Los Angeles

Classical Music, Conductors, Los Angeles, Media, Online, Orchestras, Websites

Forget the “Maestro” and “Dudamel”, just call me Gustavo

Received a blurb from the LA Phil the other day, which in all caps proudly declares “LA PHIL LAUNCHES MICROSITE CELEBRATING INCOMING MUSIC DIRECTOR GUSTAVO DUDAMEL”  … Kaboom!… Here’s the relevant bit (my bolds):

On September 24, 2009, the LA Phil launched a microsite celebrating the arrival of incoming Music Director Gustavo Dudamel. Introducing audiences worldwide to Gustavo in new and engaging ways, the comprehensive microsite, located at http://www.laphil.com/gustavo, features videos such as Gustavo’s first rehearsal with the YOLA Expo Center Youth Orchestra, the LA Phil’s video tribute “Welcome Gustavo,” and the press conferences unveiling Gustavo’s inaugural season and appointment as 11th Music Director of the LA Phil.  Visitors can also take a multimedia journey through Gustavo’s life with tiling photographs, video and biographical text.  The latest Gustavo-related news and newly recorded audio and video content will be added to the microsite as Gustavo’s exciting inaugural season progresses.

The Gustavo microsite prominently features a brand-new interactive online game and iPhone application, Bravo Gustavo, designed by Hello Design to simulate the experience of conducting an orchestra.  The Bravo Gustavo online game invites users to interact with Gustavo and the LA Phil performing Berlioz’ Symphonie Fantastique (music courtesy of Deutsche Grammophon).  The Bravo Gustavo iPhone application adapts the mobile device into a conducting baton, utilizing the accelerometer to directly affect the overall tempo and note duration of the music – just like a real conductor.

Wow, conductor as new “my best friend forever”, and it seems like the only thing missing from the package is the action figure. I suppose if the classical world had been cool enough to do a “Bravo Herbert” or “Welcome Antal” back in the day, the crowds would never have left.

by Steve Layton
CDs, Chamber Music, Classical Music, Composers, Contemporary Classical, Festivals, File Under?, Los Angeles, New York, Orchestras

Tonight at BAM: US Premiere of work by Enrico Chapela at Brooklyn’s Nuevo Latino Festival

Saturday night at 8 pm, the Brooklyn Philharmonic, under the direction of Michael Christie, gives the US premiere of Enrico Chapela’s Noctámbulos, a piece for rock trio and orchestra. Chapela will also participate in a panel discussion on Latin American Identity in Music at 4:30 (details below).

Chapela is a composer on the rise; Boosey and Hawkes added him to their roster in 2008 and he’s recently received several high profile commissions. I spoke with him on Thursday about the BAM event and his other activities. Born in Mexico, he started out his musical career as a rock guitarist, playing SXSW with a band in the nineties. He currently resides in Paris, where he’s finished a Master’s degree at the University of Paris and is pursuing a Ph.D. His dissertation topic is the two-hundred year history of symphonic music in Mexico.

An earlier version of Noctámbulos, titled Lo Nato es Neta, can be heard on Chapela’s debut CD, Antagonica. Lo Nato es Neta is scored for rock trio and acoustic quintet. Chapela readily acknowledges the cross-pollination present in the work, “It explores a wide range of rock styles – everything from metal to Pink Floyd to King Crimson.” I hear a fair bit of Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention in its juxtaposition of rock solos with angular melodic fragments, spiky post-tonal verticals, and Stravinskyian ostinati.

The piece was entered in a composition competition, but didn’t place. Happily, one of the judges dissented from the majority and separately arranged a commission for the Dresden Sinfoniker. The result: Noctámbulos, a revisioning of Lo Nato es Neta that features the rock trio as concerto soloists. It also incorporates more improvisation.

This is an exciting time for Chapela. He’s playing the guitar part in the premiere. Simultaneously, he’s working hard to finish a commission for the LA Philharmonic. “At first, I thought it would be too much to be the solo guitarist at the Brooklyn Philharmonic performances while trying to finish the piece for LA. But then I realized, who could ask for a better gig than this? Between practicing and writing, I told my wife to not expect to see me much for a couple of months!”

