By Robert D. Thomas

Music Critic

Pasadena Star-News/San Gabriel Valley Tribune/Whittier Daily
News

RACHAEL WORBY,
former music director of the Pasadena Pops, is returning to the Pasadena area
with a new program, “Muse/ique.” The opening concert will feature Worby leading
an orchestra with soprano Jessye Norman on July 30 at 7:30 p.m. outdoors on
Caltech’s Beckman Mall (the date is a weekend when neither the Pasadena Pops
nor the California Philharmonic are performing).

The program, which the media release says will “mix high
culture with casual whimsy,” will include music by Leonard Bernstein, Duke
Ellington and George Gershwin. Subsequent events will begin in fall the fall
and carry on into 2012.  Tables for
the July 30 concert on sale; single tickets will go on sale June 15. INFO:
818/732-1712.

Worby served for 11 seasons as Pasadena Pops music director
before leaving last September. Marvin Hamlisch takes over as the Pops music
director this summer with concerts on The Lawn Adjacent to the Rose Bowl. The
Pops is negotiating to move to the Los Angeles County Arboretum in Arcadia
beginning in 2012.

THE PASADENA
CONSERVATORY OF MUSIC has acquired property adjacent to its current location
that will enable the school to expand. The new property (130 N. Hill St.) will
also allow for the creation of new performing spaces. The school currently has
1,250 onsite students and reaches an additional 3,000 students through its
outreach programs.

LOS ANGELES OPERA
will commemorate the life and legacy of composer Daniel Catn on May 23 at 6
p.m. in the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion. The 62-year-old Catn, a South Pasadena
resident, died unexpectedly on April 8. His final opera, Il Postino (The Postman) received its world premiere by LAO to
great acclaim in Sept. 2010 (LINK).

Another Catn opera, Florencia
en el Amazonas, was presented by LAO in 1997. MORE

Speaking of IL POSTINO, PBS has announced that
the LAO production of Catn’s opera will be part of the PBS lineup in the fall.
The exact dates will be announced later. The programs will air on PBS SoCal
(the former KOCE in Orange County) and other PBS stations, which no longer
include KCET. MORE

ROBERTO CANI, a
native of Milan, has been named the Stuart Canin Concertmaster of the Los
Angeles Opera Orchestra. Cani, who studied at the Milan Conservatory of Music,
the Gnessin Institute of Music in Moscow, and the University of Southern
California, won several competitions and has extensive solo and orchestra
experience. Canin served as LAO concertmaster from 2001-2010. MORE

Pasadena resident NAZELI
ATAYAN ROHMAN-FLY will be one of 74 pianists will compete in The Van
Cliburn Foundation’s Sixth International Piano Competition for Outstanding
Amateurs May 23-29 in Ft. Worth, Tex. Rohman-Fly was born in Armenia, studied
there and in Moscow, and has performed extensively in Europe and the U.S. The
competitors, who range in age from 35-79, represent 18 nationalities from 11
countries. Among the jurors is Mark Swed, music critic of the Los Angeles Times. MORE

_______________________

(c) Copyright 2011, Robert D. Thomas. All rights reserved.
Portions may be quoted with attribution.

By Robert D. Thomas

Music Critic

Pasadena Star-News/San Gabriel Valley Tribune/Whittier Daily
News

______________________

Chelsea Chen,
organist

Monday, May 9, 2011 Pasadena Presbyterian Church

______________________

This has been quite a 24-hour period for organ lovers and
for young organists. Sunday night, 30-year-old Cameron Carpenter made his Walt
Disney Concert Hall recital debut. (LINK) Last night, 27-year-old San Diego
native Chelsea Chen played an impressive recital at Pasadena Presbyterian
Church sponsored by the Los Angeles and Orange County chapters of the American
Guild of Organists.

The church’s large instrument — with 6,366 pipes in 111
ranks it’s slightly larger than the Disney Hall instrument and one of the
largest in Southern California — was originally built by the Aeolian-Skinner
company in the “American Classic” style. It’s eminently suited for French
literature, and Chen’s program leaned heavily on that genre, beginning with a
probing performance of Marcel Dupr’s Prelude and Fugue in G Minor.

