association with the…
As political pawns in a long-running congressional chess game, Dreamers, those children of immigrants with aspirations for a promising life in the United States, make dispassion very difficu…
Well, that was a surprise! "(M)iyamoto Is Black Enough" " the first in what will be an ongoing collaboration between the Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts in Beverly Hills and …
For whatever reason " a worry about looming dystopia, perhaps " Germany is having its Babylonian moment. Major new opera productions here in Hamburg and in Berlin last weekend proved media s…
Hollywood has its under the radar, whatever-the-cat-drags-in Fringe Festival. Los Angeles has its fill of venturesome large institutions " notably the Los Angeles Philharmonic, Roy and Edna …
From its earliest days, the Hollywood Bowl has thought of itself as a Hollywood-size opera house. And why not? Opera likes all things outsize. Full summer opera seasons in the amphitheater o…
"Hamilton" didn't come out of nowhere. For the past century, American music theater has been struggling with how exactly to represent our national character on stage and who we are. It's a l…
A year from now we will celebrate the 80th anniversary of one of the most important concerts in American history. Richard Powers set the scene in his epic novel, "The Time of Our Singing," b…
Taylor Mac's "A 24-Decade History of Popular Music" is a necessary and great American epic for our time. It is, on the surface, like nothing else, a queering of American history with the hel…
If it's Tuesday, this must be Huayin, a scenic village in Northern China on a tributary of the Yellow River at the foot of Hua Mountain. OK, it was a Thursday. And it was Santa Barbara. But …
Gluck's "Orpheus and Eurydice" may be based on the Greek myth of a singer capable of beguiling even hell's furies, but the opera has long been catnip to choreographers. One of the defining e…
How do cultures on opposite sides of the planet interpret the Earth and its mythology? A notebook comparing the mariachi opera "To Cross the Face of the Moon" and the elaborate gamelan/dance…
In his Los Angeles Opera program note for Leonard Bernstein's "Candide," which opened at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion on Saturday night, music director James Conlon points out that the orig…
In the annals of Leonard Bernstein, it is common to dismiss the West Coast. The composer was a native Bostonian and a New York icon who didn't have all that much to do with us. Though a medi…
New principal guest conductor Susanna Mälkki led the L.A. Phil through a program centered on a extremely difficult 1968 cello concerto by the German composer Berndt Alois Zimmermann, whose …
A mill. A brook. A body. A pretty, fickle daughter. A blithe wanderer. A hunter. Nixies. A broken heart. An atmosphere of underlying weirdness. A strophic soundtrack underscoring all that is…
On the first day of 2018, a dozen cities in Germany, from Augsburg to Wiesbaden, celebrated a new year with concerts that included music by Leonard Bernstein. No matter America's fraught rel…
Robert Mann once explained in an interview that, zealously fired up after founding the Juilliard String Quartet in 1946, he went so far as to obtain an orgone accumulator. It wasn't enough t…
Has any country ever suffered victory as Russia did at the end of the World War II in 1945? Loses were incalculably terrible, and the future was as scary as ever with Stalin still in power. …
The first composer in the Western canon whose name we know and whose voice continues to exert considerable contemporary resonance was a woman " the 12th century Benedictine abbess Hildegard …
Mendelssohn's beloved overture to "A Midsummer Night's Dream" can be used two ways, both wondrous. One is as the standalone piece that the 17-year-old composer originally intended. In this f…
When Gidon Kremer has a farsighted cause, it is wise to pay close attention. Over an uncompromising half-century career, the Latvian violinist and one of the last of the legendary artists to…