Los Angeles

MUSIC OF THE MOMENT “There is a season for everything: a time for losing, a time for keeping: a time for keeping silent, a time for speaking. A time for loving, a time for hating; a time for war, a time for peace” (Eccl. 3:1ff.) There is also a time for singing about time, and…

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…

I CAN’T CAVE ENOUGH In 1917, Kentucky cave explorer Floyd Collins discovered Crystal Cave. Located in the same area as Mammoth Cave’”the longest cave system known in the world’”the site operated as a tourist attraction by his family. In 1925, while searching for a new entrance to the hundreds of miles of interconnected caves, Collins…

REVEL IN RAVEL AND BASK IN BEETHOVEN I’m so excited about LA Phil’s upcoming program this weekend (March 28 – 30) that I don’t know where to start. Well, actually I do. Ravel’s Daphnis et Chloé. In 1909, impresario Serge Diaghilev commissioned Ravel to write a score for a new ballet which would be based…

A FISHY MONSTROSITY What is it about the story of Jonah that has so captured the world’s imagination? Is it the stupidity of a man trying to run away from God, as if that were even possible? Is it the preposterous idea of a man living for three days inside a whale? Or perhaps it…

PASADENA SYMPHONY’S SPRING CONCERT BLOOMS THIS WEEK Come for the most famous four notes in classical music history, stay for the Pasadena Symphony and POPS (the Symphony has incorporated the Pasadena POPS into its Association under this new name). This estimable organization has been doing splendid work this year, especially with Beethoven’s Ninth last February,…

PROMETHEUS BOUND In a production as stately and reverent as its subject was startling and rebellious, Philip Hayes Dean has directed his own one-man-with-musical-accompanist play to a standstill.   I don’t know how you’d do this if you wanted to: to reduce a renaissance man like Paul Robeson to the dusty subject of a mediocre history…

NOT EVEN GOD Hugh Whitemore’s 2001 play God Only Knows breaks some of the most basic rules of dramaturgy: a gun is introduced which does not go off; an argument is begun which is not finished; a story is alluded to but not played out.   A half-hour in, a character says “Let’s not have a…

TENOR EVENTUALLY SINGS BUT NEEDS MORE NOTES Farce is difficult. You need to get your audience to suspend disbelief as mischief, mayhem and lots of slamming doors abound, and a series of unlikely and improbable events unfold. Get it right and the ridiculous becomes the hysterical. Get it wrong and it lays there like a…

DEMOLITION DERBY Sometimes at the end of a play such as The Lieutenant of Inishmore or Killer Joe, I gaze upon the total destruction of the set and think, “I’m glad I don’t have to clean that mess up.” Such was the case with Derby Day, now physically and emotionally wrecking the stage at the…

IT’S SAFE TO PUT YOURSELF IN HARMONY‘S WAY Barry Manilow and Bruce Sussman’s high-energy, surprisingly melancholy new musical, Harmony, depicts the real-life story of the all-male singing ensemble, the Comedian Harmonists. Through buttery, close harmonies, an excellent cast, and fluid staging, this unusually dichotomous musical follows the Interwar boy band through their formation in the…

LAURELS FOR LAURIDSEN With dozens of worthy events to choose from this Sunday, March 16, the choice to see Los Angeles Master Chorale’s all-Lauridsen program at Disney Hall was a no-brainer. Yet a fascinating thing happened recently; a few friends and family members asked, “Who is Lauridsen?” I tell them he is one of the…