Mark Swed, Music Critic
November 9, 2009
CLASSICAL MUSIC
Gustavo Dudamel and Alan Gilbert: a maestro mano a mano
Last month, New York's public radio station WNYC hosted what it billed as a Los Angeles-versus-New York conductor "smackdown."
November 1, 2009
CD REVIEWS
The viola sings out
Google "viola joke" and you'll be rewarded with thousands, an afternoon's worth of hilarity at the expense of one of the most expressive sound producing machines ever conjured up.
June 28, 2009
CRITIC'S NOTEBOOK
It's frankly Scandinavian
In his 1979 film, "Manhattan," Woody Allen, ever the sarcastic pessimist, wonders why life is worth living. He comes up with Brando, Sinatra, Groucho, the second movement of Mozart's "Jupiter" Symphony and Cézanne's pears among the few things that make it worthwhile. And "Swedish movies, naturally." Director Ingmar Bergman was the best-known Scandinavian artist, and Swedish cinema was a voyeuristic American's most likely contact with a supposedly sexually liberated Scandinavia.
May 31, 2009
CLASSICAL MUSIC
André Previn's place in L.A. Philharmonic history
Sir André, come home.
February 8, 2009
CRITIC'S NOTEBOOK
Mills College, a school without walls
For the last seven decades, Mills College, which will celebrate the renovation of its gorgeous Spanish-style concert hall with a gala concert Feb. 21, has provided a haven for a remarkable number of cutting-edge composers. No matter how academically unsuitable some might have seemed, they have flocked to its manicured sylvan campus tucked behind the intersection of two ugly freeways in a nondescript section of the Oakland foothills. And whether or not anyone has noticed, they have broken new ground.
November 22, 2008
MUSIC REVIEW
Review: Lukas Ligeti at the Steve Allen Theater
On my way to the Steve Allen Theater in Hollywood Thursday night for a rare local appearance by Lukas Ligeti, I stopped by Amoeba Music to pick up his new solo CD, "Afrikan Machinery." It was temporarily out of stock. A good sign, I thought. This is remarkable music, and its popularity must mean a brilliant young composer is catching on.
November 20, 2008
MUSIC REVIEW
'Kafka Fragments' at Walt Disney Concert Hall
May we please stop obsessing over the hypoallergenic first puppy and change the subject to something deep, spiritual, life-changing? Like detergent.
October 17, 2008
Review: András Schiff at the Disney Concert Hall
All the wit of Beethoven
András Schiff is a compact man with a large head. He walked onto the Walt Disney Concert Hall stage Wednesday night like a cross between an absent-minded professor and Charlie Chaplin's Little Tramp. When he sat at the piano to play Beethoven's Sonata, Opus 31, No. 1, his hands danced on the keyboard with extraordinary grace. He grinned and grimaced. He delighted in the delicacy of his fingers bouncing off the keys. If Chaplin had been a great pianist, this might have been his Beethoven.
October 13, 2008
MUSIC REVIEW
Von Stade sounds out the Broad Stage
The Eli and Edythe Broad Stage, newly added to Santa Monica College, had its semi-public tryouts over the summer and a gala last month with singer Barbara Cook, who was amplified. But the opening night concert Saturday, a recital by mezzo-soprano Frederica von Stade, was the first real tryout of the 499-seat hall's acoustics, which were designed by JaffeHolden.
October 13, 2008
MUSIC REVIEW
Branford Marsalis and the Philarmonia Brasileira
Make a poet a diplomat and good may come of it. France sent the great humanist writer Paul Claudel to Brazil during World War I, and food found its way from South America to France during a period of privation. So too did Brazilian music, once the war was won.
October 9, 2008
BOOK REVIEW
'Hallelujah Junction: Composing an American Life' by John Adams
JOHN ADAMS is the voice of America. His instrumental music, and particularly that for the orchestra, conveys the American experience broadly. He is generous in his interests, which include the maverick Yankee-isms of Charles Ives, the populist strains of Bernstein and Copland and the classical jazz of Ellington and Benny Goodman, as well as the more progressive styles of Miles Davis and John Coltrane. Pop music -- be it the Beach Boys, Frank Zappa, electronica or grunge -- is on his radar. He has experimented with experimental music and championed Minimalism. Sibelius looms large.
September 28, 2008
CLASSICAL MUSIC
How Esa-Pekka Salonen and L.A. Phil grew together
IMMEDIATELY after conducting the last Los Angeles Philharmonic concert of the 2007-08 season in June, music director Esa-Pekka Salonen took off for Stockholm, where the Swedish Radio Orchestra celebrated his 50th birthday with an affectionately screwball gala. Next he visited his country home in his native Finland, where he composes and recharges. In August, he went to the Finnish capital to conduct at the Helsinki Festival, which he once headed, and then back to Stockholm to do the same at the Baltic Sea Festival, which he started six years ago to increase awareness of environmental issues through music. That was followed by his Vienna Philharmonic debut at the Salzburg Festival in Austria.
