‘People are talking about….’ is the way Vogue used to frame it from the old Diana Vreeland/Leo Lerman days until well into this century. And people have been talking about Yuja Wang’s Rachmaninoff cycle since her marathon performance at Carnegie Hall less than two...
Yuja Wang, Gustavo Dudamel, the L.A. Phil — and Rachmaninoff
The L.A. Phil’s Tristan Project Long Day’s Journey Into Night by way of earth, water, fire, air, and the human element
We revisit the canonical operatic repertoire for many reasons. And—notions of gesamtkunstwerk to one side—it’s really no different with the Wagnerian repertoire. You could almost attach that description to operas dating from the Baroque. (One might easily make a...
“Some Make You Sing….” (Part 2 of 3)
Something kind of hit me todayI looked at you and wondered if you saw things my way. . . We're taking it hard all the timeWhy don't we pass it by? David Bowie, “We Are the Dead”from Diamond Dogs, 1974 The first part of this post promised a superfecta; and I’m...
I’m A Stranger Here Myself: Soundtracks for scary screens and scarred landscapes
The center of the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s Friday evening program was a shimmering pulsation of musical color, both harmonic and timbral, in a field of black and white. Both Susan Graham’s rendering of a suite of Kurt Weill songs and Esa-Pekka Salonen’s own suite...
Some Enchanted Evening – Così fan tutte
Mozart, like other great artists before and since, offers us a topological mirror in which to test and tease our perspectives on the universe and our fragile foothold in it. The evocative power of his greatest work is a sublime irony, felt all the more acutely as the...