By Ted AYALA The announcement of the authors appointed to write the arguments for a handful of ballot measures appearing in the forthcoming election was made at Tuesday’s Glendale City Council meeting. Members of the public, as well as city government, will be drafting arguments for and against Measures C, D, E, and O. Their […]
By Ted AYALA Good things come in threes, so goes the saying. But when it comes to the Glendale Philharmonic, a strong case can be made for great things coming in fives. The orchestra will be inaugurating its fifth season on Saturday, Jan. 10 at the First Baptist Church in Glendale (209 N. Louise […]
By Ted AYALA It’s good to know that in an age when job security has become passé rock stars can still find work even if they’re no longer considered hip. In fact, they can take comfort in knowing that instead of having to play at car wash openings or cavorting with groupies who may not […]
By Ted AYALA 2014 proved a few things: 1) The major classical labels are pretty much dead. 2) The “minor” labels have done a great job picking up their slack. 3) Whodathunkit? Classical music is alive after all! Another thing – it’s hard to pick just five CDs as my favorite of the year. Where […]
By Ted AYALA A ballot measure proposing a tax on visitors to the city will be going forward before Glendale voters in next year’s election. Council voted unanimously in a 4–0 vote (Councilmember Laura Friedman was absent) in favor of including the measure, which would hike the current transient occupancy tax (TOT) from 10% to […]
By Ted AYALA Thirty years after its premiere, Hans Werner Henze’s opera “The English Cat,” which was performed last week at USC’s Bing Theatre by members of that university’s Thornton School of Music, retains its power to disturb. In an era where “class warfare” has reentered the popular lexicon, not to mention an awareness that […]
By Ted AYALA Grumpy Cat may be pretty, well, grumpy. But she has nothing on the feline protagonists of Hans Werner Henze’s 1982 opera, “The English Cat,” which the USC Thornton School of Music will be presenting on Nov. 21 and 23. Edward Bond, the librettist of Henze’s opera, took his inspiration from Balzac’s “Sorrows […]
By Ted AYALA Attempts to put forward tax increases before the public are gaining steam yet again. Glendale City Council on Tuesday night directed staff to draft out options for ballot initiatives in favor of tax increases. The latest attempt follows a stillborn effort to place similar measures on the ballot in June’s election. Those […]
By Ted AYALA The 20th century’s greatest innovation in the field of opera is without a doubt the way that this centuries-old art form was infused with flexibility. With the breezy and brief operas of Milhaud & Hindemith, among others composed in the 1920s, the imposing grandiosity then best represented by Wagner was swept away […]
By Ted AYALA The trailing off of one’s final years, the realization that one is indeed mortal and that one is closer to the end than they are to the beginning – the acknowledgement of those facts, or better still the resignation to them, has perhaps more than anything else been one of the key […]