September 15, 2008
OPERA REVIEW
'Bonesetter's Daughter' at San Francisco Opera
APOWERFUL new wave of opera combining Chinese and Western music and drama and written by Chinese composers, many of whom have immigrated to the U.S., has swept much of America, as well as parts of Europe and Asia, in the last 15 years. That it has mostly bypassed the major opera companies on our coast may be evidence of nothing more than a collective Pacific Rim ho-hum at a mix that appears old news in these parts. Even so, Stewart Wallace's "The Bonesetter's Daughter," based on Amy Tan's bestselling novel and given its premiere by San Francisco Opera on Saturday night, brought a welcome dose of operatic chinoiserie to the West Coast.
September 11, 2008
MUSIC REVIEW
Massive Mahler with a strong pull
The world did not end Wednesday morning after scientists near Geneva turned on the Large Hadron Collider, smashing protons onto protons at nearly the speed of light. At least I don't think a black hole was formed, as some feared could happen, pulverizing the Earth into quantum mechanical soup. But then again, I had been at the Hollywood Bowl on Tuesday night, where Esa-Pekka Salonen conducted Mahler's Eighth Symphony, so it wasn't possible to be entirely sure.
September 9, 2008
OPERA REVIEW
L.A. Opera's 'The Fly' is a monster mash
Two years ago, a bass-baritone covered in gook stalked the stage of the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion. That was the medieval monster in Elliot Goldenthal's "Grendel," commissioned by Los Angeles Opera. Sunday afternoon, a baritone covered in gook again stalked the Chandler stage. This time it was Brundle, the scientist hero transmogrified into a Musca domestica in Howard Shore's "The Fly," inspired by the 1986 David Cronenberg horror film -- the latest opera commissioned by the company.
September 8, 2008
OPERA REVIEW
'Il Trittico,' the Los Angeles Opera
PATIENT, persistent Plácido Domingo long ago decided that he wanted Woody Allen for Los Angeles Opera. The company came up with any number of cockamamie proposals -- such as commissioning Allen to write the libretto for a new opera by John Williams, commissioning someone else to write an opera based on an Allen short story or having the filmmaker direct this or that opera -- that went nowhere.
August 21, 2008
MUSIC REVIEW
Music review: Joshua Bell at the Hollywood Bowl
Bramwell Tovey conducted "Petrushka" at the Hollywood Bowl on Tuesday night. But before he did, the principal guest conductor of the Los Angeles Philharmonic for its summer concerts explained that Stravinsky kills off the eponymous puppet in his 1911 ballet by having a percussionist throw a tambourine down on a wooden table. Tovey said he had instructed a camera to pan to said tambourine and table at the appropriate moment so everyone would see them on the Bowl's video screens.
August 14, 2008
MUSIC REVIEW
The Phil warms to Glass
Philip Glass' Violin Concerto, which finally made it to the Hollywood Bowl on Tuesday night, is the concerto that wouldn't die.
August 11, 2008
OPERA REVIEW
Review: 'A Wedding' at the Lobero Theatre
SANTA BARBARA -- Every wedding he ever attended was, in some way, a disaster, the late filmmaker Robert Altman claims in a featurette that accompanies the DVD of his 1978 comedy, "A Wedding." The more wealth involved, of course, the greater the potential for madcap mishap.
July 31, 2008
MUSIC REVIEW
Harth-Bedoya makes the night dance at the Hollywood Bowl
Miguel Harth-Bedoya led the Los Angeles Philharmonic in a likable and satisfying performance of Tchaikovsky's Fourth Symphony at the Hollywood Bowl on Tuesday night. What made it likable was the rhythmic lilt. But what made it satisfying was more important. Fate, for once, was no big deal.
July 29, 2008
OPERA REVIEW
Odd staging can't disguise beauty of 'King Roger'
ANNANDALE-ON-HUDSON, N.Y. -- Every decade or so, I get my hopes up that Karol Szymanowski's ravishing "King Roger," Poland's one great opera, will finally catch on.