As was the case with Carpenter’s program, Chen used several
transcriptions in her recital but what a difference in choices! After the Dupr,
Chen played Leon Roques’ transcription of Debussy’s Arabesque Suite No. 2, using a variety of registrations (including
the balcony Echo organ) to achieve graceful effects — what a difference this
piece makes when played on the organ. That sense of graceful delicacy continued
with a playful performance of four movements from Faur’s Dolly Suite, Op. 56, as arranged by Maurice Clerc.

To conclude the first half, Chen was joined by violinist
Lewis Wong, whom she met in 2005 while they were studying at Juilliard. Their
vehicle was the final two movements of Prokofiev’s Sonata No. 2 for Flute and
Piano that the pair transcribed winningly for organ and violin. Except for a
couple of fleeting moments, this was the most un-Prokofiev piece I’ve ever
heard but Chen and Wong played it with lightly and partnered each other
sensitively.

After intermission, Chen concluded with Maurice Durufl’s
Prelude, Adagio and Chorale Variations on Veni
Creator, a performance that began in mysterious quiet and gradually built
to a dramatic, full-throated conclusion. Chen’s elegant performing style is a
pleasure to watch and her registration choices and prodigious technique made
this a highly pleasurable evening from first note to last.

For the single encore, Chen and Wong continued their
emphasis on lyrical grace with a Taiwanese folk song, which translates as Anticipating the Spring.

_______________________

Hemidemisemiquavers:

During a preconcert dinner, Robert Prichard was made an
honorary life member of the Los Angeles AGO chapter. Prichard was organist for
nearly 30 years at Pasadena Presbyterian Church (during the last decade he was
also music director) and was instrumental in designing the Aeolian-Skinner
organ when it was installed in the church’s old sanctuary in 1961. Prichard is currently
organist and music director at St. Therese of Liseux Catholic Church in Alhambra.

_______________________

(c) Copyright 2011, Robert D. Thomas. All rights reserved.
Portions may be quoted with attribution.

By Robert D. Thomas

Music Critic

Pasadena Star-News/San Gabriel Valley Tribune/Whittier Daily
News

______________________

Cameron Carpenter,
organist

Sunday, May 8, 2011 Walt Disney Concert Hall

______________________

Organist Cameron Carpenter is either a genius or one of the
world’s great musical eccentrics. Sometimes the two go together (pianists
Vladimir Horowitz and Glenn Gould spring to mind as examples). Last night, the
30-year-old Carpenter made his Walt Disney Concert Hall recital debut with a
performance that was either (a) glorious, (b) crazy, (c) mind-blowing or (d)
all of the above, depending on your tastes. He got sounds out of the Disney
Hall organ that nobody else could conceive; the same could be said for many of
the pieces he played.

Through it all, Carpenter remains unique, although in many
ways, this was a decidedly non-Carpenter program: no cutesy pops stuff, no
ragging on the quality of the instrument, no white top or jeans (he wore a
black tunic jacket, adorned subtly with his trademark Swarovski crystals, in
the first half and a black mesh-net shirt in the second; black pants and shoes
both halves). His playing style is as sparse as his thin, albeit muscular frame
— in a “Sunday Morning” interview several years ago, he said he burns through
5,000 calories a day, including drinking three gallons of whole milk daily and
it’s easy to see why. Since he never announces his program ahead of time, he
talks between selections; many organists do this but few, if any, engage the
audience so completely. At one point in the second half, when he had to restart
a piece after resetting a couple of pistons; he told the audience, “The organ
is saying to me, ‘you want me to do what???”

His first half included three pieces you’d get from many
organists — Bach’s Toccata in F, Brahms Prelude and Fugue in G minor and
Franck’s Chorale No. 1 in E Major — but he played them like no other organist
would: the Bach dazzlingly fast and thunderously loud, the Brahms with the widest
range of registrations possible, and the Franck in a way that brought out lines
and notes that often disappear in organ haze. His concepts weren’t to
everyone’s tastes but the same was often said of Horowitz and Gould.

