In 1920, Paul Frankenburger was 23 and an up-and-coming German conductor and composer. For the next four years, he assisted two of the greatest conductors of the 20th century, Bruno Walter and Hans Knappertsbusch, but by 1933, the Nazis had forced him to immigrate to Palestine. At 36, he had to start over.
“Energy is eternal delight,” the poet William Blake said, and klezmer music proves his point. For centuries throughout Jewish Eastern Europe, rhythmically high-strung klezmer bands, which often featured a virtuoso violinist and clarinetist trading licks, were a provocation to dance. They could also make brides weep at the drop of a yarmulke.
Ernest Bloch, the renowned 20th century Swiss-born American composer, wrote just one opera, “Macbeth,” and it has rarely been produced in the United States since its 1910 Paris premiere.
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 old theater saying that there are no small parts, only small actors, can also be said for opera. Just ask Australian bass Joshua Bloom, who was in town last month to begin rehearsals as Masetto for the Los Angeles Opera production of Mozart’s “Don Giovanni.” The opera’s seven performances run Sept. 22 through Oct. 14 at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion.
When Yefim Bronfman performs Brahms\’ Second Piano Concerto with conductor Lionel Bringuier and the Los Angeles Philharmonic at the Hollywood Bowl on July 31, he will be tackling what is known as a real \”finger buster,\” a term used for a work that is awkwardly conceived for a pianist\’s hands or physically demanding. The Brahms concerto is both.
Among the pleasures of the summer music season is the annual iPalpiti Festival of International Laureates, now in its 15th year. iPalpiti (the name translates loosely as \”the heartbeats\”) is a string orchestra of 28 young professionals from Israel, Tatarstan, Azerbaijan, Norway and 14 other countries. Thirteen concerts are being performed in the Los Angeles area through July 29, but the grand finale at Walt Disney Concert Hall (July 28) has, over the years, become a much-anticipated gala-style affair.
Maybe it was his heart attack during a concert in Rotterdam in 2009, or perhaps it’s just a matter of aging, but conductor Leonard Slatkin, a venerable fixture with the Los Angeles Philharmonic at the Hollywood Bowl for many years, is now thinking about summer as vacation time.
It may seem a sign of overconfidence for someone to tell you he’s rewriting a major work by Beethoven, but for David Lang, who reconceived Bach’s “St. Matthew Passion” for his Pulitzer Prize- and Grammy Award-winning 2008 opera, “The Little Match Girl Passion,” it’s just business as usual.
Avi Avital plays the mandolin sitting center stage in a hard-back chair. He curls into himself, his face turned downward, and nestles the small stringed instrument on his lap. His intense concentration draws a listener in, whether he’s performing a piece composed by mandolin virtuoso Yasuo Kuwahara or by Israeli composer Avner Dorman.
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