Who was Akhnaten? For composer Philip Glass, this mysterious Egyptian pharaoh, said to be Queen Nefertiti’s husband and the father of King Tutankhamen, was a rebel-hero. In the 14th century B.C.E., Akhnaten defied tradition by attempting to forge a monotheistic religion, and even tried to change Egyptian artistic culture by moving the capital city and building a new one, Amarna, now a ruin.
Ethan Bortnick was just 6 when he first appeared on “The Tonight Show With Jay Leno,” playing snippets of piano works by Bach, Mozart and Scott Joplin. He even performed his own composition, “The Tiger Ran Away at the Zoo.” By that age, he had already raised $12 million for Miami Children’s Hospital. Since then, he has performed for the Chabad Telethon and the Friends of the Israeli Defense Forces, among other charities.
The pianist François Chouchan has nothing against contemporary music, but for the first season of the monthly chamber music series Le Salon de Musiques, he and co-artistic director violinist Phillip Levy have filled all eight concerts with masterpieces of the Western classical canon.
Growing up in the San Fernando Valley, soprano Shira Renee Thomas was drawn to the music played during services at Northridge’s Reform Temple Ahavat Shalom, where her father, Rabbi Jerry Brown, presided. She especially loved Kol Nidrei, and when she finally got to sing that touching piece in a recital for Center Stage Opera, she fulfilled part of a larger dream that includes one day singing at The Metropolitan Opera and London’s Covent Garden.
“Amoral, hedonistic, selfish, virulently racist, arrogant, filled with gospels of the superman … and the superiority of the German race, he stands for all that is unpleasant in human character,” The New York Times music critic Harold Schonberg wrote about Richard Wagner in “The Lives of the Great Composers.”
If you ask 35-year-old violinist Daniel Hope about his Jewish heritage, make sure you have time. It’s a complicated question.
“On my mother’s side was an incredibly Orthodox Jewish family that goes back to the first rabbi of Potsdam,” he said during a recent late-night cell phone call while in transit to Hamburg, Germany, for a concert the next day.
Itzhak Perlman left his native Tel Aviv in 1958, as a 13-year-old, to perform on the “Ed Sullivan Show” and kept on going. In a career spanning more than 50 years, the violinist has performed with almost every major conductor and orchestra in the world. Awarded a Kennedy Center honor in 2003, Perlman was also invited to perform in January at President Obama’s inauguration. Speaking by phone from New York, Perlman called the inauguration experience “chilling” and said he brought an inferior violin so his priceless Stradivarius wouldn’t be damaged in the cold. He also said the music had been prerecorded.
L.A. Opera to perform its first full cycle of “The Ring,” the German composer’s 15-hour masterpiece.
Critics have called the Long Beach Opera (LBO) \”daring,\” \”unconventional\” and \”innovative.\” While all those are accurate, another word that perhaps better describes the company is \”playful.\”
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