On May 29, Igor Stravinsky’s The Rite Of Spring turns 100, and never in my memory has the centennial of a piece of music been so exhaustively commemorated with performances, festivals, symposiums, and recordings – including a massive box containing every recording in Universal’s Deutsche Grammophon/Decca/Philips stockpile.   With that in mind, I’d thought I’d share with you a survey of all the recordings of the Rite that I could lay my hands on.     ...

► Read the entire post

     Pulling out of Paso Robles on US 101, it was an unseasonably hot early May day, in the 90s at least.  But the further north I drove, the faster the temperature dropped – and a fine, cooling fog was rolling into San Francisco by the time I reached the city limits. The city is lucky to have such powerful air-conditioning – and it's free.       The following afternoon (May 5), it was off to Davies Symphony Hall to check out for myself the current parallel recording paths of ...

► Read the entire post

     Now and then, these eyes, ears and feet get a little restless, so it was time to wander for awhile up the coast.  So I headed out of Frazier Park the afternoon of May 3, gliding over hill and dale on the lonely Cerro Noroeste Road to State Highway 166, which then goes more-or-less directly west through the Coast Range to US 101 just north of Santa Maria.       First stop was to drop in on a rehearsal of the San Luis Obispo Symphony, which over that weekend was graced by the company of the ...

► Read the entire post

     At one time, it would have never occured to me that Everest was considered to be an audiophile label.  The Everest that I knew should have been called Neverest – a label that put out of some of the shoddiest, noisiest, tinny-sounding pressings in the classical record field, with bad "electronic" (fake) stereo disfiguring all mono issues.  You could find Everests polluting the budget bins of college bookstores or close-out emporiums – and I found myself passing up performances that I would ...

► Read the entire post

     Esa-Pekka Salonen's set of the four Lutoslawski symphonies with the Los Angeles Philharmonic – now out at last in the U.S.  –  stands as one of the longest-gestating recorded cycles in the catalogue, spanning several technologies.  To give you some perspective, when the cycle began with the Symphony No. 3 in 1984, a public Internet was still a pipe dream, Lutoslawski was still alive, the Fourth Symphony had yet to be written, Salonen had just made his North American debut with the ...

► Read the entire post

    As I write this, Gustavo Dudamel and the Los Angeles Philharmonic are leaving for Europe, bringing along an unusually massive calling card – John Adams's The Gospel According to the Other Mary in its current, semi-staged form.       On one level, this proves that Dudamel is eager to have it both ways, comfortable with his celebrity status yet willing to take risks, refusing to play it safe with predictable popular repertoire (as in the example of the late Van Cliburn).  Also, ...

► Read the entire post

     When Van Cliburn left this planet today, he left a much-different world than the one in which he shot to fame some 55 long years ago.      There was a Cold War going on, Sputnik had been launched, and America needed a lift. The country was ready for someone, anyone, who could wrestle the Russian bear to the ground in one field or another.  Not only that, classical music had a more prominent place in the mass culture than it does now.  TIME Magazine regularly covered classical music news, even ...

► Read the entire post

    Usually, this blogger has enough on his plate running from the hi-fi and the flat screen TV to live concerts and back again.  But over the past week, there was a string of interesting music events that were not public concerts per se, so I thought it would be diverting to take them in.       First, the young, pretty, heavily-promoted Scottish violinist Nicola Benedetti dropped into Los Angeles last week to make her US television debut on "The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson" (nice to ...

► Read the entire post

     I've been watching a live telecast on the computer today from Madrid – courtesy of medici.tv, the invaluable C-SPAN of classical music – of Philip Glass's new opera The Perfect American, which has placed his name temporarily front and center in the mass media.  Mind you, this isn't because it is a Glass opera. Rather, it is because it is an opera about Walt Disney – and not a flattering one.     Throughout the opera's 104 minutes, we see the buccaneering, ...

► Read the entire post

     California's leading musical organizations have been very active releasing recordings this past fall and winter – and yes, I've been listening and watching, though apparently not writing fast enough.  So here is an attempt to catch up with what's new.      In 2011, Carl St. Clair and the Pacific Symphony revisited Philip Glass's eloquent oratorio The Passion of Ramakrishna – a piece that they unveiled during the opening concerts for Renée and Henry ...