In between this trio, Carpenter played his own Serenade and Fugue, or as he called it,
his homage to Bach, written (in 7 days) because he didn’t like Liszt’s Prelude and Fugue on the name B-A-C-H.
It was also, ironically, the only piece of the evening for which he used a
score. Liszt also appeared at the end of the first half in two sparkling Carpenter
transcriptions: the Transcendental tude No. 5 in B-flat (Feux follets) and the tude No. 3 (La campanella).

The second half of the program consisted of three more Carpenter
transcriptions, beginning Brahms’ Academic
Festival Overture. This program was billed as part of the Los Angeles
Philharmonic’s “Brahms Unbound” series, which means that if you attended the
Phil’s concert in the afternoon you heard two quite different takes on this
familiar overture. Carpenter’s concept was big and bold but this was just a
warm up for the balance of the program, which began with his rendering of the
Bach/Busoni Chaconne in D minor (which, since Bach originally wrote the piece
for solo violin, meant this was a transcription of a transcription). You had to
listen hard to imagine the original piece, but Carpenter’s take was elegant in
its own way.

The concert concluded with the final movement of Mahler’s
Symphony No. 5 (to quote the late Anna Russell, “I’m not making this up”).
Carpenter explained that he wrote the piece at age 15 only to realize when he finished
that the was work was “unplayable.” He set it aside for 15 years and picked it
up again seven months ago; last night, essentially, was the work’s world
premiere.

A century ago, when orchestras were far less prevalent than
they are today, organists often used to transcribe symphonic works but not, I
suspect, anything like this. If you know Mahler’s 5^th, what
Carpenter did with it was amazing; if you don’t, it was long, complex and
bewildering. Like everything else (except for his own Serenade), he played it from memory, a mind-boggling achievement in
itself.

_______________________

(c) Copyright 2011, Robert D. Thomas. All rights reserved.
Portions may be quoted with attribution.

By Robert D. Thomas

Music Critic

Pasadena Star-News/San Gabriel Valley Tribune/Whittier Daily
News

______________________

Los Angeles
Philharmonic; Gustavo Dudamel, conductor; Leonidas Kavokos, violin

Brahms: Symphony No. 1 in C minor and Academic Festival Overture;

Dutilleux: L’arbre des
songes, (The Tree of Dreams)

Friday, May 6, 2011 Walt Disney Concert Hall

Next performance: Sunday at 2 p.m.

Info: www.laphil.com

______________________

Success is a mercurial word when it comes to evaluating
conductors but at least one measure of that elusive quality is how any maestro
(or maestra) handles “meat the potatoes” repertory staples, including the music
of Johannes Brahms.

For the next five weeks, Gustavo Dudamel — the 30-year-old
Venezuelan who is completing his second season as music director of the Los
Angeles Philharmonic — is going to show us at least some of his thoughts and
feelings about Brahms’ four symphonies and Ein
Deutsches Requiem under the banner of “Brahms Unbound” at Walt Disney
Concert Hall.

This week’s concerts feature Brahms’ Academic Festival Overture and the Symphony No. 1, and if last
night’s performance is any indication, success will be just one of the
laudatory words that will be heaped upon Dudamel and the Phil by the time the
festival concludes in the first week of June.

Dudamel and Co. opened the evening with a stylish and
rhythmically precise rendition of the Academic
Festival Overture, highlighting the four student songs that Brahms worked
into the 10-minute piece.

That was a foretaste of what was to come with the first
symphony after intermission. Conducting without a score, Dudamel seemed to
shape every note and phrase, beginning the opening measures, which he took at an
ultra-luxurious tempo. Dudamel had a lot to say about this familiar work and
his concepts kept the audience fully involved throughout. He also took a few
seconds extra between the first and second and second and third movements to
let people exhale, although he moved almost without pause from the third
movement to the fourth.

The final two movements were typical Dudamel; you may not
have liked everything he had to say but what he elicited from the orchestra was
compelling. The third movement began lyrically, then moved forward with sense
of urgency. The final movement opened very slowly and softly but Dudamel never
relaxed the tension for an instant, so that the opening bars moved inexorably
toward the familiar main theme and from thence on to the dramatic, cathartic
ending.

