Music

ARTURO SANDOVAL’S AMAZING JAZZ WEEKEND IS HERE! He moves easily across many varieties of jazz and instruments — using his trumpet to produce a fiery assortment of resonances, interchangeably stately, amusing and starry-eyed. The mighty, vibrant, effervescent Cuban trumpet player, big band leader, and composer Arturo Sandoval — a protégé of Dizzy Gillespie — is…

A WEEKEND OF FIRSTS Gustavo Dudamel returns to the podium this weekend — Thursday through Sunday, January 25-28, 2018 — to lead the LA Phil in a concert easily predicted to be a stunner. Brahms First Symphony, on which he labored for so long (over 14 years), is an openly passionate work, the last great…

THEY’LL LEAVE YOU WIRED For those who don’t know,  Monday  Evening Concerts is L.A.’s longest running new music show, dating to back to 1939. To put its legacy in to perspective, the series hosted Pierre Boulez’s American debut and a few Stravinsky premieres. Now it exists much in the same way, premiering works by emerging or established…

“MAR’EH” GETS A “M’EH” While musicians and devotees of “new” music may find  Matthias Pintscher’s mar’eh  cool, the patrons at Disney Hall were not having it at the opening night last Friday. Truly typical of way too many modern works,  mar’eh  (with an also-typical all-lowercase title spelling) is a violin concerto that’s an atmospheric stew-of-notes perfect for a melody-free…

SEVENTH HEAVEN While he existed in the Romantic Era, “Romantic” isn’t necessarily the word that springs to mind when I hear an Anton Bruckner Symphony (except perhaps his Fourth, actually titled Romantic). His giant mesmerizing symphonies, nine in total, are closer to religious experiences (a devout Catholic who never married, Bruckner dedicated his unfinished Ninth…

TIEMPO’S TANTALIZINGLY TEMPESTUOUS TEMPO Sergio Tiempo is the real deal. When a pianist can take a work as familiar as Tchaikovsky’s 1874 First Piano Concerto and turn it into an exciting Olympic event, I’m more than sold. Appearing at a packed Disney Hall this morning (in a program that runs through Sunday), the very cool…

The Los Angeles Philharmonic’s  Deck the Hall  Holiday Concerts at Disney Hall are just around the corner, and the variety this year is unmatched. I may be  enchanted by the ever-popular Holiday Sing-Along (Dec. 16); I may be enraptured by jazz great Dianne Reeves’ Christmas Time Is Here (Dec. 20); I may be excited about the beat-boxing a…

IT’S BETTER BY CANDLELIGHT I always waited until too late to procure tickets to Pasadena Symphony’s enormously popular extravaganza, Holiday Candlelight. Consistently a sell-out in the past, they started to add an extra performance a few years ago, which allowed me to finally see what all the Ho-Ho-Ho-hoopla was about. The gorgeous concert actually exceeded…

OUR MASTER CHORALE’S CHRISTMAS CHORAL CONCERTS AND CAROLS With the indefatigable Energizer Bunny of conducting, Grant Gershon, at the helm, Los Angeles Master Chorale (LAMC) can easily be labeled one of the best choirs on earth, and you have a chance to see four separate holiday programs at Walt Disney Concert Hall. Naturally, you can…

IT’S BEGINNING TO LOOK A LOT LIKE FEINSTEIN Charismatic, appealing, boyish, excited, and eager to please, Michael Feinstein  will bring his off-the-cuff, friendly, intimate style to the gorgeous Valley Performing Arts Center on Friday, December 8, 2017. For this one night only, the man who has  single-handedly reinvigorated the American Songbook for the 21st  century, will celebrate the…