Live Music
Pacific Lyric Association Opera’s performance of Rigoletto on Saturday night was well worth seeing. Why? For one thing, this is an excellent example of how good opera can be when it is scaled down and …
Less ass, more eyes. Well, let's be realistic. Same amount of ass, and add the eyes. What am I getting at? Recently the Aviara Trio gave a performance of Rachmaninoff's Arabesque no. 1 and I …
Pacific Lyric Association is running three performances of Verdi’s masterpiece Rigoletto starting on Saturday, September 20th at 7 p.m. The venue is the Escondido Center for the Performing Arts. The remaining performances are on Friday …
If there is one idea that gets me worked up, it’s the “inspired by” idea or the “based upon” idea. O Brother Where Art Thou borrows incidents and characters from Homer’s Odyssey but I’d rather …
The Rancho Bernardo Public library has a chamber music series. Several libraries have similar programs. They are a rich source of music in San Diego County and they’re all free. I bring up Rancho Bernardo …
The 11th Annual Carlsbad Music Festival is starting September 19th and goes through the 21st. Pulitzer-prize winning composer and Bang on a Can co-founder David Lang will be in residence and his music will be …
Back to my disbelief in the 14 Huffington Post artists who are transforming opera and the fact that many critics have been wrong for many years regarding the progress of music and art. In the …
We've got more from Dr. Nicolas Reveles regarding the Bayreuth Festival. See part one of this interview here. Nic Reveles: The Tannhauser was probably the weirdest thing I have ever seen in my life. It …
This Huffington Post article about 14 artists who are transforming the future of opera has been crawling around my Facebook and Twitter. First of all, we get the "grand opera is dead" discussion from the …
The arts section of today's (September 1) New York Times has a generally bullish story on the attempted turnaround of the San Diego Opera. The headline tells the story: "Amid Choruses of Despair, an Aria …
July and August are Wagner months on account of the annual Bayreuth Festival in Bayreuth, Germany. The festival has been running since 1876, and has been impossible to attend for most of that time. However, …
The beleaguered San Diego Opera officially starts its season way early this year with a September 5 recital concert by opera power-couple Ailyn Perez and Stephen Costello at the Balboa Theatre. Both Costello and Perez …
The book, the book, the book, the book, the book.” Believe it or not, someone was singing about “the book” at the Central Library. That someone was Jennifer Wu, and it was awesome. The Central …
We’ve looked at the great, the okay, and now for the third and final segment on composer films — Ken Russell. Ken Russell defies any categories we might want to come up with. Great? Perhaps. …
If Amadeus is the only great composer movie, what about some others that are good? I’m not sure there are any that are good-to-great but there are a few that are okay-to-good. Immortal Beloved comes …