Tag Archives: Walt Disney Concert Hall

NICK CAVE IN PERFORMANCE AND CONVERSATION

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The songs on the first album are the children. The songs on the second album are their parents. GHOSTEEN is a migrating spirit.

Thus Nick Cave describes his new double album GHOSTEEN, songs from which he may perform this week at Disney Hall as part of his CONVERSATIONS WITH NICK CAVE—AN EVENING OF TALK AND MUSIC.

Four years ago, Cave’s teenage son Arthur fell off a cliff to his death after taking LSD. On the album Skeleton Tree (2016), the documentary One More Time with Feeling, and his interactive fan website The Red Hand Files, Cave has worked through his grief, an ongoing process he continues in GHOSTEEN.

Per a notice on Disney Hall’s website, during Tuesday night’s show—during which Cave will sing and play solo on piano, as well as take questions from the audience—”no subject is sacred, and the entire evening will be unfiltered, unscripted, and unmoderated, leading to what Cave calls an exercise in connectivity.”

CONVERSATIONS WITH NICK CAVE—AN EVENING OF TALK AND MUSIC

Tuesday, October 15, at 8 pm.

Walt Disney Concert Hall

111 South Grand Avenue, downtown Los Angeles.

Nick Cave images courtesy and © the artist, photographers, designers, and publishers.

CARRIE MAE WEEMS — PAST TENSE

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“As much as I’m engaged with it, with violence, I remain ever hopeful that change is possible and necessary, and that we will get there. I believe that strongly, and representing that matters to me: a sense of aspiration, a sense of good will, a sense of hope, a sense of this idea that one has the right, that we have the right to be as we are.” — Carrie Mae Weems*

The timeless themes of political power, social justice, gender oppression, and valiant persistence are brought to life in a modern context in PAST TENSE, Carrie Mae Weems’ multimedia take on Antigone.

Combining music, spoken word, video, and projected images, PAST TENSE—presented this week in Los Angeles by CAP UCLA—includes works by poet Carl Hancock Rux and composer Craig Harris, and will be performed by Weems, Eisa Davis, Francesca Harper, David Parker, Imani Uzuri, and Alicia Hall Moran, who brought the house down at Disney Hall earlier this week in Bryce Dessner’s Triptych.

CARRIE MAE WEEMS—PAST TENSE

Friday, March 8, at 8 pm.

Theatre at Ace Hotel

929 South Broadway, downtown Los Angeles.

*Megan O’Grady, “Carrie Mae Weems,” T: The New York Times Style Magazine, October 21, 2018, 140.

From top: Carrie Mae Weems, Past Tense, in performance; Past Tense production photographs (2) by William Strugs; Carrie Mae Weems, portrait by Jerry Klineberg; Past Tense, in performance with, from right, Alicia Hall Moran, Imani Uzuri, and Eisa Davis. Images courtesy CAP UCLA.

BRYCE DESSNER’S TRIPTYCH PREMIERE

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In TRIPTYCH (EYES OF ONE ON ANOTHER), composer and guitarist Bryce Dessner of The National has collaborated with playwright Korde Arrington Tuttle, the LA Phil New Music Group, Roomful of Teeth, videographer Simon Harding, lighting designer Yuki Nakase, and the Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation for an musical-visual investigation into the ways the photographer’s works “compel an audience’s complicity and characterizes them in the act of attention.”*

Tuttle’s libretto integrates the poetry of Mapplethorpe detractor Essex Hemphill and advocate Patti Smith, and the featured vocalists for this world premiere are Isaiah Robinson and Alicia Hall Moran, the latter of whom will perform later this week in Carrie Mae Weems’ Past Tense at the Theatre at Ace Hotel.

TRIPTYCH is directed by Kaneza Schaal and conducted by Sara Jobin. Music direction is provided by Brad Wells.

BRYCE DESSNER

TRIPTYCH (EYES OF ONE ON ANOTHER)*

Tuesday, March 5, at 8 pm.

Walt Disney Concert Hall

111 South Grand Avenue, downtown Los Angeles.

From top: Bryce Dessner, photograph by Shervin Lainez; Robert Mapplethorpe, Dorothy Dean, © Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation; Korde Arrington Tuttle, courtesy of the artist; Robert Mapplethorpe, Alistair Butler, 1980, © Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation. Images courtesy LA Phil and the Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation.

PHILIP GLASS — LODGER PREMIERE

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The world premiere of Philip Glass’ 12th symphony—an interpretation of David Bowie and Brian Eno’s music for LODGER—will be conducted this week in Los Angeles by John Adams in a program that includes Gabriella Smith’s Tumblebird Contrails and Adams’ Grand Pianola Music.

Angelique Kidjo will sing during the LODGER section, and program performers include sopranos Zanaida Robles and Holly Sedillos, mezzo-soprano Kristen Toedtman, pianists Marc-André Hamelin and Orli Shaham, and organist James McVinnie.

 

LODGER—

ADAMS & GLASS

Thursday and Friday, January 10 and 11, at 8 pm.

Sunday, January 13, at 2 pm.

Walt Disney Concert Hall

111 South Grand Avenue, downtown Los Angeles.

Above: Original Lodger album cover, 1979. Image credit: RCA.

Below: Philip Glass (left) and David Bowie.

YOUNG CAESAR AT DISNEY HALL

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The 100th-birthday celebrations of the late avant-garde composer, painter, essayist, pacifist, and early civil- and gay-rights activist Lou Harrison continue. This week, the LA Phil presents a rare, one-night-only performance of Harrison’s 1971 opera YOUNG CAESAR—directed by Yuval Sharon and conducted by Marc Lowenstein—at the Walt Disney Concert Hall.

1967, the Summer of Love, was a turning point in Harrison’s life. San Jose State invited him to join their faculty—providing a level of financial security Harrison had not previously enjoyed—and he met Bill Colvig, a musician and brilliant instrument-maker. Lover, best friend, collaborator, it was Colvig who suggested a same-sex theme for Harrison’s opera project, and the composer chose young Gaius Julius Caesar’s love affair with Nicomedes, the Orientalist king of Bithynia. The LA Phil production, part of their Green Umbrella series, stars Adam Fisher in the title role, Hadleigh Adams as Nicomedes, and Bruce Vilanch as the narrator.

Harrison had studied and absorbed his close friend Harry Partch’s theories about Just Intonation—a tuning system of corrected intervals and precise pitch. Since YOUNG CAESAR would incorporate world music from the East as well as the West, for its creation Harrison and Colvig built a gamelan of tuned metal slabs, dubbed “Old Granddad.”

YOUNG CAESAR (libretto by Robert Gordon) will be performed by the LA Phil New Music Group and experimental opera company The Industry. The choreography for this production is by Danny Dolan.

YOUNG CAESAR, Tuesday, June 13. Sold out.

WALT DISNEY CONCERT HALL, Music Center, downtown Los Angeles

See: laphil.com/lou-harrisons-capital-cs

(From top): Bust of Lou Harrison by Bruce Kueffler, Adam Fisher, Hadleigh Adams, bust of Julius Caesar, bust of Nicomedes.

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