MUSIC REVIEWS

Life and death. The really big topics. Once religion had the monopoly on this conversation, but in our essentially secular culture, the arts increasingly carry on the discussion. Art of Élan staged Tan Dun’s evocative, recondite “Ghost Opera” Tuesday (Nov. 20) at the San Diego Museum of Art’s Copley Auditorium, the second installment on the…

San Diegans with a good memory may recall that Christof Perick auditioned for the post of San Diego Symphony Music Director in 1989. It was his good fortune not to sign with the bankruptcy prone local orchestra, and he continued on to seek his musical fortune in his native Germany, although in the early 1990s…

When I lived in Chicago, I was intrigued with the popularity of a shoppers’ chapel in the Loop that offered a mid-afternoon Roman Catholic Mass. Located midway between the fancy restaurants of Michigan Avenue and the bargain-filled department stores of State Street, the chapel drew a regular crowd of consumers laden with their day’s worth…

Mention the name Gustav Mahler, and it’s hard not to think of resurrection. From his popular Second Symphony—titled the “Resurrection Symphony”—to the rebith of the composer’s musical reputation after World War II, this is a potent Mahler leitmotif. Hearing the San Diego Symphony under Music Director Jahja Ling perform Mahler’s Fifth Symphony Saturday (Nov. 3),…

Pianist Jean-Yves Thibaudet’s Debussy recital Friday (Nov. 2) at La Jolla’s Sherwood Auditorium was not for the timid or casual aesthete. His program was no sampler of Debussy’s greatest hits, but an elegant master class that probed the gamut of the composer’s idiom for his favored instrument. With consummate technical prowess and uncanny insight, Thibaudet…

In recent years, the San Diego Symphony has chosen most of its guest soloists with the same status conscious eye that upscale shoppers use at Nordstrom and Nieman Marcus. Pianists such as Lang Lang and Garrick Ohlsson (already heard this month) and violinists Joshua Bell and Gil Shaham (we will hear them later in the…