Kino-Arts in Focus


A Teenage Dramatist

A Playbook for Us All                                                                                                                                                                


Let’s back up to a year ago.  A petite high school student, age 16, responds to a scolding from her teacher by pulling herself together and scripting a drama.  Not the usual kind—she bases it on questionnaires distributed to classmates and friends too self-conscious or afraid to participate in up-front more...


Classical String Quartets                                                                                                            21st-Century Flair

At The Wallis: Miró Quartet with Special Guest Kevin Puts



Part of the pleasure of attending a concert is the shared performance, the celebration of music by the mere fact that it is being offered live, in-the-moment (even if it has been rehearsed).  And part of the excitement of that spontaneity is the unique delivery (even—and especially—if the music is already familiar more...



For a whole weekend on January 27, 28, and 29 at the Théâtre Raymond Kabbaz, the gypsy jazz of Django Reinhardt bubbles over.  Attendees will be swept away by the  lyrical strumming of the Stephane Wrembel Band and featured guest artists, Laurent Hestin, Sébastien Félix, and Raphaël Fays more...


Poetry and Music                                                                                                                    Then and Now

By master-minding the album, Reimagine: Beethoven and Ravel, Inna Faliks conceived of an ingenious way of crossing musical eras and artistic disciplines at once. Having commissioned nine responses from today's composers to Beethoven's Bagatelles and Ravel's Gaspar de la nuit, she premieres them more...


Film and Music à la Mode                                                                                                    Soundtracks, Chansons, Cabaret




Didn’t make it to Cannes this year?  Sit back and relax—sip a glass of champagne, and let nostalgia do the work.  For one night only on May 27th, live in concert at Théâtre Raymond Kabbaz, Jeanne Cherhal will play and sing the songs French cinema has made famous world-wide, beloved by those more... 


Old and New Works
Performers for Today



In the second stunning music event this week at the Wallis Annenberg Center for Performing Arts in Beverly Hills, on Saturday, April 9th the prolific pianist Suzana Bartal will perform along with the acclaimed Calder Quartet for an evening of string quartets and piano quintets encompassing more...


A Pianist Composes
A Friendly Dialogue


There may be a scarcity of rain in the California’s Southland, but there is no shortage of music this Spring, by both prolific and emerging talents, at The Wallis in Beverly Hills.  On Thursday, April 7th at 7:30 pm, is an evening of piano with Timo Andres in his Los Angeles and Wallis recital debut more...

Mastering the Old, Commissioning the New                                                                      A Violin that “Sings” Across the World

On This Shining Night: An Evening of Premieres



She’s a home-grown SoCal artist who’s been globe-trotting since childhood.  When she was four years old, her mother, born and raised in Japan, delivered her from her Mohave Desert habitat to her teacher, Shirley Helmick, along with the Suzuki method for learning music.  By age six, she had visited more...

A Global Journey                                                                                                                  A Musical Moment in Time

The Wallis Presents Angela Hewitt, Piano: Bach Odyssey


“Most of what I am playing for you tonight is late Bach, with a complex language. The Eighteen Little Preludes are eighteen little gems, written for Bach’s children, only half a page long, or even two lines, but each has a problem to solve. The Fantasia (before the Fugue) is only one line, just chords written more...

Fairy Tales and Painting                                                                                                  John Bauer Deep in the Forest


On February 7-8, 2020, the 21st Nordic Spirit Symposium at the Cal Lutheran Campus, Thousand Oaks hosts prominent scholars in the field who will bring the latest insights into “Magic, Creatures, and Legends” through story analysis, painting, and song: how to recognize supernatural creatures, more... 

Death by Pistol, Resurrection by Radio                                                                              Ibsen’s Theatre Today





Most of us who love theatre and live for it know of Hedda Gabler, one of Ibsen’s most complex characters who, ever since he wrote the play he named for her in 1889, has never ceased to stir up trouble in our thoughts and feelings.  How did George Tesman’s wife, Ejlert Løvborg’s old flame, more...


Close to Heaven
Guitar on Earth

To sit under the Gothic ceiling of St. Thomas Cathedral in Leipzig, under the vibrations of the towering pipe organ in the balcony, and hear the sacred music of Johann Sebastian Bach performed there today is to exist somewhere close to heaven without even thinking to imagine it. Yet we hardly think of more...