CROSSING BORDERS: A discussion on Latin American identity in music

Saturday, January 31, 2009 / BAM Hillman Attic Studio, at 4:00PM

Moderated by Carmen Helena Téllez / Invited panelists: Gabriela Lena Frank, Enrico Chapela, and Paul Desenne

NUEVO LATINO MAINSTAGE – Saturday January 31, 2009 at 8:00 PM

BAM Howard Gilman Opera House

Michael Christie, conductor; Virginie Robilliard, violin; Chapela Trio; Enrico Chapela, guitar; Jesús Lara, bass; Luis Miguel Costero, drums

Gabriela Lena Frank: Leyendas: An Andean Walkabout (NY Premiere of string orchestra version)

Paul Desenne: The Two Seasons (NY Premiere)

Enrico Chapela: Noctámbulos (US Premiere)

by Christian Carey
Contemporary Classical, Los Angeles

New music for a new year: Los Angeles is its own festival

January has brought a richness of performances of contemporary music. At the half-way point on the calendar this has already been a marvelous month, but there’s much more to come. Each of the major music organizations across the county seems to have decided on some exceptional music. I haven’t been able to attend everything: too many tickets, too many nights. Wouldn’t it be nice to be paid to attend the concerts? Wouldn’t it be nice just to afford them all? Oh, well, the old suit will last another year or so before replacement.

The Phil is leading the way, of course, as appropriate to our major music organization. The number of concerts left for Salonen as Music Director is now down to single digits. His valedictory concerts will be of Stravinsky the radical-reactionary (Oedipus Rex and Symphony of Psalms). But the concerts before that all focus on some brilliant new works, Philharmonic commissions or co-commissions. Yes, we’ll have Dudamel, but we’ll certainly miss Esa-Pekka! Last Sunday when he walked on stage to begin the first concert of the year, the applause continued as he stepped onto the podium. The applause continued. He finally had to turn to the audience to acknowledge their welcome before Disney Hall became still enough for the concert.

The first program of the year gave an engrossing, beautiful new work by Arvo Part, Symphony No. 4, Los Angeles. In a rare gesture, Universal Edition published the score of the work, making it available on the internet in December. The symphony is scored for strings, harp, and percussion; often it presents the sound of a single instrument vibrating in the surrounding silence. The work is a meditation, and the thoughts of the symphony are of angels, not of the city named in the subtitle. While a meditation, the work is not restful and offers no easy resolution; the music is tonal, but wavers between major and minor. The score reveals (see the third movement in particular) how Part has the orchestra in two different keys. I had not realized how much the music had drawn me into its own world until we returned from intermission. I had thought that it would be jarring to end the music with Ax playing the Brahms first piano concerto. I found, instead, that the muscular tonality of the Brahms came as a release. The recording of the Part will be a must-buy.

And then this week, another noteworthy work: Kaija Saariaho‘s La Passion de Simone (2006), with Dawn Upshaw in the Peter Sellars production featuring Michael Schumacher as dancer. This Phil co-commission has been withdrawn from the past two seasons, first because of health, last year because of scheduling conflicts. Oh, the wait was worth it. The music shimmers. Dawn Upshaw is peerless. The Sellars dramatization amplifies the language. I must admit, however, that I am not captured by the personality and philosophy of Simone Weil, but I could just concentrate on the music. One point on the artistry of Dawn Upshaw. We could see a TV screen above the stage, facing down to the stage. We wondered what that was used for. Then we saw that Upshaw spent a climactic scene flat on her back in the position of a crucifixion. The screen was for her to see Salonen while singing from the floor. This work is being presented in alternation with the premiere of a new work for orchestra and two pianos by Louis Andriessen. We hear this on Sunday afternoon.

The marvelous Jacaranda series resumed its two-year season celebrating Messiaen. We spoke while walking from the parking structure that we wouldn’t be able to see and talk to Betty Freeman that night, and we will miss her. Jacaranda presented a lovely program of Messiaen and his students, Boulez, Murail, Benjamin, and a follower, Takemitsu. The musicians are skilled, the works are well-selected. We now re-schedule other tickets to attend a Jacaranda concert. Our revitalized Monday Evening Concerts presented an evening of American music. Their program this week started at a high with Kazi Pitelka playing Morton Feldman‘s The Viola in My Life II (1971), and this seems to resonate with some of the sounds of the rest of the month. And we had the first L. A. performances of Rzewski‘s Pocket Symphony (2000) and 96 (2003). We didn’t have tickets for the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra and their performance, with Yo-Yo Ma, of Golijov’s Azul, in its West Coast premiere.

