Walt Disney Concert Hall - Home of the LA Philharmonic

Spent an evening at the Walt Disney Concert Hall in LA last week, my first visit to the warmest sounding (and looking) concert hall I have ever experienced. It did justice to a deeply satisfying performance of Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 2 by pianist Emanuel Ax, and managed to take the rough edges off of the LA Philharmonic’s world premiere of Sirens by Swedish composer Anders Hillborg.

Sirens is a modern take on the mermaids of Greek mythology trying to seduce Ulysses with song. Some intriguing sounds coming from the orchestra and a chanting, finger-snapping chorus in the beginning, but the sirens droned on, not very seductively, ending their arias with ear-piercing shrieks when they realized that their charms had failed them (Ulysses had his crew tie him to the mast of his ship so he wouldn’t go overboard and make whoopie with a manatee). An interesting passage came at the very end. As the orchestra slowly faded (Ulysses ostensibly sailing off into the sunset) we heard an intriguing solo melody that we were all convinced was part of the composition. Alas some one forgot to turn off his mobile phone. But it seemed to fit.

The podcast/iPod/Pad/Phone version of our “A Night in Macau,” which has already received more than 700 thousand views on YouTube.
(Depending on connection speed, it may take awhile to download)

The original story on The Connected Traveler.

If it ever comes to your neighborhood, as it did ours last night at San Francisco’s Jewish Community Center, see Richard Milner’s “Charles Darwin: Live and In Concert.” Milner combines his love of musical theater, especially Gilbert and Sullivan, with his scholarship as an anthropologist at the American Museum of Natural History to do Darwin in song. He wrote the lyrics himself and manages to pull them off in a number of vocal styles: Rex Harrison in My Fair Lady, Jimmy Durante’s “Inka Dinka Doo” and Maurice Chevalier crooning the love song “If You Were a Tadpole and I Was a Fish,” even something vaguely resembling a Blues Brother. It is 80 minutes of rollicking edutainment.

Milner wouldn’t play well communities that still believe that “Father Knows Best” and that man walked with tyrannosauruses or probably even with some free marketers who foster the principles of Social Darwinism, the notion that anything unproductive should be allowed to wither…or worse. That doesn’t jive with the complex ecological and social dependencies Darwin and his successors studied and proved.

Darwin probably never sang about his studies of finches and barnacles. Unlike Milner, he was said not to be a very funny guy.

Here is a video story about Milner produced by the New York Times: