Category Archives: A Little Night Music

Photo by David Thompson It will soon be 400 years since the world’s first operatic masterpiece seduced its first spellbound audience, in an elegant room at the Gonzaga Palace in Mantua, where model centaurs pawed the ground and drew fountains … Continue reading →

In one of those imponderable ironies by which the music industry slowly but surely succeeds in cannibalizing its own, the Deutsche Grammophon recording of Esa-Pekka Salonen’s Wing on Wing will be made not by Salonen’s Los Angeles Philharmonic (for which … Continue reading →

The management has changed, but not the balls. The Long Beach Opera was back in business with the usual offering of repertory no other company would dream of taking on, and with the usual daredevil production values that endear this … Continue reading →

The interesting thing about turning 80 is how much of the old stuff still clings. In the last few years, I’ve resumed contact with my two best friends from Boston Latin, the two most responsible for my involvement in classical … Continue reading →

Henry Brant is on my conscience. Nimble, animated, instantly lovable in his sunglasses and engineer’s cap, this 91-year-old sprite talks about his music, and talks and talks. He is, let’s face it, cute, and the crowd eats him up; it … Continue reading →

There is no ballet in Verdi’s Il Trovatore as composed in 1853; one was added, to accord with the demands of Parisian taste, for Le Trouvère in 1857, its music an anonymous hodgepodge of garish re-orchestrations of parts of the … Continue reading →

Spain’s music is the art of the soloist, and Jordi Savall’s old instruments sing it well. He brought some of this music to the Getty Center two weekends ago with his ensemble, Hespérion “I, and it was a fine occasion. … Continue reading →

The Goldbergs on a 9-foot concert grand at Disney; Hildegard von Bingen among the Presbyterians in Pasadena: What price authenticity now? Actually, the term is a land mine, and has always been. I have lived through three kinds of Goldberg … Continue reading →

Photo by Betty Freeman “Cherish the hybrids,” Lou Harrison used to say, and say again, as a kind of mantra. “They’re all we’ve got.” Two big works, 33 years apart in the infinite variety of his legacy, were on hand … Continue reading →

In three concerts over eight days, the excellent Penderecki String Quartet – visitors from Canada despite their chosen namesake – re-created the life span of one of the past century’s giants: Béla Bartók, through his six quartets. Though he never … Continue reading →