And coming up we have the Phil’s Green Umbrella concert and Southwest Chamber Music and its program of music by composers who are women: Gabriela Ortiz, Joan Huang, Lera Auerbach, and Thea Musgrave.

by JerryZ
Chamber Music, Just Intonation, Los Angeles, Microtonalism

The Seventeen Lyrics of Li Po of Harry Partch

Harry Partch playing the adapted viola, photo by Fred Lyon

 

So with all pleasures of life.

All things pass with the east-flowing water.

I leave you and go—when shall I return?

Let the white roe feed at will among the green crags,

Let me ride and visit the lovely mountains!

How can I stoop obsequiously and serve the mighty ones!

It stifles my soul.

His Dream of the Skyland – A Farewell Poem.

 

Li Po (Li Bai) (~701-763 CE) is universally recognized as one of the greatest Chinese poets of the Tang period, or for that matter, of the entire Chinese literary tradition. His poetry shows the influences of the interwoven philosophical religions of his time, Taoism, Neo Taoism, Confucianism and Buddhism, as well as a particular fondness for nature and wine. Well educated, highly regarded by everyone, he had lifelong trouble securing a post and spent his life as a wanderer, preternaturally creative and prolific. Over one thousand poems remain, along with the stories of his improvisations, drunkenness and generosity. Legend has it that he drowned while trying to grasp the moon in the water, but he is generally regarded to have committed suicide after leaving a farewell poem (partially quoted above). (This poem is the 10th of the set of 17 Lyrics).

 

The parallels between Partch and Li Bai are so striking as to imagine that they are the same person, re-cycled after a period of 1200 years. Hoboes, brilliant, often drunk, deeply admired, suspicious of authority, unable to find peace or security, and spectacularly creative, they are the irritating grain of sand in society’s eye that add the full dimension to our humanity – the rememberers of forgotten things.

“I am first and last a composer. I have been provoked into becoming a musical theorist, and instrument builder, a musical apostate, and a musical idealist, simply because I have been a demanding composer. I hold no wish for the obsolescence of the widely heard instruments and music. My devotion to our musical heritage is great — and critical. I feel that more ferment is necessary for a healthy musical culture. I am endeavoring to instill more ferment.” –Harry Partch 1942

 

In 1930, the composer Harry Partch (1901-1974) broke with Western European tradition and forged a new music based on a more primal, corporeal integration of the elements of speech, rhythm and performance using the intrinsic music found in the spoken word, the principles of acoustic resonance and just-intonation. Borrowing from the intonation systems of the ancient Greeks, he created a scale of 43-tones per octave, in part to enable him to capture the nuances of speech in his music, and to forge purer harmony. (more…)

by Ted Mook
Contemporary Classical, Los Angeles

Last Night in L.A.: Eve Beglarian Premiere

The Los Angeles Master Chorale gave the premiere of a new work by Eve Beglarian for full chorus and two Persian instruments.  The work is “Sang”, Persian for “stone”, taken from a Persian parable that appealed to Beglarian; she added texts in Hebrew and Septuagint Greek from the Hebrew scriptures.  Her program notes are here.  An English translation of the texts was given in the program, but no attempt was made to provide surtitles; the thing to do was to relax and be absorbed into the sounds.

The work was the first in a planned series of commissions for the Master Chorale, LA is the World, in which a particular cultural background will be honored in works for chorus.  With her selection of a Persian parable at the center of the work, Beglarian decided to link Persian musicians with western singers to create a work compatible with both traditions.  Supporting the vocalists, sometimes as accompanists, sometimes in the lead, were Manoochehr Sadeghi playing the santur, a 72-string hammered dulcimer, and Pejman Hadadi on percussion, notably several sizes of daf, a frame drum, and the tombak, a goblet-shaped drum.  The instrumental duets seemed to successfully blend improvisational heritage with western structures so that the flow between chorus and instruments was smooth.

A commission of this sort should have incorporated recording and distribution.  It deserves hearing.  I’d certainly like to hear it again, but it may take the Chorale three years or so before the work gets on another program.  But are there that many brave boards out there, boards that will program a choral work with words in Persian, Hebrew and Greek that requires Persian instrumentalists?

The Master Chorale audience is really fairly open to newer music, especially for an audience that makes me seem young when I mingle with them.  The program last night began with James MacMillan’s Magnificat (1999) and Nunc Dimittis (2000) with David Goode on the WDCH organ.  The second half of the program was Arvo Part’s Te deum (1984-1985; 1992 revision).  This masterwork requires a string orchestra, piano, recorded tape of a wind harp giving the sustaining pitches throughout the work, and three choruses.  Grant Gershon placed the men’s chorus in the left-center rafters and the women’s chorus in the right center, placing the mixed chorus on stage behind the strings.  The sound was lovely.

