Live Music
Album: Fretfull (2008) Artist: Wayne Riker Label: self-released Where available/price: Old Time Music Shop in North Park, Tecolote Guitar Works on Morena Boulevard, and online at CDBaby for $15 Songs: 1) The Betrayal 2) 8 …
"I play classical piano, badly -- mostly just to learn my parts," says mezzo-soprano singer Molly Wilmot, who lives in La Mesa. "My dad put me in piano lessons, where I learned music theory and …
'The gypsy jazz guitar is sweet-sounding but very fiery, almost like a flamenco jazz guitar," says Anthony Leigh Adams, cowriter and director of Primal Twang: The Legacy of the Guitar. On Thursday, September 7, this …
Even before 18-year-old pianist Eldar Djangirov played on Late Night with Conan O'Brien last June, the 2005 graduate of Linda Vista's Francis Parker School had sold over 50,000 copies of his debut CD Eldar (his …
My opera career up to a year and a half ago consisted of an appearance as a monkey in a Cal State Los Angeles production of The Magic Flute when I was 10 and as …
Having no idea what a concertmaster might be, when asked to interview Nick Grant of the San Diego Symphony, I looked up the term in my Penguin edition of A New Dictionary of Music. It …
The tenor saxophone player is missing. While someone tries to call him on a cell phone, the horn players clear their throats and the other ensemble members make the familiar, cacophonous sounds of musical instruments …
A cockroach looking down toward the empty end of a cereal box — that’s my sense of the bare stage of the San Diego Civic Theatre viewed from the first row. No trace is left …
In the mid-1950s a high school kid from El Cajon named Frank Zappa read an article in Look magazine that said Sam Goody was so good at selling records, he could unload a copy of …
At this moment, with my title written and nothing else, the former San Diego Symphony is preparing to announce the end of its silence. A month after disclosing a final plan to bankruptcy court, the …
I have no context, no history (other than remote; remoter than remote; wholly, utterly adventitious) to plug into when I listen to classical music, no environment in which to meet and greet it even halfway.
I grew up in the Midwest during the Great Depression. As was the case with most families, we were poor, but there was, nevertheless, a small upright piano in our living room. There were upright …
A decisive factor in Schoenberg’s terminal discomfort with America had to be the unsettling presence of ruling modernist pickle-herring Igor Stravinsky. Both lived in L.A., hung out in emigre circles, they had friends in common.
Unlike, say, rock-and-roll bands, classical musicians in a quartet are not required to exhibit personalities as they perform. A tuxedoed homogeneity and a serious sameness of expression will do nicely, thank you. If the performers …
Paul Hindemith is generally thought of as one of the important twentieth-century composer, along with Stravinsky, Schoenberg, Berg, Webern. Bartok. Shostakovich, and Prokofiev. He began his career as an iconoclast, shocking audiences with his dissonances; …