July 26, 2008
CRITIC'S NOTEBOOK
Honoring composer Elliott Carter
LENOX, Mass. -- In 1986, Elliott Carter wrote "A Celebration of Some 100 x 150 Notes," a salute to Texas on its 150th anniversary. That may appear a lot of notes to fit into a three-minute piece, but this brash bevy of 11 fanfares all fighting for attention at once was but one very small part of "Carter's Century," a very large celebration of the composer's upcoming 100th birthday as part of the Tanglewood Music Festival here. If those 15,000 notes had been grains of sand, then this five-day jubilee (which ended Thursday) at the Boston Symphony's summer home in the lush green Berkshires could have been called Carter Beach.
July 17, 2008
MUSIC REVIEW
Ringing sounds of the mallet-driven marimba
Marimba mavens are not many. The two-week Zeltsman Marimba Festival, which runs through Saturday at the Colburn School, may have generated publicity and feature stories. New works, we are told, have been commissioned by top composers, although specifics on the festival's website are few. But generally, there is still a closed world of enthusiasts for the mallet instrument that doesn't have quite the zing of the xylophone nor the solo tradition of vibraphone but that can make a beautifully resonant sound.
July 15, 2008
OPERA REVIEW
Opera review: 'Carmen' at the Hollywood Bowl
"Carmen" is not new to the Hollywood Bowl. On July 8, 1922, three days before the first season of "Symphonies Under the Stars," the Los Angeles Philharmonic, itself only 3 years old, mounted a lavish production of Bizet's opera. The cast numbered nearly 500. Massive sets of Seville surrounded the brand-new amphitheater. When soprano Marguerita Sylva, who starred, rolled into Union Station five days earlier, reporters were there to greet her as if she were a movie star. Proceeds from the performance financed the installation of the Bowl's first benches.
July 10, 2008
MUSIC REVIEW
Refreshing breeze at the Bowl
Tuesday night, for the 87th time, the Los Angeles Philharmonic opened its classical music series at the Hollywood Bowl. For the first time, at least as far as anyone could remember, it rained.
June 30, 2008
CRITIC'S NOTEBOOK
Classical music online: Salonen, Sellars and Mozart
I do not unconditionally celebrate the Internet, particularly its intrusion into classical music. As replacements for the record store, Amazon and iTunes have become necessary evils. Typical commercial downloads are sonic shadows of the superior sound of CDs. Blogs ghettoize critics. YouTube is pretty much a toy.
June 2, 2008
MUSIC REVIEW
Things get silly at salute to a maverick
Harry Partch invented and built his own weird (and beautiful) instruments. He developed his own weird (and beautiful) micro-tonal musical scale, adding an extra 31 pitches to the normal 12. He created his own odd aesthetic that joined modern music with ancient Greece and China (with hints of Latin America) and that included his own peculiar notions of dance, theater and ritual.
June 6, 2008
CRITIC'S NOTEBOOK
Walt Disney Concert Hall needs to stand tall
Chapter 11 in Neal Gabler's 2006 biography of Walt Disney is titled "Slouching Toward Utopia." It begins a couple of years after Disneyland opened in July 1955. So what did Walt do next? "Aglow over Disneyland," Gabler writes, "he was intent on expanding and improving it."
May 31, 2008
MUSIC REVIEW
Bronfman plays Salonen's Piano Concerto
On Feb. 1, 2007, the New York Philharmonic premiered Esa-Pekka Salonen’s Piano Concerto, his most ambitious orchestral score. The Big Apple's skeptical concert-goers and critics, proudly sporting their late-model flashiness detectors, responded with surprising (and evidently surprised) enthusiasm. The composer conducted. The orchestra, a very great ensemble in music it has played a million times, was impressive, barely over its head.
May 26, 2008
MUSIC REVIEW
The L.A. Phil's invitation to dream
I don't know that Baudelaire meant music in his poem "Invitation to the Voyage," when he thought of a world far away -- exotic, unobtainable, a land lost in love's gaze. "All is order there, and elegance," he wrote, "pleasure, peace and opulence." But I think he did.
June 25, 2008
CRITIC'S NOTEBOOK
The Dutch embrace Messiaen
AMSTERDAM -- There have been some things even the most dazed Dutch, hazy-headed from the legal hash and marijuana sold in "coffee shops," probably couldn't have missed this month in their teeming capital. Construction is everywhere, especially along the docklands development that includes the astonishing new Muziekgebouw (a concert hall complex devoted to new music!). By day, more bicyclists than ever rule the streets, blissfully independent of Royal Dutch Shell, the national oil company. By night, soccer fans have turned the town squares orange on Euro 2008 match nights, with seemingly all of the populace dressed in Holland's team color.
April 19, 2008
MUSIC REVIEW
Beaux Arts Trio at the Ace Gallery
The Beaux Arts Trio gave its first concert in the summer of 1955 at the Berkshire Music Festival in Massachusetts. The trio will close shop this summer at the same festival, now known as Tanglewood. But first the Beaux Arts has a lot of goodbyes to wave.
