Dudamel, Salonen to appear in Philharmonic Society's new season

The current and former music directors of the Los Angeles Philharmonic will be among the prominent classical personalities to appear in the next season of the Philharmonic Society of Orange County. Gustavo Dudamel will lead the L.A. Philharmonic for one concert, while Esa-Pekka Salonen will separately conduct London's Philharmonia Orchestra.

Other notable names of the 2012-13 season include Yo-Yo Ma and Itzhak Perlman. The season will continue the Philharmonic Society's ongoing focus on the works of Beethoven. Concerts will take place at the Renée and Henry Segerstrom Concert Hall. Recitals will take place at different venues around Orange County, including for the first time the new Soka Performing Arts Center in Aliso Viejo.

Salonen will open the season with a Nov. 14 concert with the Philharmonia Orchestra performing Beethoven's Symphony No. 7 and Berlioz's "Symphonie Fantastique." It will be Salonen's first appearance in Orange County since stepping down as music director of the L.A. Philharmonic in 2009.

The Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique, along with the Monteverdi Choir, will perform two concerts (Nov. 19 and 20) conducted by Sir John Eliot Gardiner. The concerts will feature performances of Beethoven's Missa Solemnis and Symphony No. 9.

La La La Human Steps returns to Southern California

Now celebrating 30-plus years of high stature in the concert dance world, Montreal-based La La La Human Steps remains faithful to its trademark aesthetic -- an unfathomably fast, neo-communicative physical gesturing -- which ignited fascinating onstage collaborations in the '80s (Frank Zappa, David Bowie) and leagues of young imitators after that.  

Speaking from Vancouver, Canada, this week, La La La’s founding choreographer/director, Édouard Lock, struggled with bad cellphone reception at first, announcing at one point, “OK -- I won’t move from this place.” He immediately caught the irony of his pledge, “especially for someone who is known to move so quickly.” 

Appearing in SoCal for the first time since 2008, Lock will be bringing his “New Work” to the Irvine Barclay Theatre on Thursday, featuring a new score from frequent collaborators Gavin Bryars and Blake Hargreaves played live by an onstage quartet (piano, viola, cello and saxophone). The 95-minute piece takes musical and emotional cues from Purcell’s “Dido and Aeneas” and Gluck’s “Orpheus and Eurydice,” including “the sort of fantastical relationship to love that both [plot lines] have,” Lock says. Why did he choose to leave the work untitled? “Because the two stories are so powerful that when I look at the piece,” he explains, “I don’t particularly find a desire to create a third title to overlap the other two.” 

Aside from composers Bryars and Hargreaves (who work independently from Lock, revealing their score to him just days before touring begins), Lock collaborated here with acclaimed Mariinsky principal ballerina Diana Vishneva, who’d sought Long out to choreograph something for her. How did Vishneva's Russian heritage influence Lock's choreography? On this North American leg of the tour, which Vishneva couldn't attend, we'll see her part split between two company dancers. 

Read more about Édouard Lock and his new work.

--Jean Lenihan

Photo: La La La Human Steps. Credit: Édouard Lock

 

 

 

Bolton Colburn moves from Laguna Art Museum to, yes, surfing

 

It's certainly one of the more interesting career moves we've seen recently. Bolton Colburn, who recently stepped down as the head of the Laguna Art Museum after 14 years, has been named the executive director of the Surfing Heritage Foundation.

In his new role, Colburn will oversee an organization whose goal is to "preserve, present, and promote surfing's heritage," according to the group. The Surfing Heritage Foundation, which is based in San Clemente, said it has a collection of 500 surfboards, 250,000 photographs and an archive of various surfing memorabilia.

When Colburn resigned last year from the Laguna Art Museum, he told The Times that he was aiming to pursue "ideas I'd like to accomplish in the sphere of visual art," possibly involving writing projects and exhibitions.

His new job arguably represents a departure from his stated goals. The Surfing Heritage Foundation said in a release Tuesday that Colburn will help the organization raise its profile in the museum world, among other objectives.

In his personal life, Colburn has been an avid surfer, according to the foundation. During his tenure at the Laguna museum, he even helped to oversee the 2002 exhibition "Surf Culture: The Art History of Surfing."

Colburn has spent most of his career in the world of art museums, including positions at the Orange County Museum of Art and the former La Jolla Museum of Contemporary Art. In November, the Laguna Art Museum named Malcolm Warner as its new executive director.

