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Music
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Music Preview: LISTEN LOCAL: NEW YORK CITY (Spotify)
ONE WAY TO ENSURE THAT THE CITY NEVER SLEEPS With the news that Broadway will remain shuttered until at least Labor Day, New Yorkers and those who visit the city to enjoy the life now have a way to get your Big Apple fix during quarantine through an exclusive content hub on Spotify: Listen Local:…
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Music Preview: TENOR BRIAN CHENEY (Weekly Shows on Stageit)
BACK ON THE CHENEY GANG I originally caught tenor Brian Cheney in Pacific Opera Project’s Tosca, and I was awestruck. Playing the brave painter Cavaradossi, Cheney really blew me away. With nary a glitch, and equally authoritative throughout his range, Cheney has that terrific tenor sound: the power, richness, and vocal color of a high…
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Film Feature: SOME AWESOME MUSIC DOCUMENTARIES (Red Bull Music Academy)
FUN, FIERCE AND FREE I gotta tell you, folks, since the lockdown from COVID-19, the amount of streaming dreck that has come before me is embarrassing. so it’s a pleasure to share with you some awesome music documentaries I’ve encountered. Many different lengths, many types of music, all fascinating. Some are great to watch on…
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Music Preview: AT HOME WITH GUSTAVO (LA Phil)
KEEPING US TOGETHER WHILE WE’RE APART For some, sitting at home can during our long shut-in can be crazy-making, but not because there isn’t enough to stream. It’s just that so much of it is blather. Los Angeles Philharmonic’s Music & Artistic Director Gustavo Dudamel believes a major ingredient missing during these trying times is…
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Music Preview: JOHN WILLIAMS: MAESTRO OF THE MOVIES (and more from Pacific Symphony)
SOME OFFERINGS FROM PACIFIC SYMPHONY Introducing the Virtual “Symphony Mixer” Symphony Mixer is a new virtual social series hosted by Symphony Principal Flutist Ben Smolen, each virtual happy hour will feature live performances, interviews with artists, musical anecdotes and stories from behind-the-scenes. “John Williams: Maestro of the Movies” Pacific Symphony has produced its first-ever virtual…
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Music Review: LADYSMITH BLACK MAMBAZO (Royce Hall UCLA)
PRESERVING THE SPIRIT For the last live performance I may see for a long, long time, I attended a near-empty Royce Hall for the recording of a concert by Ladysmith Black Mambazo. The group — best known for their astounding chorale rhythms on Paul Simon’s Graceland — had cancelled a previous date due to the…
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Opera Review: THE QUEEN OF SPADES (Lyric Chicago)
WHAT A QUEEN! Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikosky’s ballets Swan Lake and The Nutcracker are both beloved and celebrated, yet his operas are scarcely known. Indeed, we don’t get much Russian opera at all, at least in Chicago. Lyric produced Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin in 2017, while Chicago Opera Theatre produced his Iolanta in 2018 and Rachmaninoff’s Aleko…
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Music Preview: ACADEMY OF ST MARTIN IN THE FIELDS WITH JOSHUA BELL, VIOLIN (The Soraya)
I’LL BE THERE WITH BELL ON Many know that Academy of St Martin in the Fields is a touring and recording chamber orchestra founded by Sir Neville Marriner in 1958. But did you know that since 2011 the world-renowned virtuoso violinist Joshua Bell has been their Music Director? Next to Marriner, who turns 90 next…
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CD Review: COLOR OUT OF SPACE (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack by Colin Stetson)
OUT OF SPACE IS OUTTA SIGHT! OK, now you’re talking!! As modern music continues to drone down some boring atonal alley, and soundtracks lack any kind of personality, along comes the soundtrack for Color Out of Space, an adaptation of a 1927 H.P Lovecraft short story by infamous director Richard Stanley, who was sacked from…
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New York Opera Review: AGRIPPINA (The Met)
GRIPPING AGRIPPINA For a political comedy littered with slapstick, it’s fittingly ironic that this newest Met Opera take on Agrippina opens and bookends with morbidity: All the main players are perched on tombs bearing their names. This adaptation of Théâtre Royal de la Monnaie’s production occurs during the tricentennial of George Frideric Handel’s music and…
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Opera Review: ROBERTO DEVEREUX (LA Opera)
