Monster Mash: LACMA's red ink; Charlie Chaplin museum in Switzerland; Galileo's fingers

-- Financial trouble: LACMA loses 23% of its investments in the last fiscal year. One victim is Jeff Koons' dangling train project, which was scheduled to arrive at LACMA in 2011-12, and is now delayed for three more years. (Los Angeles Times and Bloomberg)

-- Little tramp: A long-planned museum dedicated to Charlie Chaplin, pictured, will be constructed at the site of the actor's former home in Switzerland. (Radio Suisse Romande)

-- Discovery: Two severed fingers and a tooth belonging to Galileo have been identified by a museum in Florence, Italy. (CNN)

-- Landing on their feet: Two actors from the recently closed Broadway revival of "Brighton Beach Memoirs" have landed roles in the upcoming revival of "A View from the Bridge." (New York Times)

-- Major project: A $208-million concert hall in Helsinki, Finland, is intended to improve on the existing Finlandia Hall, but it's already 50% over projected costs. (Bloomberg)

-- Winner: Jez Butterworth's "Jerusalem" was named best play at the London Evening Standard Theatre Awards. (Playbill)

-- Operatic great: Swedish soprano Elisabeth Soderstrom has passed away at age 82. (Telegraph)

-- Moving up: "Enter Laughing," which has had two runs off-Broadway, is aiming for a Broadway engagement in the fall of 2010. (Variety)

-- And in the L.A. Times: The L.A. Philharmonic's "West Coast, Left Coast" festival begins; a look at the Broadway production of "Fela!"

-- David Ng

Photo:  Charlie Chaplin with Virginia Cherrill in a scene from "City Lights." Credit: Los Angeles Times

Music review: Terry Riley launches West Coast, Left Coast Festival

“IF THERE IS NO SEDUCTION, THERE IS NO MUSIC.”

The capitalized sentiment leapt off the page in Terry Riley’s program note for “Eureka!” the late-night opening event for the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s West Coast, Left Coast festival Saturday night.

And thus -- after more than two hours of regimented warm-up from the Kronos Quartet, the electronic duo Matmos and guitarist and composer Michael Einziger -- did Riley commence the act of seduction, in the dictionary sense of leading a listener astray. As midnight neared, the godfather of Minimalism mounted the organ loft of Walt Disney Concert Hall and began his hourlong siren song.

A rainbow of organ colors poured forth. A shaman at work, Riley sometimes sang as he improvised channeling all that is mystical and magical in our glorious if dysfunctional state.

California, here we come.

Music review: Shanghai Symphony in Santa Barbara

In the field where Chinese composers and performers and Western classical music converge, East has been successfully meeting West long enough that the concept is closer to a norm -- or at least accepted cultural fact -- than a novelty. What remains rare, though, are local live concert encounters with Chinese ensembles dealing with such hybrids. That made the performance of the Shanghai Symphony, Friday at the Granada in Santa Barbara, a special occasion.

New and old matters were at hand, as China’s most venerable orchestra, dating to 1879, kicked off the 91st season of the Community Arts Music Association. After dealing fluently with Mussorgsky and Rachmaninoff (with young Chinese piano sensation Yuja Wang doing the lush and clean-machined honors on the “Rach 2” concerto), the orchestra delved into the definitively East-meets-West score of notable Chinese composer (living in Paris) Qigang Chen’s “Iris dévoilée (Iris unveiled)” and gave it a measured, captivating and discernibly “home turf” reading. For a change, the musical forces themselves, from a full, taut orchestra to Chinese instrumental soloists, came from the eastern end of the East-West spectrum.

Generally, the Shanghai Symphony --  which will perform in Costa Mesa on Tuesday -- is an impressive ensemble, led with precision and controlled passion by conductor Long Yu. They came out swooning on Friday, with Mussorgsky’s misty-wistful “Dawn on the Moscow River” (from his opera “Khovanshchina”) and a plush yet clear-headed take on Rachmaninoff. At the piano, the lovely and lithe Yuja showed -- to cop a cliché -- maturity beyond her years (22), resisting the Rach-ish temptation to venture into overly florid or self-absorbed stylization.

Simon Rattle is back in LA. with the Berlin Philharmonic

Angelenos remember Simon Rattle when. We know enough not to trust Wikipedia, which states that the Liverpool-born conductor made his U.S. debut with the Los Angeles Philharmonic in 1979. In fact, he appeared at the Hollywood Bowl three years earlier, as a 21-year-old with the London Schools Symphony Orchestra. He was still startlingly young when he began his 13-year stint as principal guest of the L.A. Philharmonic in 1981.

