If you’re one of those people who pays attention to supporting characters and comedy, you probably already know who Michaela Watkins is.
An intellectual pianist in the best sense, Jonathan Biss has a probing and poetic musical mind wedded to a playful, spontaneous temperament. Biss, 34, is also a musician who craves performing in public.
Ever since Mozart discovered the clarinet’s versatility and tonal beauty in the 1760s, the instrument has grown in stature, relying on distinguished teachers to keep its wide range of joyous, jazzy, autumnal and rapturous moods thriving.
This fall’s book season brings forth an unusually rich and provocative crop of new works by famous and revered authors, some for children and some for adults, some from abroad, but many from right here in Southern California.
Neil Simon is a close runner-up to William Shakespeare when counting the number of plays turned into movies. But can the works by the Jewish lad from the Bronx prove as durable as the prolific output of the Bard of Avon?
Moriah Films, the documentary-making arm of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, has bitten off another solid chunk of Israeli history in “The Prime Ministers,” a film based on the lively book of the same title by Yehuda Avner, who doubles as the chief narrator of the two-part production.
The 1976 premiere of “Einstein on the Beach” shook audiences up, recalling the shock at Stravinsky’s “The Rite of Spring” in 1913. There was something incomprehensible, even infuriating, about Philip Glass and Robert Wilson’s “Einstein,” but in spite of that — or perhaps, in part, because of it — the work became a landmark, challenging and enlarging traditional ideas and conventions of opera, theater and dance.
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.
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