Category Archives: A Little Night Music

Lesser Is Better Berlin’s Simon Rattle Wendy Lesser is the founder and editor of The Threepenny Review, a quarterly collection of thinking and, therefore, writing that I find indispensable. I don’t know her musical credentials, but her piece in the … Continue reading →

Edward is 12, loves the piano and is beginning to take lessons at his school in Mar Vista. Sometimes he comes to my house, when his mother comes to clean, and he picks out tunes on the piano. Arnold is … Continue reading →

The Devil in the Deep Blue Pool The lovers afloat There is this problem I have, trying to describe almost any production by the Long Beach Opera. Elektra in a Malibu beach house, Boris Godunov in a corporate boardroom … … Continue reading →

Paradise Lost and Found Robert Millard Verdi’s Otello at the Music Center “We are not the sole owners of our past,” wrote Jordi Savall, music’s great and original spirit, in a note accompanying his marvelous appearance at Disney Hall last … Continue reading →

Gustav Mahler’s Sixth Symphony is the elephant in the parlor, bedecked with garlands of roses. Its every dimension is wrong. From within the 85 minutes of Christoph Eschenbach’s performance with the Philharmonic last weekend, any composition student with an X-Acto … Continue reading →

Dutch Treat I envy anyone his first look at Amsterdam. You step out of Central Station and there is the perfect urban landscape: old buildings in grand array, trolleys in front, everything numbered so that you know exactly where to … Continue reading →

Full ServiceThe crowd observed a moment of silence as Lorin Maazel brought his performing forces to a reverent ending in a darkened Disney Hall last week, then burst forth in high-decibel approval. As with Messiaen’s pictorial panorama the week before, … Continue reading →

In 1973, the story goes, the wonderful, if eccentric, New York patron Alice B. Tully asked Olivier Messiaen to compose a piece for the American Bicentennial. Messiaen hesitated at first; the notion of celebrating American skyscrapers or the like did … Continue reading →

It was good to hear Earl Kim’s music again; I knew him at Berkeley in the late ’40s, when I had the job of working the Music Department’s only tape recorder and he was already composing deep, dark, moving songs, … Continue reading →

The Cat House Afire Edgard Varèse arrived in New York in 1915, age 32. His journey from his native Burgundy had taken in most of Europe’s cultural capitals, where his scores had been played, admired, and many lost in a … Continue reading →