“Music soothes the savage beast,” so the old adage goes. But can music that thrashes about like a savage beast be soothed? The premiere of Stravinsky’s “The Rite of Spring” became a watershed moment in musical modernism, not least for the unprecedented complexity and ferocity of its rhythms, aspects highlighted by the composer’s brilliant and […]
By Steve ZALL and Sid FISH Here’s what’s happening this month on the Southern California theatre scene: OPENING “The Gary Plays” chronicles the odyssey of unemployed actor Gary Bean, Mednick’s everyman/anti-hero who has been hailed by KCRW as “a sort of L.A. Leopold Bloom.” Audiences can choose to follow Gary’s journey over the course […]
By Nestor CASTIGLIONE Local pianophiles will want to keep their this Sunday. The reason: Local pianist David Rubinstein will be performing a recital of music by Beethoven, Chopin, Albéniz, Ravel, as well as his own works that afternoon. The Bronx native, who was born into a musical family, studied with George Kochevitsky, a noted Russian […]
By Charly SHELTON When you go to Knott’s Berry Farm, the theme park built on food, there is Mrs. Knott’s Chicken Dinner Restaurant – the best place to have a chicken dinner. If anywhere does it best, it’s Knott’s. When you go to Disneyland, the theme park built on the childhood magic of Disney, its […]
This review was revised on April 27 It is human nature to wrest light and hope from tragedy, however painful and inexplicable. The enigmatic yet resigned line from Samuel Beckett’s “The Unnamable” –”You must go on, I can’t go on, I’ll go on” – tersely sums up the need to eke out even a meager […]
By Néstor CASTIGLIONE In an era where the ostentatious and vulgar, where naked careerism and self-obsession dominate culture, the single-minded devotion to cultivating the beautiful can be a revolutionary act. “Pleasure is the only law,” the young Claude Debussy once retorted to his teacher. Taking inspiration from disparate sources – the rich chromaticism of Wagner, […]
By Charly and Sabrina SHELTON This week, we kick off the spring season with the first of our upcoming series on international travel in Ireland. So before we dive in with all the places to see, restaurants to dine in and hotels to stay in, there are some things you should know about the country […]
By Charly SHELTON Going to Ireland is like stepping into a different time. Not in sophistication or technology, but in practices. People aren’t rushing around as much. When idle for a moment, nobody pulls out their phones. Conversation with strangers is encouraged – real conversation, not just exchanging pleasantries. Castles and ruins surrounded by sheep […]
By Nestor CASTIGLIONE There are few moments in music that equal the poignancy of the final pages of Johann Sebastian Bach’s “Goldberg Variations.” It’s a journey that begins in the exquisitely poised “Aria,” treks across a panoply of 30 variations on that theme, and finally ends right back where it started, with a note-for-note reprise […]
By Nestor CASTIGLIONE European civilization by 1913 was a society of masks. The veneer of public gentility was crumbling irrevocably in the years since the turn of the century. The music of the era – the lingua franca of post-Wagnerian sumptuousness, which at its periphery was being nipped at by the new grammar of modernism […]