Dudamel was in his element on the podium; although his
gestures weren’t as histrionic as they can be when he’s conducting Mahler, for
example, every movement meant something musically and both his smile and fierce
concentration were infectious. The orchestra played as it always seems to do
when the boss is at the helm: at the peak of their collective game and the
audience was, of course, on their feet at the end.

The original concept for “Brahms Unbound” was to pair the
major Brahms works with new pieces, including three world premieres and one
U.S. premieres. The U.S. premiere — Sofia Gubaidulina’s Glorious Percussion — remains scheduled for May 19-22 (along with
Brahms’ Symphony No. 2) but the other works have bitten the dust: Polish
composer Henryk Gorecki died last November before completing his Symphony No. 4
and Peter Lieberson passed away last month, apparently before finishing his
percussion concerto.

No such fate befell Osvaldo Golijov; unfortunately, as has
been the case too often of late, the Argentine composer simply failed to
complete his Violin Concerto in time for it to receive its world premiere this
week. Instead, Greek violinist Leonidas Kavakos was the soloist in Henri
Dutilleux’s violin concerto L’arbre des
songes, which is subtitled The Tree
of Dreams.

This was the first LAPO performance of this work, which was
completed in 1985 and written for Isaac Stern. It’s a brooding, mysterious,
complicated piece that has four movements tied together with three interludes (as
Dutilleux termed them), a structural device that he employed in his previous
cello concerto, according to the program note by John Henken.

Kavakos, who was to have been the soloist for the Golijov
concerto, brought his considerable talents to Dutilleux’s score, instead. That
included a rich tone and a thoughtful traversal of Dutilleux’s meanderings.
Dudamel and the orchestra accompanied sympathetically.

_______________________

Hemidemisemiquavers:

Dudamel continues to offer beautiful lessons on how to
accept audience following a successful performance, wading into the orchestra
to acknowledge individuals and entire sections, turning the orchestra around to
acknowledge applause from all sides, including the rear, and taking his own
bows from deep within the ensemble, arms around his musical colleagues.

After the final performance of this program tomorrow, next
up on the agenda is Ein Deutches Requiem
(A German Requiem) next week (Thursday-Sunday), paired with another violin
concerto, the West Coast premiere of Steven Mackey’s Beautiful Passing. Leila Josefowicz will be the soloist in the
concerto (Mackey wrote the piece for her). The Los Angeles Master Chorale and
soloists Christine Schfer, soprano, and Matthias Goerne, baritone, will sing
in the Requiem.

Both pieces have in common the death of the composers’
mothers. Mackey’s mother died during the composition of his work in 2008; the
title comes from her last words, “Please tell everyone I had a beautiful
passing.” After Brahms’ mother died in 1865, he inserted the fifth movement
into A German Requiem, in which a
soprano soloist sings the prophet Isaiah’s words, “As one whom his own mother
comforteth, so I will comfort you.” Info: www.laphil.com

_______________________

(c) Copyright 2011, Robert D. Thomas. All rights reserved.
Portions may be quoted with attribution.

By Robert D. Thomas

Music Critic

Pasadena Star-News/San Gabriel Valley Tribune/Whittier Daily
News

______________________

Each Thursday morning,
I list five events that peak my interest. It’s a “six pack” this week; that
makes up for listing only four last week. As usual, there’s one with no
admission charge.

This week’s grouping:

______________________

Today, tomorrow and
Saturday at 7:30 p.m., Sunday at 2 p.m. in the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion

Mark Morris Dance
Group and Los Angeles Opera

One of America’s premiere terpsichorean
companies (this is its 30th anniversary season), the Mark Morris Dance Group
joins forces with Los Angeles Opera for the first time in four performances of L’Allegro, il Penseroso ed il Moderato,
a work that Morris first choreographed in 1988 to music of George Frederic
Handel and the poetry of John Milton.

