Music

CÉCILE MCLORIN SALVANT IS PRECISELY WHAT YOU’VE BEEN LOOKING FOR Hooray and hallelujah! Long before her newest disc, Dreams and Daggers — a live double-CD set that won the 2018 Grammy for Best Jazz Vocal Album — I have always been a fan of jazz vocalist and song interpreter extraordinaire Cécile McLorin Salvant. But seeing…

A MAGNIFICENT MARIACHI OPERA COMES TO THE SORAYA It was by sheer luck that I was in Chicago and happened upon the world’s first mariachi opera, Cruzar la Cara de la Luna (To Cross the Face of the Moon). Even though it immediately became one of my favorite operas, I knew that this type of…

A MASSIVE MASS FOR THE MASSES It’s a happening in Disney Hall. And there’s no better way to salute Leonard Bernstein in his hundredth year than a humongous and awesome presentation of his rarely produced Mass. How did a secular humanist Jewish composer come to write a a modernized interpretation of sacred Mass texts, including…

HOUGH AND PUFF The glorious Berlin Philharmonic Wind Quintet is coming to The Wallis in Beverly Hills as part of a very short, nine-stop North American tour. As if having this prestigious ensemble on February 10 isn’t exciting enough, the great pianist Stephen Hough (pronounced “Huff”) will be playing with the Quintet here in Beverly…

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…