► Read the entire post

     Every few years or so, there is a new eruption of Gouldiana, celebrating and recirculating the strange, visionary, and amazingly durable legacy of Glenn Gould.  The Canadian iconoclast would have been 80 on Sep. 25 – and oh, how he would have enjoyed today's technology, with the Internet to hide behind and play with, tweeting endlessly to his heart's and mind's delight, making those wee-hours phone calls via Skype. Today's advanced digital editing techniques would have given him even more ...

► Read the entire post

      As I was driving home from the doctor's office late this morning, I turned on the jazz station and heard the last strains of Dave Brubeck's "Blue Rondo A La Turk."  Immediately, a feeling of dread arose from somewhere around the solar plexus, although I knew that his 92nd birthday was coming up soon and perhaps this was a preliminary salute.  There was no back announcement, no sign that anything was up, and the station immediately segued into Lee Ritenour imitating Wes Montgomery, so I ...

► Read the entire post

     There have been a lot of round-numbered birthdays this year, and there will be no letup next year – what with Verdi, Britten, Wagner and Lutoslawski coming up fast.  And not just in so-called classical music, for Woody Herman would have been 100 next year as well. Yet he somehow doesn't seem like a historical figure, for he kept his big bands refreshingly up to date over the decades, even attempting a rapproachment with components of rock before heading back to the mainstream in his last band. ...

► Read the entire post

     It used to be said that among the living conductors in the 1980s, the three that were at the summit of the profession were Herbert von Karajan, Leonard Bernstein and Sir Georg Solti. They departed one by one – Karajan in 1989, Bernstein in 1990, and Solti supposedly had the mountaintop all to himself until his unexpected death in 1997.  It was unexpected because even at 84, Solti seemed like an inexhaustible ball of energy; no one could imagine him being ill. And then when he died, few noticed because it ...

► Read the entire post

    I just missed seeing Hans Werner Henze by two days.       Had I visited Leipzig on a Saturday rather than the following Monday on my trip to eastern Germany this past May, I could have caught a glimpse of the venerated German composer, who died Oct. 27 at 86, receiving well-wishers in J.S. Bach's own church, the Thomaskirche. I know this because Donald Rosenberg, the president of the Music Critics Association of North America, made the trek to Leipzig that Saturday afternoon, although he wasn't sure ...

► Read the entire post

     Gustavo Dudamel's Mahler Project earlier this year is now in the history books, but it hasn't disappeared from view, nor will it.  The first permanent artifact from that audacious, bicontinental adventure has emerged, a Deutsche Grammophon DVD (and Blu-ray) release containing the Mahler Eighth Symphony performance from Caracas on Feb. 18 (the Ninth Symphony was recorded in Los Angeles by DG for iTunes, but hasn't been released yet – tentatively delayed until next year). This was the performance ...

► Read the entire post

     Some have written that Naxos's brave, long-term project of recording all of Krzysztof Penderecki's orchestral and choral works has been going mostly under the radar amidst the blizzard of Naxos releases every month.  Now there is one quick way in which to start catching up.  All of the completed Penderecki symphonies have been gathered together in a discount-priced five-CD boxed set, led with eloquence and bite by Naxos's main man in Poland, Antony Wit. Since starting the cycle way back in 1998, ...

► Read the entire post

    While watching Barack Obama and Bill Clinton speak at the Democratic Convention last week, it occured to me that the difference between the two presidents' speaking styles can be explained in terms of musical ensembles.     In the case of Obama, I think of a symphony orchestra led by an inspired conductor – a large diverse organization that reads the notes right off the printed page (as Obama reads a teleprompter), but now and then manages to harness the rhythm, flow, melodic content and meaning of the ...

► Read the entire post

      If it didn't happen in New York, it didn't happen – so some of our East Coast brethren seem to say. Indeed, they still trot out the epithet "Hollywood" to dismiss and denigrate a lot of things that come from here. To this day, much interesting musicmaking From Out Of The West goes not only under the national radar, but locally as well as publishing outlets become fewer and fewer, and blogs like this one try to fill in some of the gaps.      Well, here's one gap ...

► Read the entire post

     This has been a year of centenaries for a number of 20th-century podium giants born in 1912 – Georg Solti, Kurt Sanderling (who missed his 100th by just a year), Igor Markevitch, Sergiu Celibidache – all of whom still have their fame, or at least a cult. Yet a fifth, Erich Leinsdorf (1912-1993), remains in a curious state of limbo, not exactly reviled but not particularly loved.  One wonders why.  Perhaps his outspoken ways, of not suffering fools or even worthy adversaries kindly, often expressed ...

► Read the entire post

   Here are some follow-ups to previous posts that you may or may not have seen in this blog:      Pierre Boulez's Mahler cycle was completed last year with the release of the video of Des Knaben Wunderhorn and the Adagio from the Symphony No. 10 – or was it?  Now we have an addenda of sorts, not part of the official cycle but still a something's extra, a live performance of Das Klagende Lied from the opening concert of last year's Salzburg Festival (C Major DVD or ...

► Read the entire post

     Thanks to the usual early-summer lull in the concert season, I have just finished reading the long-awaited fourth volume of Robert A. Caro's massively eloquent biography of Lyndon Johnson, The Passage Of Power – and with one more volume to go, one can only hope that he and we live long enough to see the end of it.  There is no finer writer of political biographies working today; Caro's mastery of rhetoric, his use of repetition for purposes of flow as well as reminding us of past material, ...

► Read the entire post

     The distance between Dresden and Leipzig is only 62 miles, and to see one city without visiting the other would seem to be an opportunity missed if you have the time.  While they are amazingly similar in population currently – Dresden as of 2010 has 523,000 residents while Leipzig comes within a whisker of that total at 522,000! – and both have deep connections with the great composers, they are not twin cities.  Leipzig is more of a trade center with a more bustling street vibe; it was also a book ...

► Read the entire post

     Looking at Dresden today –  with the Baroque splendor of the restored Semperoper and Frauenkirche in the same neighborhood as drab Communist architecture and a modern indoor shopping mall off the Altmarkt that could be located anywhere – you are confronted with the abrupt clash between the very old, the very new, and the recent past. It is the home of Raphael's "Sistine Madonna;" the city where "Der Fliegende Holländer," "Tannhäuser," ...

► Read the entire post

     Last October, Southwest Chamber Music kicked off its 25th anniversary season with a monster of a work, Ten Freedom Summers by jazz trumpeter, avant-garde classical composer and CalArts faculty member Wadada Leo Smith. It was a magnum opus in every sense –  19 compositions requiring three nights to perform, 34 years in the making, rolling avant-garde jazz and classical elements into one ball, purporting to capture the psychological and spiritual meanings of not only the Civil Rights movement in ...

► Read the entire post

     I realize that there is a brave new world of changing formats out there, a massive transition from physical to digital with supposedly washed-up technologies like vinyl LPs on the comeback trail.  Even so, Deutsche Grammophon's release schedule for its caliente conducting star, Gustavo Dudamel, has taken a turn toward the bizarre this year.      "Discoveries" – a 2009 hodge-podge of isolated tracks wrenched from Dudamel's earlier albums, with a few ...

► Read the entire post

      The wind was howling, the sky was a gloomy dark grey, the thermometer was stuck at 28 degrees, and the snow came tumbling down, coating the trees in the front yard with white crystals better suited for the dead of winter than the middle of spring ...  Sounds like the start of a bad novel, but that was the scene outside my front glass door a couple of weekends ago as I left Frazier Park (elev. 5,000 feet)  to attend the Los Angeles Philharmonic's Schubertiade in Walt Disney Concert Hall the week of April 15. ...

► Read the entire post

    Are classical CDs and DVDs going out of style? Not in the Bay Area, where at least two organizations continue to regularly pour out live recordings of their musical offerings on their own labels on paradoxically old-fashioned, state-of-the-art physical media.       The San Francisco Symphony observed its centennial with a gala season-opening concert last September that was shown on PBS here a couple of weeks ago and has found its way onto a DVD (SFS Media).  It isn't quite the complete ...

► Read the entire post

    Segueing over to one of my other musical passions, jazz, I recently found three bound volumes of Down Beat magazine's jazz record reviews in a Simi Valley antique shop, of all places.  The books cover all of the reviews that DB printed in 1959, 1960 and 1962 – in other words, right at the heart of what many scribes and record company factotums now consider to be jazz's artistic high-water mark  (one can debate that, but there's little doubt this was one of the richest periods).     ...

► Read the entire post

    The gears are cranking up already for next year's Wagner bicentennial, and we can probably expect a slew of new videos from the currently dominant school of regietheatre – sometimes known as Eurotrash.  Yet PentaTone, the outfit that has resurrected many a 1970s-vintage Philips recording in SACD surround-sound, is bucking that trend by gradually issuing new recordings of all ten Wagner repertory operas in audio only, recording concert performances live in the Berlin Philharmonie, one per ...

