ARTS &BOOKS
SUNDAY, AUGUST 25, 2019:: LATIMES.COM/CALENDAR
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SALZBURG, AUSTRIA— Thanks
to Silicon Valley and the entertainment industry, California, we
all know, has become the engineer of societal, political and
economic conduct nearly everywhere. We give the marching
orders. We have the unmatched resources for change. We also
have, in Los Angeles, perhaps the two artists best equipped to
reveal what this means in that uniquely personal, probing and
universal manner of opera.
What we don’t have in California are the resources or,
apparently, will for that to happen on a grand, operatic scale.
Instead, Peter Sellars and Yuval Sharon rely on the goodwill of
traditional Europe at the two greatest summer opera festivals.
Here in Mozart’s birthplace, the most prominent production of
this summer’s Salzburg Festival has been Sellars’ “Idomeneo,”
which uses Mozart’s first mature opera to direct our attention
toward the ocean and the catastrophe brewing within our waters.
At the same time, 225 miles away at the Bayreuth Festival, the
Wagnerian shrine in Germany, Sharon has revived his
production of “Lohengrin.” Having opened the festival last year,
the production has been somewhat revised to more clearly convey
how easily and disastrously we fall for technological band-aid
solutions to cover up our own failings.
To see these productions back to back revealed not only how
much L.A. has developed into an individual and leading voice in
operatic thinking but also how provincial (or is it afraid?) we are
about taking advantage of it. I happened to attend their final
performances of the summer, “Lohengrin” on Aug. 18 and
“Idomeneo” on Monday. But they’re neither
“LOHENGRIN,”as directed by Yuval Sharon, returned to the Bayreuth Festival in Germany this summer. The staging delves into ideas about power dynamics.
Enrico NawrathBayreuth FestivalYOU WON’T FIND
THIS OPERA IN L.A.
Yuval Sharon and Peter Sellars take their ideas to more committed European cities
BYMARKSWEDMUSIC CRITIC>>>
[SeeOpera, F4]
In 1964, when the first phase of the Music
Center — the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion —
opened in downtown Los Angeles, designer
and painter Millard Sheets wrote a tribute
to architect Welton Becket’s Modernist
temple to the arts in the pages of The Times:
“They have created a form that will stand
high on the hill and high in spirit that will
not be quickly dated or lacking in technical
qualities needed for its function.”
Time has a funny way of rendering state-
ments about timelessness obsolete.
“We shouldn’tbe a white castle on the
hill,” says Rachel Moore, president and
CEO of the Music Center, seated this month
at a picnic table in the plaza of the complex
on a brilliant L.A. morning, the kind that
turns every gaze into a squint. “Our new vi-
sion is about deepening the cultural life of
everyresident in the county. That is a very
outward vision.”
It’s a vision that has been ill-served by
the Music Center’s aloof midcentury archi-
tecture, which has long stood, seemingly out
of reach, a full story above Grand Avenue
and the rest of the city, in
Aloof Music Center warms up
By Carolina A. Miranda
MUSIC CENTER CEO Rachel Moore and Bob Hale, whose Rios Clementi Hale
Studios revamped the Music Center’s plaza to open it up more to the city.Al SeibLos Angeles Times[SeeCenter,F3]Luis J. Rodriguez created a sensation
with “Always Running: La Vida Loca, Gang
Days in L.A.” His 1993 memoir told the story
of an impoverished, violence- and drug-
plagued adolescence that nearly claimed
his life — until a youth counselor helped him
to find another path.
A Los Angeles Times reviewer hailed “Al-
ways Running” as “a pilgrim’s progress, a
classic tale of the new immigrant in the land
of the melting pot,” and it became recog-
nized as part of the canon of literary works
about Los Angeles.
Since then, Rodriguez has published
award-winning works ranging from poetry
to fiction; worked as editor of Tia Chucha
Press, a small literary publishing house; and
founded Tia Chucha’s Centro Cultural and
Bookstore in Sylmar.Rodriguez is
‘Running’ to
next horizon
By Patrick J. Kiger[SeeRodriguez, F6]