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On a March weekend indulging in St. Patrick’s Day parades and revels, the San Diego Symphony chose the Gallic over the Gaelic, featuring Francis Poulenc’s Concerto for Two Pianos in D Minor, with Music Director Jahja Ling and his concert pianist wife Jessie Chang as soloists. James Gaffigan was the guest conductor. While most singers respond effusively to the music of this early 20th-century French composer—his ample catalogue of song cycles and choral works touches the heart and lifts the spirit—symphonic players and their audiences have a more modest appreciation of this composer’s gifts, in part because he wrote so…
What if you knew that this evening was your last on earth? What would you do? And, to complicate matters further, what if you were the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King and you had this information? That’s the premise of Katori Hall’s play, The Mountaintop, now through March 31 at San Diego REP’s Lyceum Space. Full of twists and turns, this West Coast premiere may not entirely satisfy, but it will engage.
Western music has absorbed influences from other cultures at highly specific junctures. Mozart encountered Turkish Janissary music when he came to Vienna in 1781, and it found its way into his next opera’s percussion section. Debussy heard a Javanese gamelan at the 1889 Paris World Exhibition and it transformed his concept of harmonic progression. When the American composer Philip Glass encountered the North Indian musical tradition through sitarist Ravi Shankar in 1960, the musical style we call Minimalism began to form in Glass’ musical imagination. On Tuesday (March 5) at the San Diego Museum of Art, the intrepid Art of…
BALLETX from Philadelphia closed the ArtPower! dance season at Mandeville Thursday with outstanding performances in three works informed by lighting and shifting mood. Dramatic lighting gave Tobin Del Cuore’s Beside Myself the feel of headlights from an old Chevy truck on a country road. Cuore was born and raised in rural Maine, so that makes sense. But he now lives in Chicago, which may explain the shift. Two men dressed in hoodies slinked out of the inky blackness in deep second. Combined with an ominous score, the dance created a sense of creatures hiding in the woods or street thugs looking…
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