Live Music
Classical music is counterculture. I threw that out there in passing regarding the Alice Cooper narrated Peter and the Wolf. Let’s look at it for a little while more. It is always important to define …
The time has come to baptize this little playlist. We’ve worked around the Germanic pantheon of composers with Beethoven, Mahler, and Bruckner but it’s time to bring the lumber and add Wagner. This scene, Lohengrin’s …
Saturday night’s San Diego Symphony concert was an okay attempt at combining music and art. It was a pretty idea but the execution of the concert was pretty stale. I assume the pre-concert lecture got …
Any worthwhile lover of classical music knows that it has always been somewhat counter-culture in one way or another. Alice Cooper has been considered counter-culture from time to time, but he has passed through into …
I understand that everyone is amped up for beer week but there’s some great music lined up this week as well. Point Loma Opera Theater is giving the San Diego premiere of Nino Rota’s The …
Sarah Chang playing Bruch and Tchaikovsky Symphony No. 6: Pathetique was the moon and stars on Saturday night at Symphony Hall. There was a sunny piece of new music by Judd Greenstein, but as soon …
A Martin Scorsese film about Leonard Bernstein has been confirmed as an upcoming project. Bernstein was the high priest of classical music in the United States and one of a handful of conductors who thrived …
For the esoteric pick of the week we’re going with Gavin Bryars and his epic 1993 remastering of his 1975 composition Jesus’ Blood Never Failed Me Yet. When I first heard Jesus' Blood it was …
I haven’t taken umbrage with anything in a while. What good is a column without some umbrage? Today’s umbrage is brought to you by the term diva. Nowadays, we have three-year-olds wearing "diva in training" …
Valery Gergiev, our conductor in video number three, has been accused, in the media, of being pro-Putin and for anti-gay laws in Russia. An article of defiance showed up in The Guardian at the start …
Saint-Saëns Danse Macabre is a somewhat sterile version of the “Dance of Death”. In this version death shows up at midnight on Halloween and calls all the other dead folk together for a party. There …
We’re going to revisit the Halloween classic: Modest Mussorgsky’s Night on the Bald Mountain. For years, Mussorgsky had been considering several large scale projects based on spooky Russian folklore. He looked at creating an opera …
“There is no longer a single idea explaining everything, but an infinite number of essences giving a meaning to an infinite number of objects. The world comes to a stop, but also lights up.” — …
Günter Wand isn’t a household name in the United States, but in Britain and Germany he is one of the most admired conductors on the 20th Century. Wand came into this admiration late in life. …
We haven't had an esoteric pick of the week for a while and it just so happens that the San Diego Symphony has selected one for us. They are performing Harmonielehre by John Adams this …