Daniel SG Wood

A NOCTURNE BY ANY OTHER NAME To those of you who don’t know (or think that everything hip is only happening now), Piano Spheres has for nearly twenty years been one of the country’s few serious and consistent concert series focusing on new piano repertoire. Its Satellite Series offers recitals by four emerging L.A. pianists,…

THINKING OUTSIDE THE BACHS It is more than satisfying to see what has become a fetish of the solo piano community performed with historical acuity and depth by (lo!) a conductor. Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra (LACO) music director Jeffrey Kahane played Bach’s Goldberg Variations at Colburn’s Zipper Hall in the final installment of LACO’s stellar…

BACH TO BASICS If anything, Iranian pianist Ramin Bahrami’s American debut at the Wallis in Beverly Hills last Wednesday was just more evidence for soloists needing a director. The discussion need not be about his mastery of Bach (which he has in spades) or whether his playing is innovative or not (my vote is “not”…

KISSIN BLISS If you haven’t heard, Evgeny Kissin is positively the best pianist alive. In the sense of the grand pianistic tradition that some say died with likes of Arrau, Cliburn, and Rubinstein, Kissin is a living legend who, basically since infancy, has been caretaker to the “Golden Age” of the piano. Though his hair…

POP MISSES AN OP Pacific Opera Project’s production of Carmen is difficult to review, only because the benchmark is unclear. Bizet’s ever-popular four-act 1875 opera about a gypsy temptress and the soldier she seduces is being presented under the guise of a “POP-Up” Production. With about a week of rehearsals and minimal production costs, the…

MICRO MACRO FELDMAN Last Wednesday at the Neighborhood Church in Pasadena, LA-based freelance pianist Richard Valitutto played four solo piano works, “two short and two long,” by American composer Morton Feldman. For those uninitiated to Feldman, his work is hard to describe. A convenient description would be “soundscape music,” as in plodding, thoughtful music. It…

A GLORIOUS EVENT NEITHER MESSY NOR CAGEY Jacaranda’s understated but superb concert series continued last Saturday with a marathon  solo piano event featuring John Cage’s  Sonatas and Interludes  for prepared piano (1946-48) and Olivier Messiaen’s  Vingt Regards sur l’Enfant Jésus  (1944), played by Adam Tendler  and Christopher Taylor  respectively. The Messiaen is objectively longer and arguably more difficult than the Cage, but…

HALLS OFFERS SOOTHING RELIEF A concert of good old-fashioned Classical music can be such a joy. If presented with respect, classical music’s stigma can easily disappear. In a concert of chestnut favorites (Mozart, Haydn, and Beethoven), the L.A. Chamber Orchestra accomplished this precisely at UCLA last Sunday. The ballet music from Mozart’s Idomeneo combined with…

A WHITE BREAD SANDWICH Beverly Hills’ newest and best-looking addition, the Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts,  debuted its classical music series with the St. Lawrence String Quartet, a very promising choice given the quartet’s previous accolades: Ensemble in Residence at Stanford, winners of the Banff International String Quartet competition, and even a good line…