Newsletter: Essential Arts and Culture: Rembrandt, Thomas Adès and denizens of ‘The O.C.’
I'm Kelly Scott, and these L.A. Times arts stories prove that everything does not stop the last week of August.
Musicals can spring from the most unlikely places
I’d say it was a homage, but can you really use that word for a musical whose "book" is the pilot of a '90s prime-time soap? The Times' Saba Hamedy and others who consider Fox's “The O.C.” a formative experience traveled far, endured long lines and hooted through “Unauthorized O.C." conceived by Jordan Ross and Lindsey Rosin. Pop songs used in the soundtrack to the series provided the musical component. The two offered the same form of flattery earlier this year with the '90s movie “Cruel Intentions.” As for being a homage, it’s certainly accepted by the original cast members as one: “It's an awesome tribute to everything we did,” said actress Rachel Bilson.
Christine Lakin as Kirsten and Neil Hopkins as Sandy in "The O.C. Musical" at the Montalban in Hollywood. (Lawrence K. Ho / Los Angeles Times)
Rembrandt's do-over
The paintings may get older, but the technology just keeps getting better. Mike Boehm learned how conservators at the Getty Museum are getting a better look at a Rembrandt painting beneath a painting that the Getty owns, “Old Man in a Military Costume.” They already knew there was an underlying painting, but now they can see it's a younger man in a green cloak. “Every 20 or 30 years technology advances to the point where we have new tools to look at it in a new way and get new information,” said Karen Trentelman, senior scientist with the Getty Conservation Institute.
More — and less conventional — opera muscle at the Phil
Perhaps you remember "Invisible Cities," the opera staged in downtown's Union Station two years ago. Splashes don’t get much bigger than the one Yuval Sharon and his company, the Industry, made. The group has an opera presented in cars on the way, and Sharon has become a sought-after figure in the opera world. Last week he was appointed “artist collaborator” at the L.A. Philharmonic, which has been reaching into opera repertory regularly as part of their season. Sounds like he is looking outside Disney Hall.
Yuval Sharon is shown at Union Station in downtown Los Angeles in 2013. (Lawrence K. Ho / Los Angeles Times)
Thomas Adès and the allure of L.A. afternoons
While the opera world waits for his new opera, “The Exterminating Angel” — scheduled to premiere next year in Salzburg — composer Thomas Adès is taking time to play a demanding double piano concert Tuesday at the Colburn School with pianist Gloria Cheng. The centerpiece will be the Concert Paraphrase of his first opera, “Powder Her Face,” for two pianos, and they both talked about bruised fingers and the physical effort involved in it. Adès was at his most disarming talking about how well L.A. suits his composing clock: “If you’re a nocturnal worker, the afternoons of L.A. are actually night everywhere else — so they are miraculously peaceful, and they seem to go on forever.”
Thomas Adès practices for a Pianosphere performance with Gloria Cheng at Steinway on Aug. 28, 2015. (Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times)
The woman who started the Broad collection
If you missed this story, you ought to catch up with it: You probably know the new Broad museum (opening Sept. 20) will be a showcase for the modern and contemporary art collection of billionaire Eli and Edythe Broad. But we hear curiously little about the Edythe — or Edye — in the partnership. Jeff Fleishman spent some time with the Broad with the eye for art and offers this profile.
Edye Broad at the Broad museum with a Cy Twombly painting titled "The Rose (V), 2008." (Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times / © Cy Twombly Foundation)
My colleagues in other parts of the newsroom wrote stories you might be interested in:
Is it a sofa or an art object?
Artist Joseph Holtzman’s new exhibit at the Hammer Museum is a perfect reflection of his dual nature. The interior design expert — he was founder and publisher of “Nest” — turned his exhibition space at the Hammer Museum into an artful salon, complete with furniture from his home. As such, you are invited to not just gaze, but to also relax. “The furniture is not art. I want the sofas and chairs to be sat on,” he said. “If I get them back in rags, I'll be happy.”
For his Hammer Projects show, Joseph Holtzman designed a salon-style room with back to back sofas covered in vintage rural landscape fabrics. (Brian Forrest)
Salman Rushdie's characteristic complexity
In his new novel, Salman Rushdie lets the genie out of the bottle and puts her straight into the arms of a 12th century philosopher. Their relationship kicks off a story that pits reason against religion, imagination against order, and genies against puny humans. Critic Carolyn Kellogg says “Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights” is erudite without flaunting it, a pulpy disaster novel that resists flying out of control with a grounding in religion, history, culture and love.
A portrait of author Salman Rushdie. (Barbara Davidson / Los Angeles Times)
In short
Pop music critic Randall Roberts looks back on the late Oliver Sacks' writing about music and the brain ... John Baldessari and Meredith Monk are among those receiving the National Medal of Art Thursday ... the Los Angeles Opera targets a specific demographic, offering $30 tickets to people under 30 ... the John Anson Ford Theatre battens down the hatches before the predicted El Niño.
Coming up
Look for the Times' Fall Arts and Books Preview Sunday, Sept. 13.
What we’re reading
Art writer Priscilla Frank and arts editor Katharine Brooks of the Huffington Post drew up a list of 28 art exhibitions you should see this fall. The list geographically well-distributed; it doesn't cling to the coasts. Two of the shows are in LA, however: the Getty’s Ishiuchi Miyako: Postwar Shadows" and the Hammer’s Njideka Akunyili Crosby.
Here's a Guardian UK gallery of ginormous street art around the world drawn from a book by German graffiti artist Claudia Walde, a.k.a. MadC, "Mural XXL." I’m partial to the Oscar Niemeyer in Sao Paulo.
– Kelly Scott, arts and culture editor
...and listening to
With the Hollywood Bowl coming to end this week, KUSC has a reminder of the summer's most surprising highlight: Gustavo Dudamel's spellbinding performance of Carl Orff's “Carmina Burana.” If you want to skip the first half part, two pieces by Eric Whitacre, simply place your cursor at the end of Hollywood after hitting the play button for L.A. Phil at the Hollywood Bowl/August 30 broadcast.
Follow me on Twitter at @kscottLATarts.
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