Robert Mann once explained in an interview that, zealously fired up after founding the Juilliard String Quartet in 1946, he went so far as to obtain an orgone accumulator. It wasn't enough t…
Has any country ever suffered victory as Russia did at the end of the World War II in 1945? Loses were incalculably terrible, and the future was as scary as ever with Stalin still in power. …
The first composer in the Western canon whose name we know and whose voice continues to exert considerable contemporary resonance was a woman " the 12th century Benedictine abbess Hildegard …
Mendelssohn's beloved overture to "A Midsummer Night's Dream" can be used two ways, both wondrous. One is as the standalone piece that the 17-year-old composer originally intended. In this f…
When Gidon Kremer has a farsighted cause, it is wise to pay close attention. Over an uncompromising half-century career, the Latvian violinist and one of the last of the legendary artists to…
He was a very small figure seated on a wide expanse, a large stage empty but for a cellist on a chair. The Hollywood Bowl shell was lighted midnight blue. The amphitheater was probably kept …
America lacks a truly great international music and theater festival. It's time we create one like the Austrian event where top talents push their art forward.
"Sondheim on Sondheim" is, no surprise, all about Stephen Sondheim. But a new "symphonic version" given its premiere by the Los Angeles Philharmonic on Sunday night at the Hollywood Bowl pro…
When Robert Xavier RodrÃguez's "Frida" had its premiere in 1991 at the American Music Theater Festival in Philadelphia, Frida Kahlo was certainly well known, but not the art-world rock st…
Now we know. It has been 45 years since Lou Harrison's "Young Caesar," an overtly gay opera for puppets with penises, had its hapless premiere in Pasadena, to the outrage of some of its spon…
Peter Brook's "Battlefield," which opened at the Wallis on Wednesday for a brief run through Sunday, is itself the ultimate brief run. It is the last word in concentrated compression by thea…
The music of "La La Land" is not really the music of La La Land. It may be only in the obvious but narrow sense that this was music written for a film made here and celebrating freeway cultu…
"The Perfect American" is the operatic portrait of an idealist American artist as a less-than-perfect old man, which is to say a blend of sunshine, supremacy and insecurity. In Philip Glass'…
The arts and entertainment communities " anticipating government cutbacks, harmed by a presidential travel ban, alarmed by an atmosphere of divisiveness and invigorated by mass protests " ha…
It was nasty in Long Beach on Sunday. Record rainfall turned parts of the 710 into an underwater expedition for many on their way to that afternoon's Long Beach Opera season-opening performa…
You must have heard about a president-elect last week talking on the telephone with the president of Taiwan, and thus, by evading protocol, possibly upending U.S. China policy. Now what? …
The centennial of Leonard Bernstein's birth is not until the summer after next, but the West Coast has already gotten a jump-start over Broadway with the musicals. Michael Tilson Thomas last…
Not everything is a surprise with Santtu-Matias Rouvali, a 31-year-old former Los Angeles Philharmonic Dudamel Fellow who returned Friday night to Walt Disney Concert Hall for his first subs…
Japanese Noh theater, according to Penguin Classics' volume of the plays, "is one of the great achievements of civilization." Few would dispute that claim, if only because there are so few w…
The Music Center is lowering its county flag to half-mast for Gordon Davidson, who died Sunday at age 83. As founder of Center Theatre Group at the Mark Taper Forum, he made Los Angeles a th…
A gala's a gala. Who can ask for anything more? Well, critics do all the time, and so, my emails show, do at least some concertgoers who complain of same old, same old with the annua…
So is "West Side Story" an opera, or what? For a semi-staged performance last month at the Hollywood Bowl, Gustavo Dudamel found an ideal balance between the Broadway roots and operatic pote…
"Tosca" is Puccini extreme, the composer's most political opera. At its center is his most fiery heroine, Tosca, the diva who attempts to live for art under tyranny in Rome during Napoleonic…
It was one short walk for a music director and one surprising leap for an opera company. The week after finishing his seventh season with the Los Angeles Philharmonic in Walt Disney Concert …
You could make a Broadway show about the making of the musical "On the Town." It's got everything. Then again, no one would believe it. In 1944, a 26-year-old composer and a couple of theate…