The Part work was also a nice link to the Philharmonic’s “Shadow of Stalin” series of programs, which ended that afternoon with the orchestra playing Prokofiev’s complete Alexander Nevsky to accompany the Eisenstein film.  The music is glorious, but the film isn’t.  Imagine putting together the three worst WW II films out of Republic studios, and you approach the jingoism of the film.  (The music was a re-thinking of the film score, starting from Prokofiev’s cantata and applying it backwards to fit the movie, ignoring some dialogue to increase the musical values.)  The preceding Thursday was a concert of composers searching for musical freedom and using folk music to reflect nationalism and implied anti-Soviet resistance.  Ligeti’s Concert Romanesc (1951) was an Enesco-like work that was still controversial enough to get banned for twenty years after a single rehearsal.  Lutoslawski’s brilliantly-colored Concerto for Orchestra (1954) was able to pass.  Karel Husa’s powerful Music for Prague 1968 was the statement of an emigre against the re-conquering of Czechoslovakia after the brief “Prague Spring”.

Last week’s concert was by three young composers, writing wild music until the 1936 crackdown came.  Gavriil Popov wrote a suite from his Komsomol Patron of Electrification, which opened the concert; the score was ready for release when the Government objected to contemporary music and it went unheard for 46 years.  Alexander Mosolov wrote The Iron Foundry in 1926-1927 as part of a ballet (which was actually performed in Hollywood Bowl in 1931 as part of a different ballet) — great clanging music by a composer not able to adapt to new rules.  And there was a young composer named Shostakovich who wrote astounding operas:  The Nose and Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District.  We heard the composer’s suite from the former and the Act I, Scene 3 from the latter (the scene with the xxx-rated trombone part).  Shostakovich survived, of course, but never again with the freedom, and never another opera.

by JerryZ
Bass, Classical Music, Contemporary Classical, Los Angeles

Last Night in L.A.: Concerto for Bass

The International Society of Bassists wanted a new concerto for their favorite instrument, and they wanted orchestras to play the work rather than merely filing its name in the list of new works that they might think about some future year.  With help of their members they formed a consortium of 15 orchestras to back the work, enabling each participating orchestra to list themselves as a co-commissioner, giving each a “premiere” (even if merely a local one) at a bargain price.

John Harbison was commissioned to write the concerto, and yesterday the Los Angeles Philharmonic performed his “Concerto for Bass Viol and Orchestra” (2005), performed by our principal of 30-some years, Dennis Trembly.  This is a fairly short concerto; its three movements require a little less than 20 minutes.  Harbison used a slightly reduced orchestra, and in Disney Hall Trembly’s bass was audible throughout the work’s range of pitch and technique.  The work was particularly successful in having the bass become a singer, with several long, lyric melodies.  Less successful was exploration of the top notes.  The work could have used more fire, perhaps, or more emotion to add some force to the pleasant sounds.  The work didn’t have a single consistent musical style, having elements from a wide range of musical history, so it did have color and interest.  It was played as the center work between Janacek’s “Vixen” suite and the Dvorak 7th, and the Harbison worked with its companions.  Salonen is away all month and we’ve had a series of bland concerts with a series of guest conductors, but yesterday’s conductor, Carlos Kalmar, was a pleasant surprise.

by JerryZ
Classical Music, Composers, Contemporary Classical, Los Angeles, Music Events

Last Night in L.A.: The Many Facets of Brett Dean

Last night’s Green Umbrella concert of new music was the first concert in Los Angeles solely comprising Australian music, and it was a real success.  As the second part of the Phil’s recognition of Dean as composer, he was given freedom to select the program and his own role.  So we saw Brett Dean as composer, as performer on viola, as conductor, as commentator, as programmer, and — in all of these — as effective communicator.  This was an evening that deserved to be recorded and made available for download so that more than the thousand in Disney Hall last night could hear this music and those performances.  Dean, himself, is poorly represented on recordings.  I find several including Dean as performer on viola, but only three containing a short composition each.  To add to the pain, the most recent of these was a commission from the Berlin which is included on Rattle’s new release of Holst’s “Planets; the work, “Komarov’s Fall”, is on the recording — but Dean is not identified as composer so that an Amazon search on Dean will fail to find the work, and an iTunes search will locate the recording but fail to tell you which “song” is the reason for the match.

