Let’s hear it for classical Los Angeles
NewsLetter in the LA Times:
To the editor: How disappointing that 11 notable figures talked about a “true” Los Angeles sans palm trees and the Hollywood sign, and not one said a word on this city as a classical music capital. (“Cut the palm trees and Hollywood sign. For the 2028 Olympics, what’s the real L.A.?” Oct. 3)
The city was home to two of the most notable composers of the 20th century: Arnold Schoenberg and Igor Stravinsky. We have the Hollywood Bowl. Frank Gehry’s Walt Disney Concert Hall, home to the Los Angeles Philharmonic, is an architectural masterpiece with acoustics that make it one of the best such venues in the nation. The revival of Gustav Mahler’s music and Baroque performance practices started here.
Los Angeles is world-renowned for supporting new classical music. If the paper of record for the city wants to move away from the images of palm trees, beaches and the Hollywood sign, it needs to first acknowledge the city’s classical music heritage and current vitality, and again have regular articles and reviews on classical music by writers of the paper.
Matthew Hetz, Los Angeles
Agreed. Any orchestra music fan knows the LA Phil has the best classical music venue in the country (and, one of the best orchestras, now too. That “Big Five” label is pretty outdated).
Disney hall is mediocre, sorry. There much better halls in the US. Boston, Dallas, to name just two.
The Los Angeles Times gives a lot more coverage of classical music than most American newspapers. And its staff critic, Mark Swed, is supportive of the city’s scene (especially the LA Phil) to the point of being boosterish. Mr. Hetz must not be paying attention.
That’s true, but Mr. Hetz was responding to the 11 specific notables, none of whom considered LA’s distinction in serious music as worthy of mention.
Mr. Hetz ended his letter thus:
“If the paper of record for the city wants to move away from the images of palm trees, beaches and the Hollywood sign, it needs to first acknowledge the city’s classical music heritage and current vitality, and again have regular articles and reviews on classical music by writers of the paper.”
That’s well beyond the 11 specific notables.
Certainly, the Los Angeles Times, like all US newspapers, has less coverage of classical music than it did 10 or 15 years ago; that’s the case with the other arts as well. But “regular articles and reviews on classical music by writers of the paper” do still appear.
Los Angeles does have a terrific classical music scene that started over 100 years ago. The turmoil in Europe really helped:
https://www.zocalopublicsquare.org/exiled-musicians-who-escaped-fascism-for-hollywood/
But the LA Times has become a hard core leftist rag and anything that hints of elitism and doesn’t have proper DEI credentials will be ignored. There is a thriving classical music scene in the LA metro area. I’ve been going there regularly for concerts with the Philharmonic from the days of Mehta, Previn, Giuilini, Rattle, Salonen and many more. The opera is excellent, too. And then there are the smaller, but no less fine, orchestras in Pasadena, Glendale, the OC and elsewhere. And Korngold’s gravesite.
If the LA Times were a “hard core leftist rag,” its owner would not have vetoed an editorial endorsement of the non-authoritarian presidential candidate.
Some things are bad that even the Left has to concede. A low bar, I know.
Very true.
Public trust in American news outlets – newspapers included – is at an all time low. They’re trying to get rid of the stigma that they’re biased and not telling the truth. If they were to endorse Harris, it would just confirm it….as if any more confirmation is really needed. The Washington Post an USA Today have also declined endorsements for that reason.
There is no need for an “official” endorsement when it is enough to look at virtually any opinion page of that paper on just about any day to see very clearly whom they are endorsing.
Sol Babitz, a Hollywood studio violinist and friend of Stravinsky, was a (if not THE) pioneer baroque violinist, before even the Europeans.
This comes from the newspaper that was the home of critic Martin Bernheimer.
Having grown up in Southern California during the Bernheimer years, I can say that it was a wonder that any classical music survived his tenure, so negative was he towards most activities in the town. He was a poor appointment from the very beginning, an opera critic by preference in a town without an opera company and was routinely so negative towards the best offerings — from the unmatched Heifetz-Piatagorsky concerts, to the thrill of the early Mehta years at the Philharmonic, to the adventurous Yates and Morton years at the Monday Evening Concerts — that his rare raves, like that of Giulini’s premier with a Beethoven 9th so slow that one worried if the maestro still had a pulse, made one question if the critic was actually present.