April 5, 2008
MUSIC REVIEW
Live: L.A. Philharmonic
The affair between Gustavo Dudamel and Los Angeles is young love. Thursday night at Walt Disney Concert Hall, the 27-year-old Venezuelan who will become music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic in 2009 led a demanding program of two key 20th century works: Bartók's Violin Concerto No. 2 and Ravel's "Daphnis and Chloe." Had he wished to go to less trouble, he probably could have drawn a crowd conducting the Thomas Guide. Bigwigs rarely seen at Disney were there.
May 17, 2008
MUSIC REVIEW
Live: Chanticleer on 'Mission Road' in San Luis Obispo
SAN LUIS OBISPO -- On a balmy evening here Thursday, the dozen men of Chanticleer, dressed in identical stylish dark suits, began a slow procession down the aisle of the San Luis Obispo de Tolosa mission, founded in 1772. It was a solemn, beautiful, memorable moment. They were unfurling, for the first time, some of our musical DNA.
May 19, 2008
OPERA REVIEW
Opera: This Tosca leads the Puccini parade with purity
Come Dec. 22, celebrations of Puccini’s 150th birthday may abound. But, generally, opera companies are not making the fuss typical of major anniversaries of popular (and even unpopular) composers this year. Or perhaps the companies are. It can be hard to tell, given how common are "La Boheme," "Madame Butterfly" and "Tosca."
April 16, 2008
MUSIC REVIEW
Helmut Lachenmann at Monday Evening Concerts
In Germany, he is often referred to as “Professor Helmut Lachenmann.” He is 73, lanky, bearded. A student of Luigi Nono and Karlheinz Stockhausen, he is perhaps the foremost representative of the second-generation European avant-garde.
April 17, 2008
MUSIC REVIEW
Live: 'Blackbird,' by the numbers
The math behind eighth blackbird’s program Tuesday night at the Orange County Performing Artscenter, titled "The Only Moving Thing," was this:
April 24, 2008
OPERA REVIEW
This Dido lives and dies a dancer
In 1988, Mark Morris was invited to make his dance company a resident ensemble at the Théâtre Royal de la Monnaie. As part of Brussels' opera company, he was told to think as big as he liked. He did, and that was, for him, a new opportunity. During his three years in Belgium, he also thought differently, which was not so new for him but produced newly outrageous results when combined with thinking big in Old World operatic Europe.
March 31, 2008
MUSIC REVIEW
Live: Gustavo Dudamel and the L.A. Philharmonic
In some respects, D-day at Walt Disney Concert Hall resembled many another Friday night concert by the Los Angeles Philharmonic. A young man conducted. Another young man played the piano. The hall was full, and listeners sat respectfully through the program, saving their gusto for standing ovations.
May 16, 2008
OPERA REVIEW
Live: Opera Pacific's 'Susannah'
Opera Pacific may not be the last opera company in America to get around to "Susannah," which it did effectively Wednesday night at the Orange County Performing Artscenter, but Carlisle Floyd’s faux-folk opera has few stages left to conquer. The irresistible numbers -- well over 200 productions, 700-plus performances -- were trotted out once more during a company sales pitch for new subscribers before the curtain rose.
October 29, 2003
CRITIC'S NOTEBOOK
Now comes the true test
The Los Angeles Philharmonic opened the Walt Disney Concert Hall last week as though it meant it. That is a more striking notion than you might imagine. Concert hall openings are, not infrequently, debacles. These are complex buildings, and they are rarely ready in time. Acoustical issues, ranging from tuning the hall to learning to play in a new environment, always take time — sometimes years — to address.
July 1, 2003
DISNEY HALL
Sounds of relief are audible at Disney Hall
The polished steel exterior of the Walt Disney Concert Hall is already familiar. Inside, the paint is dry, and few hard hats are in evidence. But one lingering question has been the most important: How will it sound?
October 31, 2003
MUSIC REVIEW
EAR Unit 'paints' a tribute
Earle Brown died last year a neglected composer, but he has not been forgotten. As a member of John Cage's New York circle in the 1950s, he has his place in history. At that time, he came into contact with Abstract Expressionist painters and developed what he called his "open-form" technique. Through scores in which the musical events are indicated but not their exact realization, he wanted his music performed the way Jackson Pollock applied paint. A conductor's descriptive gestures splash the sounds onto the sonic canvas.
