The Danish String Quartet is in residency at The La Jolla Music Society from November 16 through November 23. They are presenting five concerts as a part of their Prism project. The players in the …

The San Diego Symphony is benefitting from a six-week installment of music director Rafael Payare to start the 2019-2020 season. While the orchestra has not accomplished a complete transformation, and we should not expect such …

Ring Around the Moon is a comedy of manners full of the stock characters that populate the genre. The action happens when everyone is invited up to the grand home of the Dowager Countess for …

The Royal Opera House Covent Garden has a huge problem. They’ve sold out six performances of Beethoven’s opera Fidelio next March and people are angry! The problem appears to be that the vast majority of …

The current production of Aida at the San Diego Opera is the fourth I’ve been in with the company. It is the best principal cast I’ve experienced. It is, to my great pleasure, the singer’s …

This is a funny show. It needs to be funny. If it weren’t funny it would be offensive, especially in our delicate and easily offended culture. The characters are so exaggerated that we don’t take …

Stand by folks, I’ve identified the opera problem. What opera problem? The one where audiences are declining and the audiences which do attend often can’t say if what they heard from the singers was good …

There were lines, long lines. Lines which stretched the length of the lobby and then extended around the corner. They were beautiful because everyone was in line for the opening concert of the 2019-2020 Jacobs …

The Old Globe website describes Noura as, “A riveting West Coast premiere loosely inspired by Ibsen’s A Doll’s House.” I agree, it is loosely related to A Doll’s House. Very loosely.So loosely, in fact, that …

No one in the history of recorded classical music has benefited more from media than violinist Anne-Sophie Mutter. At age 13 was selected by Herbert von Karajan. At age 15 she was recorded for the …

I’ve made no secret of the fact that I am a Hershey Felder fan. My fandom is based on three of his productions, the most recent of which I saw on Saturday night, September 14 …

If a show is only as good as its villain, then Amadeus is a great show. The title might refer to Mozart, but the show opens and closes with Salieri, the villain. The play, by …

The new music director of the Berlin Philharmonic, Kirill Petrenko, is receiving some flak for his opening concerts with the orchestra. He is too conservative with his programming. In the words of Alex Ross, critic …

The Romeo and Juliet I saw at The Old Globe recently tried to “re-imagine” the classic tale. Leonard Bernstein’s West Side Story actually does it. The success of West Side Story lies in the fact …

The San Diego Opera opens their 2019-2020 Season with Verdi’s Aida. I will be in the chorus, for the fourth time. However, this is the first time I will be in a production which is …

I recently watched a YouTube video from a channel entitled *This is Opera*. The video demonstrated just how much Yannick Nézet-Séguin understands the human voice. If you watch the masterclasses which Nézet-Séguin held at Juilliard, …

While I generally embrace digital technology, I don’t consider myself to be an app guy. I don’t follow the top app charts in the App Store or play any games on my phone or iPad. …

“Wherefore art thou Romeo?” I’m assuming that’s a line you’ve heard before. For the purposes of this article, I’d like to change it to “Who-fore art thou Romeo?” Who were the Capulets and the Montagues? …

I’m sure you remember the old “interrupting cow” knock-knock joke. Interrupting cow wh—? MOOOO! That joke was on my mind during Miró Quartet’s all Beethoven concert on Saturday, August 11, at the La Jolla Music …

The musical Dogfight at Coronado Playhouse is set in the early 1960s at the start of the Vietnam War. In this show, we follow a cast of characters who participate in a competition to find …

According to their website, “The Miró [String] Quartet took its name and its inspiration from the Spanish artist Joan Miró, whose Surrealist works — with subject matter drawn from the realm of memory, dreams, and …

Slipped Disc website is reporting massive employee cuts by the Teatre Municipal de Santiago. The company is the national theater of Chile and is located in the capital of Santiago. The theater was inaugurated in …

Sometimes a composer becomes so well known for a particular genre of music that other pieces go unrecognized. The following are three examples of composers who are famous for one thing but who composed other …

PigPen Theatre Co., which previously produced The Old Man and the Old Moon at the Old Globe, has now adapted the award-winning children’s novel The Tale of Despereaux into a musical stage production extraordinaire. (The …

Ludwig van Beethoven was baptized on December 17, 1770, in the Electorate of Cologne, in present-day Germany. At the time, Bonn was the seat of the Electorate since Cologne had become a Free Imperial City …