The production features 24 dancers, and four soloists:
sopranos Hei-Kyung Hong and Sarah Coburn, tenor Barry Banks and bass-baritone
John Relyea. Grant Gershon conducts the LA Opera Orchestra. Alastair Macaulay
of the New York Times wrote one of the most glowing reviews I’ve ever read when
this production played in Manhattan last August as part of Lincoln Center’s
“Mostly Mozart Festival.” (LINK). INFO: www.laopera.com

Thursday and Friday
at 8 p.m., Sunday at 2 p.m. in Walt Disney Concert Hall

Gustavo Dudamel and
the Los Angeles Philharmonic open “Brahms Unbound”

Dudamel and the Phil conclude their 2010-2011 Disney Hall
season over the next five weeks with programs that pair major works by Brahms
with contemporary pieces. This week it’s the Symphony No. 1 in C Minor joined by
and Henri Dutileux’s 1985 work, L’arbre
des songes, a violin concerto whose title translates The Tree of Dreams. Leonidas Kavakos will be the soloist in the
concerto. Brahms’ Academic Festival
Overture opens each evening. INFO: www.laphil.com

Saturday at 2 p.m.
and 8 p.m. in Ambassador Auditorium

Psaadena Symphony;
Maximiano Valds, conductor; Chu-Fang Huang, piano

In the final concert of the PSO’s 82nd season, the
Chilean-born Valds conducts Rachmaninoff’s Symphony No. 2 and Liszt’s Piano
Concerto No. 2 in A minor, with young Chinese pianist Chu-Fang Huang as
soloist. INFO: www.pasadenasymphony-pops.org

Saturday at 8 p.m.
in Pasadena Presbyterian Church; Sunday at 2 p.m. in First Presbyterian Church,
Santa Monica

Musica Angelica plays
Bach’s “Brandenburgs”

Music Director Martin Haselbck leads his early-music
ensemble in Nos. 3, 5 and 6 of Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos, along with the
Double Concerto for violin and oboe and Suite No. 2 for flute and orchestra.
Soloists will be oboist Gonzalo Xavier Ruiz, flutist Stephen Schultz, and
Musica Angelica’s concertmaster Ilia Korol. The orchestra will just have
returned from performing these works at the famed Musikverein in Vienna on
Monday. INFO: www. musicaangelica.org

Sunday at 7:30 p.m.
in Walt Disney Concert Hall

Cameron Carpenter,
organist

This is a great 24 hours for organ lovers. Cameron Carpenter
is either one of the most electrifying or exasperating organists playing today,
depending on your tastes. The dichotomy begins with his concert attire (usually
white sequined T-shirt with jeans) but it doesn’t stop there. If you’ve never
seen this young virtuoso perform before, you can view several performances via
YouTube HERE.

Typical of Carpenter, he doesn’t announce his “official”
program in advance. This concert was originally billed as part of the L.A.
Phil’s “Brahms Unbound” series and listed Carpenter’s transcriptions of the composer’s
Academic Festival Overture and
Prelude and Fugue in G Minor, WoO 10. Subsequent publicity is saying the
program will be drawn from “Jazz etudes by Nikolai Kapustin; piano encores by
Vladimir Horowitz, Arcadi Volodos, and Cyprien Katsaris; compositions by
Brahms, Bach, Carpenter, Chopin, Dupr, Grainger, Hanson, Honegger, Liszt, and
Ravel; as well as film scores by Gershwin, Hisaishi, and Williams.”

Whatever … it should all be a hoot on the Disney Hall organ,
or as Terry Riley dubbed it, “Hurricane Mama.” INFO: www.laphil.com

And the weekend’s “free admission” program (actually, it’s
on Monday, who but who’s counting) …

Monday at 8 p.m. at Pasadena
Presbyterian Church

Chelsea Chen,
organist

When I heard the San Diego native in 2008 at Disney Hall, I
was highly impressed (LINK) and getting to hear her for free on PPC’s 112-rank
Aeolian-Skinner organ should be quite a treat. The program lists music by Dupr,
Debussy, Faur, Prokofiev (with guest violinist Lewis Wong), and Durufl. This
concert is co-sponsored by the Los Angeles and Orange County chapters of the
American Guild of Organists but it’s open to the public. INFO: www.laago.org

_______________________

(c) Copyright 2011, Robert D. Thomas. All rights reserved.
Portions may be quoted with attribution.