Family concerts in L.A., Orange counties
Here’s a selection of upcoming family concerts presented by local orchestras:
For Esa-Pekka Salonen, it’s been ‘a tough year’
Uprooting the family. Getting mugged. Contractor problems. Thankfully, Salonen has his music.
Esa-Pekka Salonen always said he wanted to leave the Los Angeles Philharmonic while he was ahead. In April he did , finishing his 17-year run as music director in remarkable fashion. At the end of his last concert , a quiet chord of Stravinsky’s “Symphony of Psalms” hung in the air for a mini-eternity. The audience rose to its feet in a warm, mass embrace of the conductor with applause. Many wept. Orchestra members lined up and, one by one, hugged Salonen. After 20 minutes, he was red-faced, teary-eyed and loaded down with flowers.
Chopin’s bicentennial, Boulez’s birthday and more
Esa-Pekka Salonen in Milan, Wagner in Wales and a Sondheim salute.
The dominant theme in the 2010 musical performance landscape is the Frederic Chopin bicentennial. More than 2,000 worldwide events will honor the beloved Polish composer and his elegiac piano scores. Chopin festivals abound seemingly everywhere: London, Rome, Buenos Aires, Tel Aviv, New York, Miami, Tucson — well, you get the landscape.
La La La Human Steps
Édouard Lock’s Montreal company rethinks Tchaikovsky with ‘Amjad’ at Royce Hall.
WE can refuse history, but we can’t forget about it, even with the new technologies. Those are Luciano Berio’s words. They were also the theme of the late Italian composer’s Norton Lectures at Harvard 15 years ago. Last week, I was sure I had long ago proved Berio wrong. Having shuffled dying swans and such into the category of ritual rather than renewable art, I not only, good Modernist that I am, refused Tchaikovsky’s ballets but also had put them out of my mind. Would good reviews have made American Ballet Theatre’s “Swan Lake” at the Music Center an event? Not for me.
The Pool Parties concert series looks to live on in 2010. 
As hotel bars go, this one takes some beating. The Windsor Bar, on the third floor of the Roppongi Prince Hotel, is divided into two spaces. Its most distinctive feature is a dramatic ceiling mural in the style of M.C Escher: a monochrome moonscape glimpsed through a perspective distorting series of pillars and arches…