Music

A QUEST FOR JUSTICE IN HANDEL’S GIUSTINO Opera fans, take note! The ever-adventurous Long Beach Opera launches its 2022 spring and summer season with a genuine rarity: a new version of Handel’s Giustino, performed at the Museum of Latin American Art (MOLAAA) in Long Beach (May 21, 22, 28, 2022 at 7:30pm) in what appears…

EERIE WITCHES AND VOICES OF COURAGE For two performances only this weekend, May 14-15, 2022, The Verdi Chorus is presenting its Spring 2022 Concert at Santa Monica’s First Presbyterian Church. This thoroughly professional outfit always sounds amazing. It’s such a treat to hear up-close opera choruses, as the voices can sometimes be lost when an…

THE WIZARD OF NAS While the Los Angeles Philharmonic and its chief conductor, Gustavo Dudamel, are no strangers to fronting pop and hip hop stars at the Hollywood Bowl, these genre-melding collaborations are not a typical programming staple in the Phil’s school-year digs on Grand Avenue in Downtown L.A. But on the first night of…

DO NOT ABANDON HOPE; THIS GENERATION’S STRAVINSKY HAS ARRIVED I have great tidings, for English composer Thomas Adès has bestowed on us what is easily one of the greatest works of the twenty-first century. Under the aegis of its Gen X festival, LA Phil premiered his huge symphonic fantasia, Dante, last weekend at Disney Hall,…

WILD UP’S NEW HOME-BASED SERIES, LOS ANGELES NEW MUSIC, PLAYS MAY 15 – JULY 10, 2022 “For a decade, we’ve been exporting LA culture. Now, we’re beginning a home series here in LA.” – Christopher Rountree, Artistic Director of Wild Up  Wild Up, LA’s ruling new music collective,  greets the season of renewal with  Los Angeles New…

FAIR FIDELIO Fidelio is the sole opera written by Ludwig Van Beethoven. Inspired by an apocryphal story from the French revolution, it concerns Leonore, whose husband Florestan has been secretly imprisoned by an evil politician named Don Pizzarro. In order to rescue him, Leonore dresses up in male garb and gets a job in the…

TYMPANIST JOSEPH PEREIRA SURE KNOWS HIS KRAFT Sometimes concerts in the LA Philharmonic’s Green Umbrella new music series are programmed around a singular thematic element. Sometimes they offer a range of works representing a particular school or mode of composition. Some showcase distinctive performance styles. If last Tuesday night’s long Green Umbrella program, curated by…

AN EXPERIENCE NOT TO BE MISSED On a website which attempts to list every Anton Bruckner orchestral recording offered to the public (www.abruckner.com), the discography collector and annotator John F. Berky states that the Austrian composer “expanded the concept of the symphonic form in ways that have never been witnessed before or since. When listening…

Randall Goosby with the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra, Roderick Cox conducting Now, why isn’t Samuel Barber’s Violin Concerto played more often? It’s ridiculously beautiful in the first two movements, and fiery in the last. In fact, this may be the best solo work with orchestra of the three that Barber wrote. And Hilary Hahn performing…

Concerts in the L.A. Philharmonic’s Green Umbrella new music series are always an adventure. Typically curated by the (often young) contemporary musicians and composers whose work is featured in the performances, these programs offer an eclectic array of unpredictable encounters with the avant-garde art music of our moment. Some of them are highly engaging; others…