ONE of the best things about spring in Southern California is the Ojai Music Festival, which runs this Thursday to Sunday. I’m looking forward to this year’s festival, which was programmed by soprano Barbara Hannigan. Ojai is – in my two decades of attending most years – always good and sometimes great. It reminds us that classical music, for all the enduring work of the past, is a living art, … [Read more...]
What’s in a Name?
This is the second in a series of posts by guest blogger Milton Moore, a longtime music critic who has covered a wide array of genres. * * * When Scott invited me to write about the new music I was sharing with him, we immediately faced a dilemma: What to call this stuff? Some of this might slip into the classical bin, but it doesn’t really target the Mozart audience … [Read more...]
Time Pauses For Valentin Silvestrov
A quarter century ago, a New England journalist named Milton Moore turned me – a lover of rock and jazz without much interest in music before Elvis Presley and Charlie Parker – on to Schubert, late Beethoven, and The Well-Tempered Clavier. Milton, who has been reviewing music, classical and otherwise, since the ‘70s, today starts a more-or-less monthly column about contemporary and … [Read more...]
The Perverse Imagination of Edward Carey
[contextly_auto_sidebar] A FEW weeks ago I got a historical novel, written for adults, called Little, based on the life of Madame Tussaud. I soon learned that my 12-year-old son had beaten me to this author's work: He'd already read Heap House, the first novel in the outlandish, fantasy-based The Iremonger Trilogy, aimed at precocious kids. I was lucky enough to speak to the writer, Edward … [Read more...]
The Art of Judy Dater
[contextly_auto_sidebar] RECENTLY I got to spend a little time with the Los Angeles-born, Bay Area-dwelling photographer Judy Dater, whose work goes back to the 1960s. Dater's been experiencing a bit of a career revival lately, with a recent show at San Francisco's de Young Museum, which has now come to Loyola Marymount University's art gallery, and a beautiful, career-spanning book of her … [Read more...]
The Music of Stanley Kubrick
[contextly_auto_sidebar] A FEW months ago I went to see a restored 70 mm print of 2001: A Space Odyssey, and film I had not seen (I realized) in decades. A number of things struck me, among them how beautifully and in some ways unconventionally Kubrick used the music in the film. (Of course, the the slow, ruminative, color-soaked grandeur of the movie was also very hard to miss.) This is of … [Read more...]
Arts Funding: The US vs the World
[contextly_auto_sidebar] NOT long ago I wrote a story about the arts in LA since the Great Recession. I spoke to so many people, some at length, that most of my reporting ended up lost in my notebook. One of the more intriguing conversations I had was with David Sefton, the former head of UCLA Live, now running arts festivals in Australia. I asked Sefton -- whose early years involved booking … [Read more...]
The Arts in Los Angeles, 10 Years After
[contextly_auto_sidebar] SOME of you may know me as the author of a reasonably gloomy book on the arts, the recession, digital technology, and our fraught cultural future. When I was approached recently by the Los Angeles Times to take a look at how cultural institutions, large and small, and individual artists had experienced the 2008 crash, the belated recovery, the ensuing housing crisis, … [Read more...]
Alexander Calder in Los Angeles
[contextly_auto_sidebar] RAISED at a time when Europe was still the center of the art world, and coming of age as New York was beginning to replace it, the sculptor Alexander Calder can seem about as "East Coast" as a strand of ivy on a stone chimney. But he spent three crucial early years in Pasadena, CA, where his parents ran with the artists of the Arroyo scene and others in Los Angeles. … [Read more...]
Rachael Worby and MUSE/IQUE
[contextly_auto_sidebar] OVER the years I've attended several musical events put on by Rachael Worby, a human dynamo who has operated several series in and around Pasadena. Worby -- who was once, I think, the First Lady of West Virginia -- seems interested in something both populist and unorthodox, and the new season of her series MUSE/IQUE launches this weekend. What follows is our recent … [Read more...]