The major works of the evening were Dean’s.  In the first half we heard his “Voices of Angels” (written in 1996, the oldest work on the program, as Dean pointed out).  He wrote the work while still in Berlin, premiered by Berlin colleagues in the small hall of the Philharmonie.  This work is for Schubert’s quintet:  violin, viola, cello, bass, piano; by coincidence we heard the “Trout” on Monday night, and “Voices of Angels” (of similar length) could hold its own on a program including both, a program intended for less adventurous ears.  I suppose the caveat is that the players must be good enough to handle the advanced techniques asked of them by Dean. 

The climax of the second half of the concert was Dean’s “Pastoral Symphony” (2000), written on his return from Berlin to Australia and his rediscovery of Australian spaces and natural resources, specifically including its birds.  Also impacting the piece was his recognition of the loss of environment from expansion and modernization; in the music a bucolic environment at the start of the work becomes largely supplanted by construction, by shopping centers, by freeways.  The work is a 20-minute movement for a small chamber orchestra with prominent winds and percussion:  3 violins, 3 violas, 2 cellos, bass; flute, oboe, 2 clarinets, bassoon, 2 horns, 2 trumpets, trombone, tuba; 2 percussion, piano; sampler.  I joined what seemed to be almost all of the audience in liking this work very, very much; however, as Dean told the audience, by a large margin this was the largest audience for a new music concert he had experienced — and the most responsive.  We liked it.  Salonen was just a few seats away; he like it, too.

The program began with the first U.S. performance of Liza Lim’s “Songs Found in Dream” (2005), commissioned by the Salzberg Festival and premiered by Klangforum Wien.  Lim received a Phil commission, writing “Ecstatic Architecture” for the first season in Disney Hall.  I wasn’t enthusiastic then, and the newer work last night didn’t communicate to me.  My wife says the problem is with me; she said that the work clearly evoked the images in aboriginal art and in petroglyphs, and she was surprised I didn’t hear this.  Lim’s web site includes music of three of her compositions.

For the second half of the program Dean introduced his younger (27) colleague, Anthony Pateras, who came on stage looking as if he’d much rather be in a club or a studio, and not in this large auditorium with audience sitting in orderly rows.  (His web site gives a clue of why he might feel that.) He seemed much more relaxed when he returned on stage to acknowledge the continuing applause after his first work; later, after performing the second of two pieces, you could see him having his own “Sally Fields” moment:  “They like me, they really like me!”  I hope someone was taping this for his records, a few years from now.

The first Pateras piece was “Chromatophore” (2003) for amplified strings (2 of each instrument).  The name comes from the pigment cell used to change colors by chameleons or fish.  Through technique and amplification the work uses strings almost as percussion instruments; sustained tones (i.e., traditional string sounds) are minimized.  The work was developed through improvizations, and while it now has a written structure, each player has cells in which independent playing is required.  Within the approach of limiting sustained notes, the work explores the pitches of thee common diatonic scale.  The music was challenging and stimulating.

Pateras’ solo work was a movement from a work-in-progress, “Continuums & Chasms, Movement vii”.  This is for fully-prepared piano, in which each note of the piano is altered.  For this work, Pateras seemed to structure the alterations into clusters: in some, sounding of a pitch was minimized; in others, the pitch and tonal color were altered in various ways, producing gong-like effects, for example.  He uses very rapid fingerings as he moves across the keyboard, and the uses of different types of sound creates very interesting colorings.  Both Pateras works were performed in U.S. premieres.  I lack the language to convey how interesting these pieces were as music, not merely as sound. 

The re-birth of Monday Evening Concerts is achieved!  The brochure for the 2006-2007 season has been released and is shown on the web site.  Four concerts!  I only wish that at least one of the four concerts was for local new music and that another was for other American new music.  My private campaign is for them to hire Kyle Gann as one of the curators.  Well, maybe next year.  Just having the program alive is accomplishment enough for now.

by JerryZ
Classical Music, Composers, Los Angeles, Orchestras

Last Night in L.A.: Brett Dean (Part 1)

Six years ago, Sequenza21 published an interesting interview with Brett Dean.  The violist who was once the youngest member of the Berlin Philharmonic was beginning to be recognized as a composer.  This was about the time he made his first appearance with members of the LA Philharmonic in a “Green Umbrella” concert of new music, performing his work “Intimate Decisions” for viola.  S21, typically prescient, gave a lede to the interview stating that if you hadn’t heard of Dean yet, “You will.  You will.”