It’s debatable how much LA had to do with the Mahler and early music craze elsewhere. While these had been a known quantity in LA from early on, not least due to the music luminaries that relocated to LA and the vision of Lawrence Morton for his Monday Evening Concerts, I don’t LA started any “trend”. Any influence it might have had must have been through conversations between musical elites rather than a mass audience following.
Here is what Lawrence Morton wrote in 1957:
“Perhaps the most interesting aspect of our activities in recent seasons has been the rediscovery of the music of the more remote past. Gesualdo, for instance, whom history has hitherto rated as a mere eccentric, has suddenly been revealed as one of the most original and hence interesting composers of the later Renaissance. Already, on the basis of our performances of a dozen madrigals (subsequently recorded) and only three responses and one or two motets, some local observers are speaking of Gesualdo as familiarly as they speak of Mozart !(This is very amusing to those of us who have been laboring for
several years in the study, transcription, copying, rehearsing, and performing of the music and who are still striving to overcome our unfamiliarity with the great body of Gesualdo’s work.) It is a mark of the “spirit of the times,” by the way, that just a few months ago a German publisher announced a complete edition of the six books of madrigals. (We claim no influence or credit for it.) Beside Gesualdo, both Schütz and Monteverdi have been developed by the Monday Evening Concerts pioneers.”
https://www.mondayeveningconcerts.org/uploads/6/2/6/5/62651779/monday_evening_concert_1.pdf
It was, as Morton noted, “the spirit of the times”.
You can’t say LA influenced or inspired their compositions.
Why not? Seems like they wrote crap after they moved to LA – seems like their music was quite influenced by their surroundings.
More so in jazz and rock, I’d say.
J Barcelo: “The turmoil in Europe really helped.”
WWI and WWII in the first half of the 20th century really upended the so-called New World Order, not just culturally, but economically and scientifically too. Luminaries like Albert Einstein were forced to vote with their feet.
In 2024, aspects of culture in London like “The Importance of Being Earnest” (based on posters that publicize it) indicate that today’s politics are affecting not just Europe, but other parts of the West too.
In the 2020s, both sides of the Atlantic probably will see another version of turmoil. Ukraine, the Middle East and DEI-ESG possibly will be today’s form of it.
As for LA/Hollywood, it’s hard thinking of people and places decades ago when communication and technology (and travel times) were so different and very limited. Trips on ships and trains. Yet certain trends of today were evident even back then too.
However, regional London for the past 30-40 years has been the home of where more popular major movies have been made than LA or the US has been. To paraphrase, the more things never change, the more they’re very different.
The oil money must have been doing its job well, so much so that you place ESG in the same category as wars in Ukraine and the Middle East
“The fossil fuels lobby includes paid representatives of corporations involved in the fossil fuel industry (oil, gas, coal), as well as related industries like chemicals, plastics, aviation and other transportation. Because of their wealth and the importance of energy, transport and chemical industries to local, national and international economies, these lobbies have the capacity and money to attempt to have outsized influence on governmental policy. In particular, the lobbies have been known to obstruct policy related to environmental protection, environmental health and climate action.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fossil_fuels_lobby
Don’t forget that the symphony hall and its orchestra down in near-by Orange County is quite good as well. Much of the classical music happenings in So Cal are centered around their many universities and colleges: U.S.C., UCLA, Chapman University, Redlands University, Call State U. Northridge, C.S.U. Long Beach, C.S.U. Fullerton, etc., etc.
All this talk about the LAPO. I saw them in Vienna over a decade ago with The Dude at the helm and they were simply wonderful. There wasn’t anything between them and the CSO and NYPO as far as I could tell (and I saw them all that year).
In a dying empire filled with emptiness, hustlers and hucksters, things of real beauty do not count. When the goal is more you always want more. It was a degenerate and debased place and that’s why classical music is and was not included.
I’d bet the LA Phil figures into the Olympics in a brief but prominent TV moment. Maybe it’s unsurprising that classical music isn’t mentioned in first discussions – there’s so much other cultural stuff fighting for a spot on any list – but by 2028 methinks we’ll see some excited boom shots of the orchestra. Real question is what rep they’ll they play when they get their moment?