181 stories by "Mark Swed"
He was a very small figure seated on a wide expanse, a large stage empty but for a cellist on a chair. The Hollywood Bowl shell was lighted midnight blue. The amphitheater was probably kept …
America lacks a truly great international music and theater festival. It's time we create one like the Austrian event where top talents push their art forward.
"Sondheim on Sondheim" is, no surprise, all about Stephen Sondheim. But a new "symphonic version" given its premiere by the Los Angeles Philharmonic on Sunday night at the Hollywood Bowl pro…
When Robert Xavier RodrÃguez's "Frida" had its premiere in 1991 at the American Music Theater Festival in Philadelphia, Frida Kahlo was certainly well known, but not the art-world rock st…
Now we know. It has been 45 years since Lou Harrison's "Young Caesar," an overtly gay opera for puppets with penises, had its hapless premiere in Pasadena, to the outrage of some of its spon…
Peter Brook's "Battlefield," which opened at the Wallis on Wednesday for a brief run through Sunday, is itself the ultimate brief run. It is the last word in concentrated compression by thea…
The music of "La La Land" is not really the music of La La Land. It may be only in the obvious but narrow sense that this was music written for a film made here and celebrating freeway cultu…
"The Perfect American" is the operatic portrait of an idealist American artist as a less-than-perfect old man, which is to say a blend of sunshine, supremacy and insecurity. In Philip Glass'…
The arts and entertainment communities " anticipating government cutbacks, harmed by a presidential travel ban, alarmed by an atmosphere of divisiveness and invigorated by mass protests " ha…
It was nasty in Long Beach on Sunday. Record rainfall turned parts of the 710 into an underwater expedition for many on their way to that afternoon's Long Beach Opera season-opening performa…
You could make a Broadway show about the making of the musical "On the Town." It's got everything. Then again, no one would believe it. In 1944, a 26-year-old composer and a couple of theate…
Calixto Bieito is Catalan for Eurotrash. Not really. But Bieito is the provocative opera director who first comes to the mind of many worried about an art form sinking into Tarantino-esq…
A prodigious builder of musical bridges, Jennifer Koh is a violinist with a number of ongoing projects meant to connect people, disciplines and eras. To gain insight into a musician's mind, …
With "Hopscotch" last fall, opera roamed to parts of downtown and Boyle Heights the art form had never ventured, its audiences escorted in safe environments of limousines. Sunday evening the…
All war is hell. But it is a special hell for those expected to fight without understanding why, as it is a special hell for civilians caught up in the battle, unsure who are the good guys a…
Los Angeles Opera came into being in 1996 with a stellar production of Verdi's "Otello." It was a historic occasion at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion. The next evening the company presented P…
I have a long history with the Music Center. I know the nooks and crannies of the campus' four theaters. But the one place I had not been until recently is the office of the president and CE…
Barely two years after Los Angeles Opera first mounted Barrie Kosky and Suzanne Andrade's popular silent-movie take on Mozart's "The Magic Flute," the company brought it back to the Dorothy …
The announcement that Los Angeles Philharmonic music director Gustavo Dudamel will conduct members of Youth Orchestra Los Angeles in the Super Bowl halftime show is big news for the world of…
Christmas, we like to remind ourselves, is about family. But the season tends to offer surprisingly little familial music of any real significance. The subject matter of holiday oratorio, ca…
In "Fase, Four Movements to the Music of Steve Reich," which Flemish choreographer Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker brought to Royce Hall on Tuesday night, one plus one equals two, allowing for an…
On the cover of its July issue, Opera News dubbed Jake Heggie "U.S. opera's most successful composer." It was an odd pronouncement for the in-house publication of the Metropolitan Opera Guil…
The Los Angeles Philharmonic turned to New York of the 1940s and '50s Tuesday night at the Hollywood Bowl, for which Bramwell Tovey drolly apologized to his Angeleno audience. I certainly no…
Unlike the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and the Boston Symphony, which have outdoor summer homes, the New York Philharmonic wanders when the weather gets hot. In …
On a day in which this city ecstatically celebrated the Supreme Court decision to legalize same-sex marriage, "Two Women," you might think, could mean only one thing Sunday afternoon.
