Category Archives: A Little Night Music

Morimur is up there on the charts, the latest implausible release from ECM, one of the few remaining labels to turn implausibility into solid musical virtue — and perhaps into a few deutschemarks along the way. The title is something … Continue reading →

The Philharmonic‘s presentation around Schoenberg’s Five Pieces for Orchestra was a distinguished event worthy of the music — as the treatment accorded the Piano Concerto three weeks before had not been. Bold to the point of insolence, gorgeously color-splashed, this … Continue reading →

They’re still talking about it in Stuttgart — about the night, just over a year ago, when a capacity audience in that normally strait-laced metropolis went berserk for nearly half an hour at the world premiere of a 90-minute choral … Continue reading →

It will be interesting to see whether the efforts of our major cultural managements will succeed in turning Arnold Schoenberg into a media hero, as they did Igor Stravinsky last season. Schoenberg himself never made it, and the account of … Continue reading →

It didn‘t take too much gift of prophecy to recognize the fates that brought Esa-Pekka Salonen and the Los Angeles Philharmonic to a merger of their destinies. People still talk about his debut here (November 29, 1984) — a fair-haired … Continue reading →

MaryAnn Bonino‘s Chamber Music in Historic Sites brings in superb small entertainments from around the world — chamber music, early music, solo recitals — and plunks them down in enhancing architectural settings — churches, mansions, classic lobbies. You hear a … Continue reading →

Pierre Boulez brought his Répons here for its first — and, so far, last — hearing in the spring of 1986. It took another 14 years for a recording of the work to appear, in Deutsche Grammophon’s 20/21 Series, which, … Continue reading →

CLASSICAL MUSIC IS DEAD ONCE AGAIN, AND ITS CORPSE HAS never been livelier. The villains have been variously identified, and the saviors as well. Audiences dwindle. One faction says the defection has to do with too much worn-out, familiar repertory. … Continue reading →

Large events demand large gestures. At the Hollywood Bowl, where Wynton Marsalis’ “joyous, affirmative” All Rise was already on the schedule, some oratory by Marsalis and Esa-Pekka Salonen refocused the work as a response to the horrible tragedies of two … Continue reading →

Photo by Ken Howard Nobody said it would be easy. Barely into its season of reincarnation, the L.A. Opera has already found its path strewn with boulders. The New York tragedy contributed; the Lohengrin opening, on the Wednesday after the … Continue reading →