► Read the entire post

     Gustavo Dudamel wanted to complete his Mahler Project with a performance of the Eighth Symphony that mirrored the 1910 premiere of the piece – with a thousand or more performers.  There was a little problem, though – Walt Disney Concert Hall only seats 2,265 customers, and with so many performers taking up so much room, not many tickets would be available. Also, it was winter – and though temperatures turned out to be on the mild side, who would take a chance on booking a big outdoor arena many ...

► Read the entire post

    Here in Los Angeles – suddenly the Mahler capital of the world for three-and-a-half weeks in winter – we are two-thirds of the way through Gustavo Dudamel's audacious journey from memory through all nine completed symphonies, plus the Adagio from the Tenth and Songs Of A Wayfarer. Time to take a breather before resuming the Mahlerthon, and gather a few thoughts together:  – As a rule of the thumb, the best performances have been of those symphonies with which Dudamel has had the most ...

► Read the entire post

The first performance of the prologue to a hitherto-unknown unfinished Shostakovich opera, "Orango," arrived at Walt Disney Concert Hall Dec. 2-4 – and it was everything I had hoped it would be.   "Orango" dates from 1932, when Shostakovich was still in prime satirical mode before the darkness of Pravda's denunciation shrouded his life a few years later.  The prologue introduces the proposed opera much the way Berg's "Lulu" begins – an "entertainer" leads spectators ...

► Read the entire post

    The Boston Symphony Orchestra doesn't come out to the West Coast very often; indeed, "the Aristocrat of Orchestras," as they were marketed in the Erich Leinsdorf era, hadn't been to Los Angeles in 20 years. So when they do make it here, you go – especially since it was their first time playing in Walt Disney Concert Hall Dec. 10.       True, I wish that James Levine's original program had been retained, for Bartok's "Miraculous Mandarin" Suite and Wagner's Prelude ...

► Read the entire post

    Random thoughts and comments about some happenings in recordland ...     The news that EMI's recordings division is about to be gobbled up by Vivendi's Universal behemoth – unless the EU tries to block it – will set a lot of collectors' minds reeling.  Ironic that Deutsche Grammophon – originally spawned as a German spinoff of EMI's ancestor, the Gramophone Company – is now part of the group that will take over its parent.  Amazing that virtually all of the ...

► Read the entire post

A giant has fallen before his time should have been up – and I got the news minutes after it was announced on my Apple MacBook laptop.  Which shouldn't come as a surprise, since my laptop has become my office, my typewriter, my publishing arm, my archive, my primary research tool, my CD and DVD player and burner, my satellite music collection, my television set, my mailbox, my newspaper, my photo lab, my musical instrument, my road map, my weatherman, my shopping mall, my consumer guide ... and I'll bet that's not even ...

► Read the entire post

       I’m listening right now to a treasurable recording of Kurt Sanderling – who died Saturday just two days short of his 99th birthday – conducting Brahms’ Symphony No. 3 with the Dresden Staatskapelle circa 1971 or ‘72.  It’s slow but beautiful and flowing, each phrase curling up and inevitably leading to the next with a firm pulse underlying everything.  There are other roads to Brahms 3 than this, but while you’re immersed in Sanderling’s vision, you ...

► Read the entire post

      During the Franz Welser-Möst regime – which looks to be a long one – the Cleveland Orchestra’s preferred recording medium has been the DVD over all audio formats.  So far, this policy has paid off with an excellent collection of Bruckner videos that may turn into a complete cycle if we’re lucky. Symphonies Nos. 5, 7 and 9 have been out for awhile; No. 5 is the pick of the lot with the added advantage of being performed in Bruckner’s own reverberant St. Florian Church ...

► Read the entire post

      There is a growing stack of new Mahler DVDs on my shelf, and it cannot be a coincidence that this cornucopia of video has come during the centenary year of Mahler’s death.  For decades, Mahler on video consisted mainly of Leonard Bernstein’s pioneering, still-magnetic Mahler video symphony cycle of the 1970s (plus one last outburst of songs in 1988-90) and a cloud of dust.  But Mahler belongs to the whole world now, and while this new burst of video doesn’t replace Lenny’s unique ...

► Read the entire post

       An esteemed, incorrigibly witty Canadian colleague of mine likes to compare the relationship Canada has with the United States with that of a mouse and an elephant.  The mouse always notices the presence of the elephant, whereas the elephant is rarely aware of the mouse.         That says it perfectly.  We in the U.S. hardly ever hear a word about events in Canada – our next-door neighbor with about a ninth of our population but a larger land mass – in the ...

► Read the entire post