Richard S. Ginell: From Out of the West

    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

     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,

     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

     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

      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

     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.

By Richard S. Ginell

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

    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

By Richard S. Ginell: From Out of the West

Among living conductors in the 1980s, the three said to be at the summit were Herbert von Karajan, Leonard Bernstein and Sir Georg Solti. They departed one by one...

     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

     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,

    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

      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

By Richard S. Ginell

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.

By Richard S. Ginell: From Out of the West This has been a year of centenaries for a number of 20th-century podium giants born in 1912 – Solti, Sanderling, Markevitch, 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.

   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

     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,

By Richard S. Ginell

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

     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,"

     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