DEVERSTATING It was the middle-child opera of the season; not like the world-premiere Eurydice or the must-see Ring Cycle. Roberto Devereux is a lesser-known Donizetti confection, and erstwhile Artistic Director Plácido Domingo was set to hot-ticket this tale of Queen Elizabeth and her lover Essex that likely hasn’t been an opera question on Jeopardy! Except…
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Music Review: ESA-PEKKA SALONEN AND JULIA BULLOCK (San Francisco Symphony at Davies Hall)
ESA-PEKKA SALONEN AND JULIA BULLOCK The opening notes of Steven Stucky’s transcription of Henry Purcell’s Music for the Funeral of Queen Mary, memorably mournful, set the elegiac tone for last weekend’s San Francisco Symphony concert at Davies Hall. In ten short minutes, a quietly solemn mood was eloquently created, under the sympathetic conducting of Essa-Pekka…
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Music Review: THIBAUDET & SAINT-SAí‹NS (Fabien Gabel conducting SF Symphony at Davies Hall)
THIBAUDET & SAINT-SAí‹NS As befits a Valentine’s Day weekend, the San Francisco Symphony whipped up an evening of lush romanticism that was designed to leave its audience swooning. Under the elegant and intensely felt direction of the distinguished French conductor, Fabian Gabel, making a spectacular debut with the SFS, the first half of the evening…
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Music Review: WEILL’S VIOLIN CONCERTO WITH SALONEN (The Weimar Republic: Germany 1918-1933)
ONCE IN A WEILL The Weimar Republic’s pyrotechnic explosion of the fine arts in the 1920s produced much “new” music before being deemed “decadent”, and dashed by the rising Nazi regime in the mid-1930s. Two programs by the LA Phil and conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen at Disney Hall — one last weekend and one upcoming —…
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CAN WE USE MUSIC TO INCREASE OUR STUDYING ABILITY?
CAN MUSIC INCREASE OUR STUDYING ABILITY? Can music affect our ability to perceive and remember information? How does music affect our brain and psycho-emotional state? Well, we can divide all musical works into activating, tonic, and relaxing, soothing. The perception of music is closely connected with mental processes; it requires attention, observation, quick wit. Music,…
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Opera Review: EURYDICE (LA Opera)
MYTH INTERPRETATION MacArthur Genius Grant-winning composer Matthew Aucoin called up playwright Sarah Ruhl, the Pulitzer Prize finalist who had achieved said nomination with a play about vibrators. But it was in reference to another work of this other MacArthur Genius Grant-winner, a 2003 play called Eurydice. Did she want to make an opera about Orpheus,…
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Music Review: ALL-STRAUSS (Philippe Jordan, Gautier Capuçon, Teng Li, Los Angeles Philharmonic)
STRAUSS RELIEVER A few years ago, I saw Richard Strauss’s opera, Elektra. Let me just say that even with moments of beautiful, chilling music it veered into atonal territory, sounding like a disjointed, anticlimactic Danse Macabre, but without the dance. The vocal lines skewed towards the upper range which not only grated on the ear,…
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Opera Review: GIANNI SCHICCHI & L’ENFANT ET LES SORTILÈGES (Pacific Opera Project)
A DAZZLING DOUBLE BILL The laudable Pacific Opera Project gave us two sparkling gems of operatic joy this week: a double bill of Puccini’s Gianni Schicchi and Ravel’s L’enfant et les Sortilèges. Director Josh Shaw has updated both operas to the mid-1950s, a period which suits both pieces well — old enough for temporal distance…
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Concert Review: LEA DELARIA (The Theatre at Ace Hotel in Los Angeles)
DELIGHTFULLY DELIRIOUS DELARIA She’s butch, bold, brazen and brash. She’s riotous, raucous, ribald and rebellious. She scats with style and scurrilously scours political cads. And above all, she’s enormously entertaining. Since the mid-eighties, I’ve seen her on Broadway as well as her solo shows, some mostly singing and some mostly stand-up. Last Saturday night, January…
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Concert Preview: LILLIAS WHITE (Samueli Theater at Segerstrom Center for the Arts in Costa Mesa)
MY WHITE NIGHT I first saw Lillias White when she made her Broadway debut in Barnum in 1981; I’ve been watching her work for almost four decades since, and I promise you she never fails to blow the roof off the joint (happy are those who saw her “Effie” in the 1987 revival of Dreamgirls)….
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