November 17, 2003
MUSIC REVIEW
'Paper' leaves a trail of missed opportunities
Tan Dun's "Inventions for Paper Instruments and Orchestra" is a delight. A percussion soloist entertainingly tears, crumbles, shakes, taps, pops and bangs upon what seems like half the inventory of a large stationery shop. That is when he isn't startlingly blowing, singing or whistling into sheets of paper.
April 7, 2008
DANCE REVIEW
La La La Human Steps
WE can refuse history, but we can't forget about it, even with the new technologies. Those are Luciano Berio's words. They were also the theme of the late Italian composer's Norton Lectures at Harvard 15 years ago. Last week, I was sure I had long ago proved Berio wrong. Having shuffled dying swans and such into the category of ritual rather than renewable art, I not only, good Modernist that I am, refused Tchaikovsky's ballets but also had put them out of my mind. Would good reviews have made American Ballet Theatre's "Swan Lake" at the Music Center an event? Not for me.
July 10, 2007
OPERA REVIEW
Powerhouse 'Flute' subdues picnickers
Looking to make a buck, in 1791 Mozart and the impresario-librettist Emanuel Schikaneder came up with a great idea for a new opera that could reach the pop crowd. But where to reach such a crowd today? Sunday night, "The Magic Flute" came to the Hollywood Bowl, where the care and feeding of a large general audience has been turned into an efficient art form of its own.
June 12, 2007
MUSIC REVIEW
Life's rhythms pulse through Ojai festival
OJAI — Folks here never tire of reminding visitors that Ojai is different, a small slice of paradise, not quite part of the real world. They could be right. But we must hope they are not.
June 5, 2007
OPERA REVIEW
Domingo, cast find their perfect match in Luisa
When Plácido Domingo was named artistic consultant of Los Angeles Opera in 1984, two years before the company staged its first production, he noted that it might be a good idea to perform zarzuela, Spain's form of operetta, in a town where Spanish is commonly spoken. Named artistic director designate in 1998, the Spanish tenor and son of zarzuela singers said the time was ripe for you know what. With his title upgraded to general director of the company four years ago, Domingo insisted once and for all that he'd bring zarzuela to L.A.
April 17, 2007
MUSIC REVIEW
Pacific Symphony rediscovers Mexico
"Discover Mexico" was the touristy title of the first concert in the Pacific Symphony's festival of Mexican music, "Los Sonidos de México," Sunday afternoon at the Irvine Barclay Theatre. "Notice Mexico" might be more like it.
March 20, 2007
CRITIC'S NOTEBOOK
A fine weekend for chamber music
Three pieces of chamber music have halos above them. An aura of reverence surrounds Beethoven's late soul-searching String Quartet in C-sharp minor, Opus 131, and Schubert's otherworldly C-major String Quintet. The third is Shostakovich's 15th and final string quartet, his this-time-he-really-meant-it farewell to a life of terrible inner and outer turmoil.
February 20, 2007
MUSIC REVIEW
So very still but moving
After a seemingly interminable wait, we now have a second Gorecki Third. The first Third was a long, somber symphony, written in 1977, that remained cultishly obscure until it was released on a 1992 Nonesuch recording that became a cultural phenomenon. It sold more than a million copies, rose high on the British pop charts and was even sampled by hip-hop bands.
September 6, 2006
CRITIC'S NOTEBOOK
Please, give him room to mature
I try not to be shocked by the depths to which the music business can sink. And I fail.
June 4, 2006
CRITIC'S NOTEBOOK
A retreat charges on
In the summer of 1955, "Stravinsky scarcely moved from Wetherly Drive," writes Stephen Walsh in the newly published second volume of his biography of the composer. Stravinsky scarcely moved because his arthritis was acting up and because he had music to write. But that spring, he had moved enough from his West Hollywood home above Sunset Boulevard to drive the 80 miles to Ojai, where he was briefly rejuvenated.
CRITIC'S NOTEBOOK
Lenny, the indispensable
"He drank a lot," Ned Rorem says of Leonard Bernstein in a new 11-part radio documentary that has begun airing weekly around the country and starts tonight at 7 on KMZT-FM. "I remember he even drank for breakfast. That impressed me."
May 21, 2006
CRITIC'S NOTEBOOK
Performing Rauschenberg
On Dec. 7, 1992, the New York Philharmonic celebrated its 150th anniversary by unveiling a poster it had commissioned from Robert Rauschenberg. An attractive, if slightly innocuous, silk-screen collage, it is instantly recognizable as a Rauschenberg. In the center sits a large pale rose, its stem coming out of a couple of earthy, painted-over brass instruments. On top is a lopsided keyboard. The poster enhances the lobby of Avery Fisher Hall, which needs all the visual help it can get.
Copyright © 2009, The Los Angeles Times
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