One doesn’t often get the chance to hear a performance by a First Prize winner and Gold Medalist of the International Chopin Piano Competition, but that chance occurred Friday night at Meng Concert Hall in the Clayes Performing Arts Center at California State University Fullerton with a performance by Dang Thai Son, who earned the [...]

Alexander Scriabin’s music was, arguably, the catalyst that set in motion Sergei Rachmaninoff’s career as a touring pianist. Synthesizing elements from Chopin and Russian music with uniquely personal spiritual beliefs, his art captivated audiences, as well as fellow musicians.
Yet after his untimely death in 1915 at the age of 43, his music would come to [...]

The popular notion which finds that Western classical music is so much “dead white men’s music” is a typical, if dutifully ignorant one which is held not only by people otherwise unaware of the genre, but even by some of its professional practitioners. In fact, even in Beethoven’s time non-white peoples living in Europe and [...]

Peter Oundjian, formerly of the Tokyo String Quartet, has put his chamber music days behind him and has now taken up the baton, accruing to the critical plaudits he has earned over a lifetime as a chamber music partner. Southern California audiences will get an opportunity to hear him in this latest guise when he [...]

The milestone represented by the marking of one’s 80th birthday is doubtless a profound one, a token of the human activity—present and long past—which has unspooled before them over the decades, with its memories imprinting themselves upon the soul like static images burned onto a projector screen. But for an artist like Tigran Mansurian, who [...]

Internationally renowned ballet stars and prominent role models Ashley Murphy and Brooklyn Mack guest star in Los Angeles Youth Ballet’s critically acclaimed production of The Nutcracker by award-winning choreographer Andrea Paris-Gutierrez, which caps the holiday season with four performances Dec. 21 to 23 at Glendale’s Alex Theatre.
Enhancing the rich compendium of this much beloved classic, Paris-Gutierrez’s [...]

A chill breeze set in late Sunday afternoon in Downtown Los Angeles, wafting through the skyscrapers, and setting trees swaying with a rustling that was a harbinger of the winter that will arrive in a matter of days. Its bite was already felt at the tips of one’s fingers, in the hollow of one’s cheeks. [...]

Michael Tilson Thomas began a two-week stint with the Los Angeles Philharmonic this past weekend with performances of his own Four Preludes on Playthings of the Wind and Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 6 in B minor, Op. 74 (“Pathétique”) at Walt Disney Concert Hall.
Tilson Thomas originally composed Four Preludes in 2003, and then revised it in [...]

Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, Jean Sibelius was the most popular composer then living in the Anglosphere, not to mention in his native Scandinavia. Fame was a double-edged sword for the notoriously self-critical composer. Doubt, its flames stoked by alcoholism, gnawed away at his creative drive, aggravated further by the disdain of the modernists [...]

Philip Glass’ Satyagraha is a complicated opera with many layers of thought and artistry. At the same time, it is a minimalist work that does not follow the rules of traditional opera. In other words, it is quintessential Glass. Which means you may already have formed an opinion about whether you will like LA Opera’s [...]