Category Archives: A Little Night Music

Tchaikovsky at Royce Hall, Schumann at Disney: After three weeks of Berlioz’s hectoring, perhaps it was time to ride the warhorses for a couple of nights. Last week they ran sleek and handsome. It’s easy enough, in my line of … Continue reading →

Photo courtesy of L.A. Philharmonic The sounds of Hector Berlioz and the shape of Walt Disney Concert Hall are a perfect match. It was fitting, therefore, that the Philharmonic’s three wondrous weeks celebrating this most certifiably mad of certifiably sane … Continue reading →

“This must be what the gods were like,” writes Craig Seligman about Così Fan Tutte in the latest issue of the excellently wise Threepenny Review – which, by happenstance, landed on my doorstep on the eve of Opera Pacific’s production … Continue reading →

In his sweat-drenched confessional called Bad Boy of Music, George Antheil allowed as how his discovery of the music of the future came to him in a dream. Acting upon his visions, he abandoned his comfortable Trenton, New Jersey, home, … Continue reading →

Photo by Joshua Paul The Death of Klinghoffer is again before us, insistent, moving, inescapable. Nobody of consequence has ever challenged the intense musical power of John Adams’ opera; within a different dramatic context, absent the outcries of Palestinian terrorists … Continue reading →

In Glendale’s Alex Theater on a Saturday night in late September, the voice of Lorraine Hunt Lieberson soared upward on a jagged trajectory laid down by Johann Sebastian Bach. “Mein Herze schwimmt im Blut,” she sang, and the heart’s blood … Continue reading →

1 Footsteps on Disney Hall’s balcony stairs: They clatter, they clomp, and musicians onstage have been known to complain out loud. Berlin Philharmonic violinists, over on stage left, could be seen mocking the noisemaking before the start of one of … Continue reading →

Little Joe’s mother is sick, but there’s no money for milk. Joe and his friend Annette go to the village square to sing for money, but that annoys Brundibár, the town minstrel. He drowns them out with a loud song. … Continue reading →

The year was 1978, and while some guys on Sunset were concocting the prototype of the paper you now hold, I was 2,500 miles away, holding down the classical-music gig at New York magazine and convinced that life held no … Continue reading →

TO ALL THAT OPULENCE on view at Disney Hall, REDCAT is the perfect counterbalance. Nobody cares about the acoustics, since most of its music is miked. Nobody cares about the look of the place, since its 200-seat space is infinitely … Continue reading →