Category Archives: Herald Examiner

Sunday afternoon I sat in the handsome music room of a serene old Pasadena mansion, beguiled by the soft, silken sounds of David Tanenbaum’s guitar. Out through the picture window I watched as a beautiful small bird — some kind … Continue reading →

There is more great music in any five minutes of “The Gondoliers” than in all of “Phantom of the Opera” and “Les Miz” combined. Why, this being so, must we languish so long between magical encounters with the glory of … Continue reading →

There is nothing I know from the pen of the late Samuel Barber more beautiful than his “Knoxville: Summer of 1915.” No performance I have ever heard — including that of Eleanor Steber, for whom the music was written — … Continue reading →

Everybody knows that Giovanni Paisiello’s “Barber of Seville” of 1782 isn’t a patch, comedically or musically, on the more famous Rossini opera of 34 years later. Still, the early work has a great deal of charm, and more than a … Continue reading →

Iona Brown led her Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra into unfamiliar territory on at the Japan-America Theater on Friday night, and staked out a handsome claim. Contemporary American music has not figured on her programs until now, to any great extent. … Continue reading →

A special place of honor is ordained for the EMI recording of Richard Strauss’ “Ariadne auf Naxos,” first accomplished in 1954 and now at hand  in a two-disk CD reissue. Whatever your feelings may be about the work itself, you … Continue reading →

Steve Reich has done it again. Natter on  all you want on the subject of minimalism, its musical style on a treadmill, its major composers likewise. Yet here is Reich’s “Different Trains,” introduced last December at New Music America in … Continue reading →

Reinhold Moritsevich Gliere died as recently as 1956; his musical style suggests a much earlier date. His memory is kept alive by two works, one tiny (a dance from his satiric ballet “The Red Poppy”)  the other huge (the Symphony … Continue reading →

Did the world really need a Tenth Symphony by Ludwig van Beethoven? Apparently so, says a British musicologist named Barry Cooper, and who’s to say he’s wrong? Nothing would please me more, in fact, than to be able to greet … Continue reading →

Old Sourpuss has finally made it. His “one indivisible, supreme creation of the mind of man” — that being Richard Wagner’s own modest appraisal of his “Ring of the Nibelung” — has now achieved its ultimate consecration. Would the old … Continue reading →