RELATED:

Malcolm Warner of Kimbell to run Laguna Art Museum

Bolton Colburn resigns after 14 years as Laguna Art Museum's director

Surfing Heritage Foundation wants to collect oral histories of wave riders

-- David Ng

Photo: Surfers off of Dana Point, taken by early surf photographer, Doc Ball, in 1939. Credit: Surfing Heritage Foundation

 

Theater review: 'Topdog/Underdog' at South Coast Repertory

In Suzan-Lori Parks’ “Topdog/Underdog,” in revival at South Coast Repertory, characters named Lincoln and Booth by their parents as a sick joke struggle to survive the historical funhouse they’re trapped in.

The Freudian compulsion to repeat the past combines with the Marxist notion of tragedy’s inevitable return as farce — deadly farce, in the case of these two brothers holed up in a decrepit one-room apartment lacking not just a second bed but also running water and a toilet.

These men aren’t just prisoners of memory, they’re stuck in a grimy economic jail cell with little chance of parole. They laugh and poke fun out of a kind of slow-burn despair that can occasionally seem like a ghetto “Waiting for Godot.” Other times their story will have you thinking more biblically — Cain and Abel for starters.

PHOTOS: 'Topdog/Underdog'

Music review: Marino Formenti tackles the 'Diabelli' Variations

After 19 years, finally a boo.

Philharmonic Society president and artistic director Dean Corey reacted with delight during intermission of Marino Formenti’s recital Saturday night at the Renée and Henry Segerstrom Concert Hall. The booing was in response to the U.S. premiere of Evan Gardner’s “Variations on a Theme by John Cage.” The feisty Italian pianist chose this piece for piano and live electronics as prelude to his astonishingly visceral performance of Beethoven’s “Diabelli” Variations.

Known as a rivetingly physical, virtuosic and now and then wayward specialist in new music, Formenti was Corey’s offbeat choice to participate in the society’s ongoing survey of Beethoven’s most audacious late chamber music. The “Diabelli” -- 33 formidable variations lasting nearly 45 minutes -- was not in Formenti’s repertory. Corey’s terms were that if he learned the variations, the pianist could program anything else he wanted, with the expectation of reminding us that Beethoven was once avant-garde too.

Formenti began the concert with the Modernist British composer George Benjamin’s “Shadowlines,” crystalline miniatures played with beautiful delicacy and flickering immediacy. For Gardner’s new piece, Formenti put on special electronic sensor gloves, which he waved in the air to create feedback on a loudspeaker. Beethoven was reserved for the second half.

PST, A to Z: 'Everyman’s Infinite Art' at Chapman University

Pacific Standard Time will explore the origins of the Los Angeles art world through museum exhibitions throughout Southern California over the next six months. Times art reviewer Sharon Mizota has set the goal of seeing all of them. This is her latest report.

When I set out for Chapman University’s Guggenheim Gallery, I fully expected to meet with closed doors. After all, “Everyman’s Infinite Art” was described as a re-creation of a 1966 exhibition in which the gallery was closed, proffering only a brochure to frustrated art lovers. This was four years before artist Michael Asher kept the Pomona College Museum of Art open 24/7 (a feat re-created for PST) and Robert Barry declared Eugenia Butler Gallery closed for the duration of his show there. While I can’t speak to the history of gallery closure as conceptual art, it seems Chapman professor Harold Gregor, who organized “Everyman’s,” was slightly ahead of his time.

In fact, Gregor was responding to an exhibition on the other side of the country. “Primary Structures,” at the Jewish Museum in New York, was an important show of Minimalist art that included works by Carl Andre, known for straightforward arrangements of unembellished construction materials. For “Everyman’s” Gregor wrote descriptions of works that also could be made from everyday materials, albeit less macho ones — rulers, ping pong balls, disposable cups. Work No. 6 read: “Twenty-five upright soup cans, labels removed, arranged to form a right angle with twelve cans comprising each leg and one can at the apex.” Although he actually built at least four of these works — only photographs survive— visitors to the gallery experienced them only as text descriptions.

It’s not clear whether Gregor thought Minimalism was a good thing or if he was mocking it. But in either case, for him, this was art at its limit. In the exhibition text — written in the style of a manifesto — he described how this type of work did not need to be realized: it was possible to experience it fully only as text. He went on to claim that, “it entails minimal spectator involvement and minimum artistic skill and discipline. In short ... EVERYMAN’S INFINITE ART.”

