Category Archives: A Little Night Music

IT HAPPENED AGAIN. TWO WEEKENDS AGO, while the Los Angeles Opera was showing off the buying power of million-dollar budgets in its oversize Music Center playground, a few miles to the south there was the Long Beach Opera, the little … Continue reading →

The on-again, off-again romance between the Los Angeles Opera and the other local industry — which sagged a while back as Hollywood’s Bruce Beresford turned Rigoletto into a lumpy hash — has now moved forward a couple of notches. William … Continue reading →

The story of Terezin‘s music is well known: Hitler’s Nazis maintaining this one prison camp — Theresienstadt in German, Terezin in its native Czech — as a cultural showcase, composers and other artistic spirits encouraged to create and perform for … Continue reading →

COMPOSER, PERFORMER, MEDIA HOST, writer and musicological avatar to the immortal P.D.Q. Bach: The marvel of Peter Schickele is not only the variety of his parts but also how well they all fit, the one to another. Composer/performers are a … Continue reading →

. . . the faithful flee: So goes the rhyme in support of equal temperament. Music, your old prof surely had you believe, draws its strength from its harmonic progressions, and they derive their strength from the set of falsities … Continue reading →

One special image comes to mind when Toru Takemitsu’s music is at hand. It is the final moment in Akira Kurosawa‘s Ran, for which Takemitsu composed the score that is one of film music’s supreme achievements. The film is Kurosawa‘s … Continue reading →

Within a week in late April the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra played in two local venues, at Glendale‘s Alex Theater and UCLA’s Royce Hall, and three on the East Coast, Portland, Hartford and at Manhattan‘s Carnegie Hall. I heard the … Continue reading →

Photo by Christine Alicino WHERE MUSIC CAME FROM, WHERE music stands today, where music is going: lovely questions, these, that nobly sustain motor-mouth moderators of pre-concert “symposiums” and writers of program notes. They were more easily answerable in my younger … Continue reading →

THE PERPETRATORS OF DEAD MAN WALKING — the opera inflicted upon the stage of Costa Mesa’s Segerstrom Hall these past few nights — have gone to some lengths to distance themselves from Tim Robbins’ 1995 film of the same name … Continue reading →

“Schubert’s dynamics,” asserts the Isabelle Huppert character in Michael Haneke‘s gut-wrenching new film The Piano Teacher, “range from scream to whisper, not loud to soft.” Her student-victim is struggling with the slow movement of the A-major Sonata, one of the … Continue reading →