November 18, 2018 • 10:50 am Comments Off on Reena Esmail’s This Love Between Us
Tonight the Los Angeles Master Chorale gives the West Coast premiere of Reena Esmail’s moving This Love Between Us: Prayers for Unity.
Here’s my program essay for tonight’s concert, which pairs her oratorio with Bach’s Magnificat.
I also had the privilege of writing this profile of Reena Esmail for Musical America.
Filed under: American music, Bach, choral music, Los Angeles Master Chorale, new music, Reena Esmail
July 21, 2018 • 8:13 am Comments Off on LA Master Chorale in Big Sing California
Billed as “the biggest choral event in California history,” Big Sing California will link up 10,000 singers from around the world with the LA Master Chorale this afternoon at 2pm PST. The program will include music by Morten Lauridsen, Moira Smiley, Eric Whitacre, Rollo Dilworth, Shawn Kirchner, and other favorites. Complete program, artist bios, list of those participating, videos, and more here.
And it’s being livestreamed, but there will be no repeat screenings.
Tune in to Big Sing California
Filed under: choral music, Los Angeles Master Chorale
May 14, 2018 • 11:40 pm Comments Off on Ellen Reid: Excavating American Dreams
Here’s the piece I wrote for the Los Angeles Master Chorale’s world premiere of reams of the new word by the team of composer Ellen Reid, librettist Sarah LaBrie, and researcher Sayd Randle.
“In classical and concert music right now, a lot of people are trying to think of how to reflect the world we feel we are living in and the world we want to be living in,” says composer and sound artist Ellen Reid…
Filed under: American music, commissions, Los Angeles Master Chorale, new music
February 10, 2018 • 12:17 pm Comments Off on Handel in Los Angeles
Tomorrow night’s performance by the Los Angeles Master Chorale of Israel in Egypt by Handel is sold out. Not surprising, given the remarkable collaboration that is taking place.
The Master Chorale and Grant Gershon have teamed up with the Syrian-Armenian artist Kevork Mourad, who will provide his unique visual accompaniment to the music.
Here’s my essay for the program:
SLAVERY, PLAGUES, AND RESTORATION
“I’m struck by how the Exodus story has spoken to so many different peoples over the last three millennia — especially today, with so many refugee crises and displaced peoples,” says Los Angeles Master Chorale’s Kiki and David Gindler Artistic Director, Grant Gershon. “To me, the heart of the Exodus story is this miraculous and unique restoration of a people to their homeland.”
Filed under: Handel, Los Angeles Master Chorale
December 10, 2017 • 9:09 am Comments Off on Bach Motets
This evening the Los Angeles Master Chorale performs the six Bach Motets, as Associate Conductor Jenny Wong makes her solo conducting debut at Walt Disney Concert Hall.
Filed under: Bach, Los Angeles Master Chorale
June 21, 2017 • 7:43 am Comments Off on Morten Lauridsen and Lux Aeterna
Today begins the 2017 Chorus America Conference, hosted by the Los Angeles Master Chorale. There will be a celebration of the 20th anniversary of Morten Lauridsen’s Lux Aeterna, which the Master Chorale commissioned when he was composer-in-residence.
My essay for Chorus America on the enormous impact Lauridsen has had on the contemporary choral music has now been posted:
In the last decade of the 20th century, the composer Morten Lauridsen wrote a series of pieces while serving a residency for the Los Angeles Master Chorale that have had a lasting and international impact. This year the choral world celebrates the 20th anniversary of the largest of these milestones, Lux Aeterna. What has given the Lauridsen aesthetic its power to connect and attract? And why does it continue to move performers, composers, and listeners?
Filed under: choral music, Grant Gershon, Los Angeles Master Chorale, Morten Lauridsen
March 26, 2017 • 12:11 pm Comments Off on Adams & Stravinsky with the LA Master Chorale
My essay for tonight’s program by the Los Angeles Master Chorale. On the menu are some of the great choruses from John Adams’s operas (with brand-new piano transcriptions) and one of his favorite works of all time, Stravinsky’s Les noces.
Filed under: essay, John Adams, Los Angeles Master Chorale, Stravinsky
November 3, 2016 • 12:13 am Comments Off on Reactions to LA Master Chorale’s Lasso
The opening weekend of the new Los Angeles Master Chorale season was devoted to Orlando di Lasso’s late masterpiece Lagrime di San Pietro. I’m still working through the extraordinary effect the performance had on me — and I know I’m far from alone.
Overall, I was left with an experience I associate with late Beethoven and Parsifal. It was genuinely that special. I’m fascinated by the line of development in Peter Sellars’s work from his stagings of the Bach Passions through John Adams’s The Gospel According to the Other Mary (also with the Master Chorale) and Kaija Saariaho’s La Passion de Simone. And of course his work on Stravinsky. James F. Ingalls’s lighting design added a rich layer, yet another strand of counterpoint.
The rehearsals — a record total of 26 to bring this to the stage — were reportedly grueling: a combination of boot camp and spiritual retreat. And the incredible technical challenge of committing so much of this music along with the choreography and gestures was taken for granted. Not that this was an “effortless” performance — far from it, the strain and exhaustion entailed in bringing this music and its message to life added to the powerful impact.
Mark Swed’s review I found especially incisive:
Normally, we turn to death-invoking music for its transformative powers. The final great works of Beethoven (the late string quartets), Mozart (the unfinished Requiem) or Mahler (the Ninth Symphony’s probe of dying embers) help us transcend despair. Di Lasso’s “Lagrime,” however, is by a deeply depressed composer in the days before meds, someone who only wants his misery to end. It did in 1594, three weeks after finishing the score.
[…]
“Lagrime” is a major accomplishment for the Master Chorale, which sang and acted brilliantly. It is also a major accomplishment for music history. The company hopes to keep this production alive, touring it, and if the music business chooses to honor the just, that will be a saint’s compensation.
Filed under: early music, Grant Gershon, Los Angeles Master Chorale, Peter Sellars
October 27, 2016 • 12:51 am 1
At the end of the month the Los Angeles Master Chorale and artistic director Grant Gershon will open their season with a brand-new staging by Peter Sellars of Lagrime di San Pietro. This is the cycle of “spiritual madrigals”Orlando di Lasso composed at the very end of his life in 1594. Here’s my essay for the program:
What’s the correct way to refer to one of the most extraordinary musical minds in history: Orlande/Orlando/Roland de Lassus/di Lasso? There’s a Franco-Flemish form and an Italianized one; sometimes the two get mixed together. There’s even a Latin option intended to standardize the situation. The very profusion of variants points to the internationalism and cross-pollination across borders that marked the era of the High Renaissance in Europe.
Filed under: choral music, directors, essay, Grant Gershon, Los Angeles Master Chorale
September 13, 2016 • 5:00 pm Comments Off on Lagrime di San Pietro
Overwhelmed by this late Renaissance masterpiece from the end of Orlando di Lasso’s life: Grant Gershon will lead the Los Angeles Master Chorale in a performance to open their season next month — in a new staging by the brilliant Peter Sellars.
A teaser, from an interview I just conducted with Sellars:
“Lagrime is one of the most magnificent pieces in the history of music: vivid and complex and yet an incredibly humble last work .
Orlando at this point in his life — just 30 years after the death of Michelangelo — does not need to prove anything to anyone. He is writing because this is something he has to get off his chest to purify his own soul as he leaves the world. It’s private, devotional act of writing, but these thoughts are now shared by a community — by people singing to and for each other…”
Filed under: Grant Gershon, Los Angeles Master Chorale, Peter Sellars, Renaissance music, Uncategorized
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