New York And Los Angeles Philharmonics Open With Lindberg And Adams World Premieres ... Non-National Symphony Orchestra Opens With Beethoven Pastoral

... "Mr. Dudamel began his tenure conducting the premiere of the new Adams piece, “City Noir,” a bustling, complex 35-minute work in three movements: the final panel in a triptych of orchestral works inspired by what Mr. Adams calls the “California experience,” its “landscape and its culture.” (The first two are “El Dorado” and “The Dharma at Big Sur,” a violin concerto.)

The piece was suggested, Mr. Adams has written, by the richly evocative books on California’s social history by Kevin Starr, especially a chapter called “Black Dahlia,” which explores the sassy, shoddy and sensational era of the 1940s and ’50s, which gave rise to film noir. It is not easy to evoke the milieu of an era in music. But this score was also inspired by jazz-inflected American symphonic music of the 1920s through the ’50s, from Gershwin to Copland to Bernstein, something that is a lot easier to evoke." ...

Anthony Tomassini "Los Angeles Glows at Dudamel’s Inaugural Concert" New York Times October 9, 2009

*

Header photo: The blogger revisited his family's 1958-61 Pacific Palisades, California house when he attended the season and hall opening performance of Bela Bartok's "Miraculous Mandarin" at the Walt Disney Concert Hall a few years back. His attendence at the performance was by special arrangement with the Los Angeles Philharmonic and did not result in a review, and his transportation was provided courtesy of the University of California - San Diego's Department of Sociology. He remembers paying for his own lunch at the Getty Museum and one-half of his wife's lunch; as well as $5 for parking at the Museum.

(Did you expect another picture of Mr. Dudamel, instead?)

(c) Copyright controlled 2003. All rights reserved.