Culture Watch: What’s new in music, DVDs, books and magazines
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Books: “Innerviews: Music Without Borders” by Anil Prasad. Editor and publisher of the Web’s longest-running music magazine, Prasad collects his frank and often freewheeling interviews with a wide array of musicians: Joe Zawinul, Chris Whitley and McCoy Tyner among them. Ammunition against the argument that the Internet is no place for in-depth reflection.
—Chris Barton
TV: Nov. 24. “Sondheim! The Birthday Concert,” PBS, 9 p.m. (check local listings). Stephen Sondheim was feted in grand style for his 80th birthday in March at Lincoln Center. Among the luminaries honoring America’s greatest theatrical songwriter were Bernadette Peters, Mandy Patinkin, Patti LuPone, Audra McDonald and Elaine Stritch.
-- Charles McNulty
DVDs: Tchaikovsky’s “Cherevichki -- The Tsarina’s Slippers” (Opus Arte). Here’s something new for Christmas: Tchaikovsky. The Royal Opera production, directed by Francesca Zambello, of the unjustly neglected fantasy opera based on Gogol’s “Christmas Eve,” goes all out, as it must to compete with the omnipresent “Nutcracker.”
-- Mark Swed
CDs: Martin Grubinger: “Drums ’n’ Chant” (Deutsche Grammophon). Mixing it up with Gregorian chant is nothing new. But this young Austrian percussionist has gathered percussion, jazz, classical and world-music friends for a multi-culti, multigenerational jam with Benedictine monks more far reaching than most. The results are entertaining.
-- Mark Swed
Magazines: “PIN-UP, the L.A. Special.” It often seems patronizing when a New York editor does a “special” L.A. issue. But Felix Burrichter gets a lot right in the new PIN-UP, an edgy magazine that treats architecture as yet another fetish. He gets a lot into one issue including architects Ball-Nogues on “bong row” downtown and Greg Lynn on sailing with Frank Gehry.
—Jori Finkel
