Rodney Punt

The old saying goes, when you play a country song backwards you get BACK your pick-up truck, your job, your dog and your girlfriend. Which tells us how tediously self-pitying country songs can be when they are played forward. But a precaution is...

The Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra concert of March 25 promised a world premiere of a new work by a hot young composer. Also a familiar concerto and symphony by Mozart. More than the new work, however, it was the radical makeover of a classic that garnered the evening's attention.

Mozart's...

On the far eastern fringes of Pasadena's Colorado Boulevard, beyond trendy Old Town and past the impressively façaded walls of Pasadena Community College, noteworthy buildings give way to modest shops and restaurants catering mostly to locals. In this leafy, low-key neighborhood, one doesn't expect an encounter with the handsome modern...

Johann Sebastian Bach compiled what are today called the Brandenburg Concertos as showpieces and probable calling cards for employment with the Margrave of Brandenburg. The provincial Saxon Kapellmeister put everything he knew of musical brilliance into their design, borrowing from and enhancing his...

Director Peter Sellars has forged a strong reputation for envisioning contemporary operas and rethinking classic ones. Of present day fare, John Adams' Nixon in China, in both its original and revived versions, may be the most iconic. Notable among the classics are the Mozart-Da...

Santa Fe, New Mexico

Lightning and thunder struck a few days ago at the very moment when Rodolfo touches Mimi's hand in the dark of his garret apartment. No suspended disbelief was necessary for this early August performance of La Bohème. Real-life theatrics are...

A month ago at Ojai, morning fog came on little cat feet, birds chirped, the sun shone at noon, oaks drooped at four, swamis led evening meditations, and the hills were alive for four days with the sounds of unusual music. It was June...

At his death in 1886, Franz Liszt left to posterity a curious artifact that sums up the great musician's lifelong obsessions: a walking stick on which were carved the heads of St Francis of Assisi, Mephistopheles and Gretchen. All three iconic but contradictory...

Disney Concert Hall will be the scene this Sunday of Franz Josef Haydn's glorious musical depiction of the biblical origins of life, as the Los Angeles Master Chorale presents his greatest work, The Creation. Next month, music director Grant Gershon rounds out...

In an age of shock-value opera stagings, it has become common to stuff the veiled implications of Benjamin Britten's The Turn of the Screw into one-dimensional little-shop-of-horrors productions. Both the Los Angeles and Santa Fe Operas followed that course in years past....

Sometimes you get the impression that Jonas Kaufmann is a tenor working his way into a Heldenbaritone. OK, that's an exaggeration, but the singer's dusky voice plays tricks on you before you realize his brighter tenorial overtones barely trump their subterranean...

If you have not yet seen The Turk in Italy at LA Opera, here's what you need to do: Drop everything and buy a ticket before they are sold out. Then call your cousin in Milwaukee and tell her to book the...

There is at least as much to praise in the careful preparation of Luigi Cherubini's rarely performed Medea, as in its ultimate performance by the Long Beach Opera. That amounts to a lot on both counts in the U.S. stage...

Less flamboyant than the Kronos and more feline than the Arditti, the Eclipse Quartet is L.A.'s answer to both in twentieth-century and present-day music. Its four members -- violinists Sara Parkins and Sarah Thornblade, violist Alma Lisa Fernandez, and cellist Maggie Parkins...

When a young singer sets out to make his reputation in Lieder (German for art songs), he must carefully consider how he will introduce himself. He may choose appealing, often familiar works that sound more difficult than they are to avoid pushing...

The year was 1797. A great nation had long been politically divided, its people betrayed by a glorious history to which they contributed nearly all the pain but participated in none of the gain. The revolution of nine years before had launched a...

Reflecting on the holiday season just passed, I am impressed at how often Christmas music induces good feelings but rarely serious thoughts. This year, for social and economic reasons, good feelings were at a premium. The most comfortable of annual seasons seemed...

If you know Intimate Opera of Pasadena, it is probably from its earlier iteration as a kind of singers' collective that for a decade or more presented excerpts of operas at a bookstore-cum-café in Pasadena's Old Town district. In this capacity they...

Ask any professional musician what is the most performed classical work of all time, and chances are they will tell you it is George Frideric Handel's Messiah. But you're not home yet. The follow-up question remains: which version?

For well over...

The current season's marriage of inconvenience between the budget grinch and a cash-strapped LA Opera proffers some things old, some new, others borrowed or blue. If the current Rigoletto is both old and borrowed, it is at least still effective. First mounted...