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Producing Artistic Director Robert Smyth has a knack for staging plays from the 1940s. He gets the era, how people talked then, and he’s fascinated with the details of the kind of well-made play that 1940s writers routinely produced. But, these plays today are considered quaint, and they’re seldom done. Mr. Smyth consistently provides persuasive evidence for reviving shows from this period.
He’s also good at directing farce, and See How They Run is a classic 1940s British farce. It should be a winner at Lamb’s and it is.
It took the tango 100 years to make its way from the slums and brothels of Buenos Aires to the refined environs of La Jolla. But Saturday’s (Aug. 18) SummerFest concert featuring Pablo Ziegler and his Classical Tango Quartet proved this Argentine music could rub shoulders with Schubert and Brahms and hold its head high. As pianist, composer and arranger, Ziegler benevolently dominated the program, which featured a generous collection of music by that icon of tango nuevo Astor Piazzolla—mainly in arrangements by Ziegler—and his own tango compositions. Ziegler’s assured presence at the piano was the thread that tied together…
It took humanity a while to figure out war. Archeologists dig up pits full of slaughtered families. Geneticists find some tribes flourished while others vanished. But this might be mere jostling. War didn’t hit the Big Time until it found its historian. Around the 6th Century B.C., somebody wrote down the ancient oral tales, polished by centuries of rich and subtle variation, about a war five centuries earlier before the gates of Troy, Mediterranean city of legend. The byline was “Homer” and, whether the writer really was a blind poet or a group of scribes or even another word…
While still a conservatory student, the young American composer Samuel Barber wrote “Dover Beach,” a substantial piece for string quartet and baritone soloist, which became a calling card for a musical career that soared quickly. Friday’s La Jolla SummerFest 2012 concert of commissions and premières opened with Gabriel Kahane’s “Come On All You Ghosts,” another solo vocal work with string quartet accompaniment, which the 31-year-old composer completed last year. Given their first-glance similarities, these two pieces chart the great distance between today’s classical music ethos and that of 80 years ago. Barber chose the poetry of Matthew Arnold, the respected…
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