For Polish conductor Boguslaw Dawidow, long tours with symphony orchestras have become a way of life. In 2011, as music director of the Opole Philharmonic of Poland, he took the orchestra on its first transcontinental United States tour, which included 48 concerts in 19 states.
After facing down a formidable Milken Community High School sound system and the best vocal efforts of the knights of “Monty Python’s Spamalot,” who inadvertently “crashed” a recent rehearsal, the feat of harmonizing with 250 singers during a pair of sold-out concerts at New York City’s Lincoln Center should be a cakewalk for one local Jewish choir.
The famed Vienna Philharmonic has acknowledged that many of its musicians were Nazi party members during Hitler\’s rule and that its director may have delivered a prestigious orchestra award to a Nazi war criminal two decades after the end of World War Two.
It takes more than a lineup substitution — even a major lineup substitution — to rattle the Israeli Chamber Project (ICP). The circumstances that will bring the company — which offers a rotating roster of musicians from Israel and elsewhere — to make its Southland debut on Nov. 30 in a Da Camera Society concert at the Doheny Mansion were fortuitous, if not a bit tumultuous. How about two of the three originally scheduled musicians bowing out?
Cellist Alisa Weilerstein grew up in a thriving Jewish community in Cleveland, where before she became a bat mitzvah, she had already made her debut at age 13 with the Cleveland Orchestra.
The storied Israel Philharmonic Orchestra, founded as the Palestine Symphony Orchestra 12 years before the rebirth of the Jewish state, and its music-director-for-life Zubin Mehta, will join in concert on Oct. 30 at Disney Hall.
“Unless I’m crazy, we played this song the last time we were here,” singer/songwriter Jakob Dylan told a packed audience mid-show at the Henry Fonda Theatre.
The Red Hot Chili Peppers made their first visit to Israel on Sept. 10, but the band member who stole the show wasn’t even onstage. Hillel Slovak – the group’s Israeli-American guitarist and co-founder – died tragically of a heroin overdose in 1988, but his presence was felt throughout every moment of the raucous performance in Tel Aviv.
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