Now he is Sir Simon, music director of the mighty Berlin Philharmonic. It hasn’t been all Sunny Sir Simon, as the German capital dubbed him when he took over in 2002. But the orchestra, which appears with Rattle at Walt Disney Concert Hall on Monday and Tuesday nights, is now thriving, breaking new ground with its digital concert hall, outreach programs to schools and prisons, new music projects and a general attitude of waking classical music up to smell the coffee while honoring its incomparable tradition.

And, based on a brief conversation I had with Rattle for an Arts and Books article as he prepared for his U.S. tour, he is as hopeful, thoughtful and funny as ever. Having recently had his contract in Berlin extended until 2018, he has a mandate to continue the change he has brought to what is often considered the world’s most desirable orchestral job.

Click here for the full story.

-- Mark Swed 

Photo: Rattle in Berlin last April. Credit: John MacDougal/Getty Images

Music review: Gustavo Dudamel and Gil Shaham play Mozart and Berg

The great 20th century conductor Bruno Walter claimed he wasn’t ready to conduct Mozart until he was 50. This refined, unfussy musician believed the heaven-sent symphonies of a young composer who died at 35 were wasted on the young, with their immature tendencies to romanticize, their childish swagger, their puppy love.

Gustavo Dudamel, 28, opened and closed a Los Angeles Philharmonic program in Walt Disney Concert Hall Thursday night with two late, major Mozart symphonies – the “Prague” and “Jupiter.”  In an act of great seriousness, he used these scores to make an Alban Berg sandwich. The filling was Berg’s elegiac 12-tone Violin Concerto, written in “memory to an angel,” and the wondrously affecting swan song of the Austrian composer who died at 50 in 1935. The violinist was the still youthful Gil Shaham, 10 years Dudamel’s senior.

Obviously, we have no way of knowing whether Walter would have thought that Thursday’s performances had too much musical baby fat.

But I thought about this once-perfect Mozartean on Thursday. Dudamel uses a slightly smaller orchestra for the symphonies than was the custom in Walter’s day. And Dudamel upended the fast movements with rhythmically precise swift punches the way early musickers sometimes do with their flexible period instrument ensembles.

But, somehow, this Venezuelan, who has conducted the Vienna Philharmonic only a time or two (and most recently in Tchaikovsky and Stravinsky), excavated a long-lost Viennese character out of his new orchestra.

Monster Mash: Shroud of Turin controversy; Green Day revisits hit single; new curator at Whitney

-- Real or fake?: A researcher claims to have discovered text that authenticates the Shroud of Turin. (Forbes)

-- Back in the studio: The rock band Green Day is recording a new version of its hit song "21 Guns" with the cast of the stage musical "American Idiot." (Playbill)

-- New job: Scott Rothkopf will leave his position as senior editor of Artforum to become a curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. (New York Times)

-- Tooting his horn: Composer Edward Elgar ("Pomp and Circumstance") was apparently a terrible trombone player. (The Independent)

-- High-tech: Two instruments that were aboard the Hubble Space Telescope go on display at the National Air and Space Museum and are scheduled to tour California. (BBC News)

-- Antitrust: Ambassador Theatre Group’s purchase of Live Nation’s UK theaters is being investigated by Britain's Office of Fair Trading. (The Stage News)

-- For the kids: Oxford will be getting a new children's museum dedicated to the art of storytelling. (The Guardian)

-- Art in motion: New York's Metrocard becomes art, sort of. (New York Times)

-- And in the L.A. Times: Times music critic Mark Swed reviews Philip Glass's latest opera; theater critic Charles McNulty reviews "Equivocation" at the Geffen Playhouse.

-- David Ng

Photo: an image of the Shroud of Turin. Credit: Ellen Jaskol / For The Times

Opera review: Philip Glass' 'Kepler' has U.S. premiere at BAM

The starry sky is regular subject, spiritual circumstance or actual setting of Philip Glass’ work. His latest opera, “Kepler,” given its American premiere at the Brooklyn Academy of Music Wednesday night, is about the German astronomer who identified the elliptical orbits of our solar system. The composer couldn’t have been more at home.

Among Glass’ 23 operas are “Galileo Galilei” and two others based on Nobel laureate Doris Lessing's “Canopus in Argos” series of science-fiction novels. “The Voyage” opens with Stephen Hawking meditating on space-time and an alien spaceship crashing onto Earth; it ends with Columbus taking his final journey on his deathbed into outer space.

