The last concert of the season for the Phil closed with roars of applause and approval for Esa-Pekka Salonen‘s Piano Concerto, given its premiere last year by the New York Philharmonic. Listening to the broadcast of that performance was only a weak preparation for what we heard and felt yesterday. It seemed as if the whole audience was, like me, swept up and carried away by the music. And what a performance it was! The concert was recorded by DG, for which we are grateful, and I’ll download it on release. Yefim Bronfman was the soloist, as he has been

The music year in Los Angeles is getting off to a good start with an exciting mini-festival by the L.A. Phil, led by David Robertson.  What’s even nicer is that the Phil has given Sequenza21 readers a chance to win two tickets to next Friday’s concert, January 11, the program that appropriately includes “Sequenza X”.  The contest ends tomorrow night, so enter now! First, let me tantalize you just a little with some details of the series.  Next week there will be the premiere of a new Michael Gordon work with Bill Morrison, “Dystopia”, with the Boulez “Explosante-Fixe” as the

Our revivified Monday Evening Concerts opened its second season of its new life last night.  This was an evening of MEC as we had been hoping for.  The program gave us music we wanted:  stimulating and sometimes challenging music; some new composers and new music, along with some to link to earlier times; music performed by very talented musicians; music in a hall with good sound; music to make us feel glad we had come.  And almost 300 of us came out Zipper Hall at Colburn School to hear and enjoy. The new and most challenging music was in the

It’s a pretty short list when you try to name the persons who have really affected and changed musical life in Los Angeles.  There are many who brought fame to L.A., and there are several who became famous through Los Angeles.  But fame is much easier than impact and change.  Bill Kraft is one of that short list.  He was a member of the Los Angeles Philharmonic for 26 years, 18 of which were as Principal Timpanist.  As conductors and administrators worked with the orchestra to make it a more stellar ensemble and to bring vitality to contemporary music, Bill Kraft

In this final piece on most prominent of the organizations that do noticeable programming of contemporary or near-contemporary music, I’ll deal with a variety of activities around the city.  Perhaps the most consistently interesting programming in Los Angeles is put together by Jacaranda.  As implied by their subhead, “music on the edge of Santa Monica”, their programs do much more than give service to the idea that music is actually written and worthy today.  (Yes, their performances are held within walking distance of the ocean.)  This season they begin the first of two seasons focusing on the music of Olivier

The L.A. Philharmonic’s New Music Group opened its season last night with a concert of three works by Kaija Saariaho, all written in the early 90s.  This concert was to have provided a follow-up program to a major new Saariaho work, la Passion de Simone, on the philosophy and death of Simone Weil, which was premiered this summer in Vienna.  But (as reported by Mark Swed) Peter Sellars, who staged the premiere, convinced the Phil not to do a mere concert version as planned, but to produce the semi-staged version of Vienna, with dance and lighting; so the Passion was

Close to 300 of us traveled to Zipper Auditorium last night to hear Gloria Cheng open the new Piano Spheres season.  It was a great concert.  With the exception of the premiere of a new work, she selected pieces by some of the most unrelenting modernists; as she said from the stage, the names of the composers would make most potential audience members head for the hills, anywhere but to sit and listen.  She gave us pleasure and enjoyment.  No one in the audience gave up and left.  In fact, after the encore of a long, challenging program, I think

Over and above its contributions in teaching the performing arts, The Colburn School gives Los Angeles a good, small concert hall, Zipper Concert Hall, just across the street from Walt Disney Concert Hall.  Zipper Hall is now performing home to three independent program series important to contemporary music in Los Angeles.  To get a little off-topic, of course Zipper is also home to the programming of Colburn School itself and is the primary Los Angeles home of the Calder Quartet, just ending a residency at Julliard and a co-founder of the Carlsbad Festival of alternative classical music, which begins down south

During the summer the music programming stays pretty much with the established and conventional, if not with the outright light and popular.  I missed about the only performance of contemporary music at the Bowl, and the programming of the concerts by the lawn of the Huntington Gardens by the Southwest Chamber musicians was much more traditional than usual so that the one real treat was Elissa Johnston singing the Berio “Folk Songs” as part of a delightful program of Debussy supplemented by Lou Harrison and the Berio songs.  But now we’re ready to have more music of today. Arranging our calendars

The Sunday evening concert explored the range of voices of a piano with four works for piano and orchestra, almost four concertos.  Pierre-Laurent Aimard was pianist in three and merely a conductor in the fourth, Dialogues for Piano and Large Ensemble (2003) by Elliott Carter.  One result of the differences in attitude (or fashion?) regarding contemporary music between northeast and southwest is that we hear much less of Carter’s music than do you in the more variable climates, so that hearing the work seemed both old and new.  Tamara Stefanovich was given the chance to shine as soloist, and she did