Influences: Singer Paulo Szot

Paulo Szot seems to traverse both the physical and musical worlds with equal ease. Born in Brazil to Polish immigrants, the world-class baritone spent his formative years in both places, immersed in the arts. He has sung opera successfully in major houses in the U.S. and Europe and seamlessly crossed over to Broadway, notably in his 2008 Tony Award-winning role in the Lincoln Center hit revival of “South Pacific.”

Having just finished singing Escamillo the bullfighter in a San Francisco Opera production of “Carmen," Szot has briefly set down -- with a stop in between to absorb the Yosemite sights -- in Costa Mesa, where Thursday through Sunday he’ll sing a cabaret set of show tunes and American Songbook standards with an instrumental trio at the Segerstrom Center for the Arts’ Samueli Theater.

Among his life’s influences:

'Studio SCR' series includes O.C.'s leading theater outsider

Orange County’s leading outsider stage director, Dave Barton, will work inside the county’s theatrical Big House –- South Coast Repertory -– for the first time in spring as part of SCR’s second annual Studio SCR series spotlighting off-center artists and companies in the 94-seat Nicholas Studio.

Barton’s Fullerton-based Monkey Wrench Collective will revive his staging of “pool (no water)” by the edgy British playwright Mark Ravenhill, one of a series of often-confrontational English and American writers who’ve found a regular outlet in Orange County during Barton’s 15-year run as leader of Rude Guerrilla Theater Company, then Monkey Wrench. 

Studio SCR, with seven productions from January to June, will feature other artists known for experimental work, including plays previously staged at REDCAT, the RADAR LA festival, and Fringe Fests in Hollywood and Edinburgh, Scotland.

The schedule:

Henry Segerstrom's mall hosts exhibit on his public art patronage

By definition, public art is a form that requires no throwing back of curtains.

But a behind-the-scenes look at the public art of one extremely busy Southern California neighborhood -– Costa Mesa’s South Coast Metro commercial and arts district -– is what's being offered in an exhibition opening Wednesday at South Coast Plaza, the shopping center that led the district’s transformation from lima bean fields to the sort of place it makes sense to festoon with major pieces of sculpture.

“On Display in Orange County: Modern and Contemporary Sculpture” runs through Jan. 2 in a pop-up gallery at the South Coast Plaza Penthouse, a third-floor niche for luxe retailers.

The show includes photographs, preliminary artist renderings and models, videos and other archival items documenting the creation of 13 works. All but one was bought or commissioned by Henry T. Segerstrom, managing partner of the family firm that owns and operates South Coast Plaza and developed the surrounding properties. (The exception is a 1981 Henry Moore sculpture purchased in 1984 by Angels of the Arts, a support group of the Segerstrom Center for the Arts.) One piece, Alexander Calder’s 1966 mobile, “Pekin,” will be part of the exhibition, having been temporarily relocated from its usual perch in the lobby of one of the district’s commercial buildings.

Doing good while doing well, the Segerstroms donated the acreage for the Segerstrom Center for the Arts -– a title that applies both specifically to the two-building performing arts center at its core (formerly known as the Orange County Performing Arts Center) and more generally to the overall arts district. That district also encompasses South Coast Repertory and a vacant parcel set aside for the Orange County Museum of Art, which faces the challenge of raising money so it can build there and eventually vacate its cramped quarters in Newport Beach.

Music review: Carl St.Clair, Pacific Symphony at Segerstrom Hall

Gustav Mahler’s emotionally conflicted, musically prophetic Ninth Symphony was once a rarity in the concert hall.  Yet in the span of a little more than a year, Southern California orchestras will have performed it on at least four occasions -– Gustavo Dudamel led the Ninth last January and will reprise it next February, the San Diego Symphony performed it just last week -– and the Pacific Symphony made the Ninth the capstone of its “Departures” trilogy Thursday night at Renée and Henry Segerstrom Concert Hall.

Those who came early were treated to actors Nick Ullett and Jenny O’Hara's dramatically charged readings from Mahler’s letters and his wife Alma’s diaries and memoirs (assembled by artistic advisor Joseph Horowitz); Gustav’s bluntly alpha-male ultimatum on what he expected from Alma drew gasps of amazement from this 21st century audience. Another prologue followed in which three songs from “Rückert-Lieder” were performed with a big, rolling timbre by baritone Christòpheren Nomura and pianist Hye-Young Kim, with linking commentary from music director Carl St.Clair.