Astronauts in space ships, nebbishes having out-of-body experiences, pensive mystics pondering unknown realms, an ancient Egyptian king becoming one with the sun -- these are situations enhanced by Glass’ repetitive melodies, moody harmonies and propulsive rhythms.

But in “Kepler,” Glass’ yin-yang style gains new advances. More than ever before, the same kind of music can express going somewhere or nowhere, a physical or spiritual state, a secular and sacred condition.

Monster Mash: Metropolitan Museum of Art in the red; Shubert's Broadway deal; Thom Mayne's Dallas museum

-- Red ink: The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York has reported an $8.4-million deficit for the fiscal year that ended in June. (CultureGrrl)

-- Broadway deal: The Shubert Organization has entered into an unusual, three-year deal with producers Robert Cole and Frederick Zollo, which guarantees Cole-Zollo projects one of the Shuberts' 17 Broadway theaters. (Variety)

-- This old house: Britain's National Theatre is planning an $83-million renovation of its London home. (The Stage)

-- Massive project: Groundbreaking has occurred in Dallas on the Perot Museum of Nature and Science, designed by architect Thom Mayne. (Dallas Observer)

-- Financial trouble: The Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra is trying to cut its current deficit of $2.8 million, the highest ever in its history. (Indianapolis Star)

-- In the works: A proposed museum honoring the Negro Baseball League in Baltimore would cost about $4.1 million. (Baltimore Sun)

-- Winner: New York landscape architect Michael Van Valkenburgh has been selected to redesign the northeast corner of Grant Park in Chicago. (Chicago Tribune)

-- Controversial: A dance artist in Britain plans to induce an epileptic seizure on stage. (BBC News)

-- And in the L.A. Times: Times architecture critic Christopher Hawthorne examines the designs for the proposed Bush presidential library; Santa Monica vies for Eli Broad's contemporary art museum.

-- David Ng

Photo: the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Credit: Daniel Acker / Bloomberg

Opera review: Esa-Pekka Salonen makes Met debut in New York

From the house of the dead -- as I’ve heard the Metropolitan Opera grumpily described from time to time -- comes a great “From the House of the Dead.”  OK, that’s a cheap shot, but a company generally eager to please has finally tackled Janácek’s last and least ingratiating opera, with the acclaimed French theater, film and sometimes opera director Patrice Chéreau and conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen making their Met debuts.

The result is an unusually uncompromising artistic triumph for the Met, and a surprising hit. For 90 transfixing minutes Monday night, at the second of seven performances (running through Dec. 5), an audience of nearly 4,000 sat in remarkable, stunned silence.

“From the House of the Dead,” which is based on Dostoevski’s 1862 exposé of a Siberian prison camp, may not be anyone’s idea of an evening’s entertainment, especially in a weak economy. The opera offers no big starring roles, little conventional plot, unrelentingly intense music and a principally male cast of hardened criminals and cruel guards. But last week's opening night reviews were raves, and shortly before Monday’s curtain, scalpers were circling the new Las Vegas-style dancing fountain in Lincoln Center plaza.

Monster Mash: Zaha Hadid's Maxxi building in Rome; Glassell will is upheld in Texas; Ashlee Simpson on Broadway

-- Unveiling: Reviews are coming in for architect Zaha Hadid's National Museum of the XXI Century Arts in Rome, even though it is not quite finished. (Times Online) 

-- Legally binding: A Texas jury has upheld the final will of philanthropist and oilman Alfred C. Glassell Jr. against his daughter's attempt to invalidate it. (Houston Chronicle) 

-- Cultural debate: Experts wonder if antiquities really belong to their country of origin. (New York Times)

-- Red ink: The bankrupt Toronto-based Ritchies Auctioneers has $8.5 million in debt. (The Globe and Mail)

-- Real-estate hitch: The sale of a $5.1-million upstate New York home belonging to indicted art dealer Lawrence Salander hits a snag. (Bloomberg)

-- Outright theft: A former employee at Delaware's Winterthur Museum has turned himself in after spending more than $100,000 of the museum's money. (The News Journal)

-- Reserving judgment: Pop star Ashlee Simpson-Wentz will join the cast of Broadway's "Chicago" beginning Nov. 30. (New York Daily News)

-- New downbeat: The Chamber Orchestra of Philadelphia has named Belgian conductor Dirk Brosse as its new music director. (Philadelphia Inquirer)

-- And in the L.A. Times: Art critic Christopher Knight reviews "Collection: MOCA's First Thirty Years"; theater critic Charles McNulty reviews "Mary Poppins" at the Ahmanson.

-- David Ng

Photo: the National Museum of the XXI Century Arts in Rome. Credit: Max Rossi / Reuters