Last night’s Monday Evening Concert was programmed by Kent Nagano: “Bach and the Music of Today”. This is hardly a fresh theme, and last night’s program didn’t reveal any fresh ideas of resonance across the centuries. But it did let us hear works of four composers of today, and that was welcome. I first heard the music of Kurt Rohde when Nagano programmed his Double Trouble (2002) for the 2004 Ojai Festival. Last night Rohde and his friend Ellen Ruth Rose performed the virtuosic parts for two violas, supported by a small ensemble of violin, cello, flute, clarinet, piano; I
Read moreMonday Evening Concerts are alive and well and being given in the great acoustics of Zipper Hall! And if you don’t know why that’s important you’re reading the wrong blog. Last night’s program was the most stimulating in four or five years, stimulating because it presented works by six talented composers, works that were fresh and alive and downright good music. One of the fresh approaches in the new MEC is to have a musician serve as curator for the program, selecting composers to bring to our attention and determining the works to support the rationale. In this first program
Read moreLast night’s Never-on-Monday Evening Concert at LACMA presented the Argento Chamber Ensemble in its sampling of German music. Lanier Sammons wrote a nice review of the concert’s performance in New York. As performed here, the program had a different sequence, separating the two pre-Expressionist works so that the Schoenberg Kammersymphonie ended the first half and the Wagner transcription ended the second. Despite Lanier’s good review (and that from the NY Times), I felt the concert made a strong argument that an ensemble of five strings and ten winds does not make for good balance and clean textures. Listening to the Liebestod made
Read moreThe County Museum of Art didn’t cancel all serious music: just the Monday Evening Concerts. Under new management, the music program now offers occasional concerts on any night but Monday. They try to relate the bookings and programming to the art. Thanks to one other difference — being willing to do some PR — a good crowd came to LACMA to see eighth blackbird. The ostensible tie-in to the art was with the smashing special exhibition on Magritte and art he influenced. (Unfortunately the museum is closed on Wednesdays so that for the attendees the art was limited to a distracting
Read moreLast night’s Los Angeles Master Chorale concert in the Walt Disney appeared to be sold out. The only thing that might surprise outsiders was that the advertising had emphasized that the program would be two works that were actually written in the twenty-first century. Oh, it was a good concert! The two works were by Steve Reich: “You Are (Variations)” which the Chorale premiered in 2004 and performed in New York as part of the Reich birthday party, and the recent “Daniel Variations” for which this was the West Coast premiere. Reich was at the sound controls handling the amplification. “You
Read moreJohn Adams is almost 60 (February 15), and the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s Green Umbrella concert last night had Adams as conductor of three of his works. It appeared to me to be the largest audience in the series, with even some people up in the organ-loft seats facing the conductor. The concert was a pleasure, a treat. Only a curmudgeon could have been dissatisfied at the exuberance and joy of the evening, feeling that serious music shouldn’t have that much fun associated with it. The program opened with “China Gates” (1977), a work for piano solo in which Adams was
Read moreThe description in the title is how Messiaen described a section of the piano part in the second movement of his great “Quartet for the End of Time” (1941). Last night’s Philharmonic chamber concert in Disney Hall came as close as I can imagine to enabling me to see sounds. It was a gorgeous performance by members of the Phil (with CalArts’ Vicki Ray as pianist). I’ve only been to one other live performance, and of course it’s one of the Messiaen tracks on my iPod, but the sound of the performance made it seem as if I was hearing
Read moreThere hasn’t been much contemporary music in Los Angeles over the past month. (Does music over the holidays have to be so traditional? Isn’t there much festive contemporary music?) But we’re off to a decent start in January. The first Philharmonic concert in 2007 had the hot, bright, young (25!) conductor, Gustavo Dudamel, conducting a program of Kodaly, Rachmaninoff (the 3rd, with Bronfman), and the Bartok Concerto for Orchestra. Dudamel got great reviews when he first appeared at Hollywood Bowl, and his reviews of these concerts were raves. The program was recorded and will be available next week on iTunes. Mark
Read moreA sold-out REDCAT held a brilliant concert to celebrate the re-birth of our Monday Evening Concerts and to honor the late Dorrance Stalvey, the man who directed the concerts for almost 35 years. The series had hit a rough patch when Stalvey became director (and curator of music at LACMA). He brought creativity in programming and in performance to the series. To recognize Stalvey’s contributions to our community and our music, Alan Rich provided a lovely tribute to the man in the concert’s written program, and the centerpiece of the concert was the performance of Stalvey’s last completed composition, “Stream”
Read moreTuesday night Thomas Ades was the guest pianist, filling Leonard Stein’s slot, in the Piano Spheres concert at Zipper Hall of the Colburn School. This brought out the largest audience I’ve seen in a Piano Spheres concert, even larger than the audience for Gloria Cheng’s series opener. The buzz about Ades has been good, to understate the reactions. Perhaps our important piano series is beginning to get the audience it deserves. The program to let us hear Ades, the pianist, was not showy or flashy. It wasn’t new: the whole second half of the program is on his EMI recording.
Read more