This season Dean is the first contemporary composer to be given a spotlight by the LA Phil, in two programs.  Yesterday’s subscription concert featured Dean’s “Viola Concerto” (2005) with the composer as soloist and the full orchestra conducted by Salonen.  Salonen brought out a microphone to introduce Dean to the audience, commenting on how rare (these days) it is to hear a composer performing his own concerto, much less to be so accomplished in both performance and composition. The Phil was one of the co-commissioners for this significant work.  Dean relates that it was initially written as only two movements, but that he then felt the piece needed an introductory movement to provide a frame-setting for the musical ideas.

The first movement, “Fragment”, establishes Dean’s sound, quietly growing in space.  “Pursuit” then places the solo viola in a chase with the orchestra.  Dean’s notes for the work refer to this movement as what could have happened if Paul Hindemith had played in a band with Tom Waits, an interesting idea.  There are occasional respites from the chase, including a lovely and technically-demanding cadenza which also includes elements of bird calls.  The relationship to Australia’s spaciousness and to its birds is a recurring element in several of Dean’s compositions.  “Veiled and Mysterious” returns us to space and quiet of the first movement.  The viola seems to meditate, and then it leads the orchestra into a re-examination of ideas of the first two movements.  The viola, finally at peace, enters into a closing dialog with the English horn.

Dean made great use of sonic color from his orchestra, and the sound in Disney Hall was responsive.  In the third movement, for example, a solo cello begins the orchestral accompaniment, with tremolo from violas; a second solo cello joins in, then a third, then a fourth.  Other strings join the tremolo and then add their own lines.  Bowed percussion add cool, metallic sounds to color the interactions.  This is attractive music, music willing to be introspective as well as active, music able to take advantage of quiet as well as to build sound.

The program for the concert built in color.  Haydn’s Symphony 82 (“The Bear”) began the program.  Following intermission, Salonen conducted a sonic spectacular bringing out every possible color in Ravel’s orchestration of “Pictures at an Exhibition”.

On Saturday, the LA Opera did a really good job of community outreach.  They presented two performances of a new work “Concierto para Mendez” with music by Lee Holdridge and libretto by Richard Sparks.  This is a musical celebration of the life of the trumpeter Rafael Mendez; it combines elements of documentary, opera, and concerto for trumpet.  Soloists from the Opera provided the singers and the LA Opera Orchestra provided the musical continuity and support.  Mendez had an amazing life:  dragooned into Pancho Villa’s revolutionary army as a trumpeter at the age of 10; immigrant to the United States as a laborer at 20; discovered as a musician and becoming a member of the Russ Morgan and Rudy Vallee orchestras; injured in an accident and having to readjust and retrain his embouchure; first chair trumpet for the MGM Orchestra, the best of the studios, at 35; starting a life as soloist and teacher at 40.  Six local trumpet students were selected to appear as his students in the work.  The performances were free. 

by JerryZ
Classical Music, Los Angeles, Opera

Last Night in L.A.: “What to Wear”

“What to Wear” ended its all-too-short run yesterday.  When you find out its schedule for performance in New York, get your tickets right away.  Better yet, get tickets for two dates (or more), because you’ll want more than one evening.  As reported and commented on last week, this is the opera with music by Michael Gordon and libretto, design, direction, and occasional voice-overs by Richard Foreman.  Gordon’s music is a pleasure to hear and feel.  (I wouldn’t have minded a few fewer decibels.)  David Rosenboom, one of whose sidelights is being dean of the CalArts School of Music, was music director and he led a pulsing, vibrant performance.  An ensemble of seven musicians (two keyboards, two violins, bass, electric guitar, percussion), all superior talents.

The opera reaches an emotional and philosophical climax in the scene that contemplates and presents the inevitable results when a duck enters a fine restaurant.  Following this catharsis, the heroine’s wondering whether or not she is still beautiful and her realization that golf can still be part of her life gave closure to those of us in the audience.  Foreman’s text and direction allows for some individual interpretations by the audience.  For example, one reviewer believes that the four heroines (two sopranos, alto, and tenor) are sisters, while I feel they are merely different aspects of the same physical person.  The four soloists and the six women of the singing chorus gave excellent performances, as did the eleven gender-free members of the movement ensemble. Thank you, CalArts and REDCAT.

Watch for news, and go see this.  See it twice.  It’s great fun.

by JerryZ