The sun was setting in Beethoven’s Symphony No.6 out beyond the reaches of the Vienna Woods, which extend to the north and southwest of the “city of music”. The final glow of the music disappeared …

There are stellar performances and then there are revelations. The San Diego Mainly Mozart Festival can be counted on to provide at least one revelation per festival. So far in 2019, there have been at …

Stephen Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street is an American masterpiece of the musical theater. The show debuted in 1979 and was based on a 1973 play by Christopher Bond.However, the story …

On Saturday, June 8, The Mainly Mozart Festival Orchestra exploded into the Balboa Theatre with a performance of Handel’s Royal Fireworks Music, thereby opening their five-concert series with music director Michael Francis. Full disclosure: I …

There was a new piece of music at the closing concert of the Jacobs Masterworks Series at the San Diego Symphony. I didn’t review it because, in my opinion, it wasn’t worth reviewing. I spent …

Things just aren’t the way they used to be. At least they’re not for Don, the aging protagonist in this Old Globe-commissioned world-premiere play by JC Lee. Don can’t quite keep up with technology, or …

The San Diego Symphony concluded its Jacobs Masterworks Series with a weekend of Rachmaninoff and Beethoven. I attended the Saturday, May 25 concert. This was the third time I’d heard the Rachmaninoff Piano Concerto No. …

As an employee of the San Diego Mainly Mozart Festival, I’m not allowed to be as exuberant about the festival in these pages as I once was. It might appear as if I’m a propagandist …

When Princeton professor of classics Daphne beseeches the Grecian deities in a moment of despair, her prayer is heard and answered by the gods — the gods of comedy, that is. Who are the gods …

On April 27 and 28 the San Diego Mainly Mozart Festival presented a concert of, Two Pianos, Eight Hands. The format harkened back to the golden of age of the piano. Before the invention of …

I’ve been waiting for Charles-Camille Saint-Saëns’ Organ Symphony at The San Diego Symphony ever since it was announced last spring. The day came, Friday, May 3, and Saint-Saëns was darn near upstaged by a plucky …

The format of You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown is to string together some of the classic cartoon frames from Charles Schulz’s Peanuts comic strip and then add original music which isn’t, by any stretch …

Sweat is a great example of a play written for people who go to the theater but about people who would never go to the theater. In other words, this is a “blue-state” playwright writing …

The fire which consumed the roof of Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris has been out for a few weeks now. What many of us may not have realized at the time is the Notre Dame …

The San Diego Symphony concert on Friday, April 12 felt slow and unsettled. I was surprised. In years gone by, the combination of conductor Jahja Ling, the San Diego Symphony, and Johannes Brahms, has been …

Jerrie Cobb was an exceptional human being. So exceptional that her stress test scores exceeded those of the astronauts in the Mercury 7 Project. She is the “her” in They Promised Her the Moon. The …

“Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that.” – George Carlin. I came across this quote recently and came to an uncomfortable realization. I only say …

What’s your classical music “guilty pleasure”? This is a question all classical music devotees must answer at some point. Let’s define what a “guilty pleasure” is. A guilty pleasure has little artistic merit but has …

The San Diego Symphony has announced its 2019-2020 season and it is a rambunctious list of symphonic music. For the past few seasons, I’ve felt as though the San Diego Symphony has been getting away …

We are having a proper winter in San Diego and on Saturday, March 9, we had a proper symphony performed by the San Diego Symphony at the Jacobs Music Center. Before we received the proper …

Soprano Joélle Harvey was my favorite part of the San Diego Symphony concert on Friday, March 1, at Symphony Hall. Over the years I’ve been critical and disappointed with the vocal experience at the symphony …

I’d never seen Into The Woods live, so I took a chance and went up to Torrey Pines to see Steven Sondheim’s fractured fairytale. The production was impressive but more importantly, the emotional content of …

In speaking with a friend the other day, the topic of “10 pieces of classical music everyone should hear before they die” came up. We came up with three pieces before the parameters of the …

Diana, a new musical at the La Jolla Playhouse, is running through Sunday, April 7. Given La Jolla Playhouse’s production of Summer: The Donna Summer Musical we might expect Diana to be The Diana Ross …

Birds sing, elephants dance, and monkeys paint, but only humans turn those activities into art. And only humans evince a bottomless hunger for it: hence the endless parade of pictures on Instagram, stories on Netflix, …