Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra blog

I’ve wanted a mandolin for a really long time. I’ve seen them on TV, and at a store once, and enjoyed watching others use them. Of course, I’m thinking of the kitchen tool that makes easy work of cutting vegetables into slices of equal thickness… but here’s a fun fact: there’s another type of mandolin, which was played during this evening’s LACO concert, and it looks like a little guitar! The mandolin player was Chris Thile (which, as I’ve gathered, is pronounced like ‘tea leaf’ but without the ‘f’, but please correct me if I’m wrong…), who was phenomenal. My friend Tavi, who came with me to the concert, noted that his hands and fingers, as they flew across the mandolin with furious speed, looked like they were on crack. Nicely put, Tavi! Mr. Thile played a Mandolin Concerto that he composed, and followed it up with 2 really amazing encores.

If you study music and the history of music, there are composers who emerge from the names and dates and facts and become whole human beings instead of biographical sketches on the page. Sometimes our imaginations are aided by biographical films like Amadeus or Immortal Beloved. Documentaries may provide enough information to give a historical figure flesh and blood. Sometimes, we feel closest to the composers who were born in our hometowns or who referenced the folk songs of our youth. Or perhaps we relate best to the ones with similar life stories, or those who accomplished what we have only wished.

You may have seen the story at the LA Times’ Culturemonster blog or heard from various other sources that the Los Angeles Unified School District is looking at cutting its corps of elementary school arts specialists in half next year as one measure to help reduce a budget deficit of over $470 million. (The move would trim about 3% from the district’s funding gap.) If adopted, the plan would then see the remaining 170 or so instructors in music, dance, theatre and visual arts lose their jobs the following year, effectively drying up LAUSD’s pool of personnel qualified to teach those subjects. Once gone, the likelihood that those jobs and the surrounding program infrastructure could easily be re-instituted in more prosperous, less debt-ridden years, looks awfully slim.

Gernot Wolfgang is a prolific film, tv, jazz and concert music composer in Los Angeles. A 2006 LACO commission recipient, Gernot is a dear friend and devoted patron of the Orchestra. About the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra’s performance of his work Desert Wind, the Los Angeles Times’ Richard Ginell wrote:

This Sunday, January 10, tune in to KGIL Retro 1260 AM from to 1 pm to 5 pm to hear a live program showcasing the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra.

Happy New Year, LACO blog readers! Since this is the last day of 2009 (as well as the last day of the “naughts,” or whatever it is people are calling this first decade of the new millennium), how about a trip back in time? How about a trip through the last 10 years of LACO history? Here are some momentous events we have experienced since 2000…

Los Angeles native Zev Yaroslavsky is the LA County Supervisor, 3rd district. He recently shared his love for the power of escapism through music.

Los Angeles Times music critic Mark Swed attended LACO’s Bel Canto concert this weekend and in his review, he praised Laura Claycomb’s “beautiful singing,” calling her performance of the Mozart aria and Zerbinetta’s Aria “dazzlers.”

There was a notable addition to this evening’s LACO concert, and ‘notable’ is an understatement. There was a remarkable addition (there, that’s better) in the form of soprano Laura Claycomb, who joined the Orchestra on 3 of the 5 pieces performed tonight. I don’t know how often LACO performs with singers, but this is the first time I’ve seen it, and it was a lovely change that I hope they’ll do again. In the first half of the concert, Ms. Claycomb performed 8 pieces by Aaron Copland that basically turned Emily Dickinson poems into songs. Now, I don’t know much about classical music, but I’m certain that I know less about poetry. In addition, I’m by no means a fan of Dickinson, and haven’t even read much or her work, if any, for that matter. So the combination of orchestral music and poetry resulted in a 20-minute WTF moment for me. I enjoyed that I could follow along in the program (since the poems were printed in their entirety), but that’s about it. I can’t think of better words to use, but I just didn’t get it. The addition of music didn’t help me appreciate or understand the poems any further, and the songs just seemed strange to me.

“I dwell in possibility.”
-Emily Dickinson

This weekend, LACO pays tribute to the works of a famous poetess through song and music. Soprano Laura Claycomb joins the Orchestra to perform, among the other exciting works programmed for Bel Canto, Copland’s Eight Poems of Emily Dickinson. According to our program notes beautifully written by Christine Lee Gengaro, PhD, Copland “set Dickinson’s poetry with extraordinary sensitivity. Her unusual punctuation and sometimes halting lines are observed with great care in the music. Some of the hallmarks of Copland’s style, the angular lines and occasional wide leaps, along with virtuosic flourishes in the accompaniment, are much in evidence here and help produce very effective settings of Dickinson’s words.”

When I was researching the program notes for this week’s concert, I came upon a very interesting little detail about Emily Dickinson. In the last years of the poet’s life, her health slowly declined and she asked her sister Lavinia to promise to burn all of her papers when she died. Lavinia instead turned over more than 1700 poems to editor Thomas H. Johnson. If not for a broken promise, we would live in a world without the lines: “Hope is the thing with feathers/That perches in the soul,/And sings the tune without the words,/And never stops at all.” Lavinia must have felt that the value of her sister’s art was more important than Emily’s wishes.

In a blog entry posted last week, we read about Laura Claycomb’s passion for music and live orchestral performance. In part II of her musical musings, Claycomb shares the specific pieces and experiences which have inspired her throughout the years. Enjoy her eloquent words, and hear her perform with LACO on December 12 and 13!

Kicking off a three-year tenure as LACO’s new composer-in-residence, “brilliant musical vagabond” (Sequenza 21) Derek Bermel discusses his musical influences with KUSC’s Brian Lauritzen in a new podcast on laco.org.

Soprano Laura Claycomb, who joins LACO on December 12 and 13 for its Bel Canto concert, articulates her passion for music and the joy of experiencing live orchestral concerts. She also recounts a heartwarming holiday story – a must read! Enjoy, and look out for part II next week.

In his latest posting at So I’ve Heard, Alan Rich offers this description of George Tsontakis’ Ghost Variations, played by Eric Huebner on the November 10 Piano Spheres program at Zipper Hall: “I particularly admired the Tsontakis Ghost Variations, a big piano panoramas that sounded notes of grandeur that awoke comparisons to Lisztian transcendental etudes, before settling back upon a paraphase of a Mozartian concerto finale.”