by Nestor Castiglione | Feb 6, 2019 | Classical Music and Opera |
Admirers and detractors of Gustav Mahler can often agree at least on one thing: The man had a rare gift for effective orchestration. From the groaning solo contrabass in the First Symphony, to the “bird of death” in the Resurrection, to the disintegrating chamber-like...
by Nestor Castiglione | Feb 6, 2019 | Classical Music and Opera |
In a recent interview, Tigran Mansurian said he considered himself a musical “grandson” of Dmitri Shostakovich, the doyen of Soviet composers during the mid-20th century. As with his friends and colleagues Alfred Schnittke, Arvo Pärt, Andrei Volkonsky and Edison...
by Nestor Castiglione | Jan 25, 2019 | Classical Music and Opera, Featured |
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...
by Nestor Castiglione | Jan 25, 2019 | Classical Music and Opera, Featured |
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...
by Nestor Castiglione | Jan 16, 2019 | Classical Music and Opera |
It was an incongruous, yet curiously stimulating mingling of incense and sulphur that awaited the listener Jan. 16 at the Glendale City Church. On one hand, the dulcet lyricism of gratitude to the Creator of creators from the future Abbé Liszt; on the other, the...