Turgenev Today
From Russia with Love, Maybe...


On a slow, sticky day in central Russia, 170 years ago or more (a hundred years before that it would have been much the same), a new young tutor on an isolated country estate draws the ladyfolk to him like flies to flypaper—not that he, Belyaev, isn’t pleasantly attractive.  He appears sweetly romantic to the more...


A Beloved Pianist and Composer                                                                                                           An Esteemed Pianist and Conductor

Concerto: A Beethoven Journey

From writer-director-cinematographer Phil Grabsky, who has brought music lovers the enthralling documentaries In Search of Mozart, then … Beethoven, then … Hayden comes a chronicle of Leif Ove Andsnes’s epic four-season tour with the master composer’s music for piano and orchestra more... 


A Maestro Supports Music Education for Children                                                                                         West Coast Premieres of Verdi and Debussy

Open Your Ears Wider: Carlo Ponti’s Los Angeles Virtuosi Orchestra at the Théâtre Raymond Kabbaz

Music does something special for children.  Statistics have shown that students who learn to play instruments through sustained study and practice not only develop their musical talent and discipline but also perform better in other classes and on standardized tests, especially in math. Yet over the past years, many a music more...


From Monet and Renoir to Debussy and Ravel                                                                   Music’s in the Air

Prints and Impressions: Esther Yune, Piano 

Slender fingers walk like spider legs over the keys with gentle finesse yet a reserve of power.  They flow like the tentacles of a hydra, rolling and spreading from her undulating wrist even for the most percussive, staccato notes.  Such is the precision and eloquence of Esther Yune in her solo recital of “Prints and Impressions,” more... 


Concerts, Master Classes, and a 28-Poster Exhibit

Old Roots Jive with a New Beat

“EUropean Jazz @ UCLA” Buzzes with Sound and Image

A trumpet-blown mazurka?  A blues-y polka?  An improvised waltz from the Danube?  New jazz standards just might spring from age-old European traditions, even in homage to America, the homeland of jazz, as performed on local stages. A four-day and four-tiered event from October 10-13, “EUropean Jazz @ UCLA” more...


The Men Compose the Music and Write the Libretto                                                             But the Women Bring Dulce Rosa to Life

Dulce Rosa Glows in the Light of LA Opera at the Broad Stage

What a way to extend the reach of opera — by launching an Off Grand series at an alternative venue to expand both the audience for LA Opera productions and its repertory with new works created and performed by rising talents.  To introduce a pioneering project such as this at the intimate Broad Stage is the best idea more... 


For Women’s History Month, It’s Two on the Aisle                                                 Part 2: George Bernard Shaw's Mrs. Warren's Profession

A Mind of Her Own: Mrs. Warren’s Profession

How talky, that man, who never stopped spewing out his ideas through the mouths of actors who sat on a bench, stood by a gate, leaned on a fence, or at best, lit a fine cigar or took a swig of whisky, as Vivie Warren does when she finally settles down for a moment of relief.  No tarantellas danced or doors to the home closed more...


For Women’s History Month, It’s Two on the Aisle                                                 Part 1: Kevin O’Morrison’s Ladyhouse Blues 

 Andak Stage Company’s Ladyhouse Blues

St. Louis, Missouri. 1919.  There’s a hush over everything in this working-class neighborhood.  In the evenings the blinds are drawn over all the windows. The homes have become still.  “Ladyhouses,” the postman calls them, because they’re full of widows, or women waiting for their men to come home from the war  more...


A Playwright Speaks of the Stage

Chekhov on Writing and Acting


Antaeus Casts The Seagull in Light and Shadow


When popular, puffed-up, and aging actress Arkadina returns with her younger lover, a fashionable writer, to her lakeside estate in late 19th-century Russia, she steps into a bees’ nest of would-be artists and jealous rivals — or at least as one critic put it, “a Petri dish in which frustration mutates and multiplies.”  She also enters a more...  


Dance Theatre’s Ode to Cinema                                                                                                      A Filmmaker’s Dedication to a Poet

Canzoni del Secondo Piano: Dancing Songs from the Second Floor

The Italian dance company, Tecnologia Filosofica, comprised of five dancers, a singer, and a musician, performed Canzoni del Secondo Piano on December 9, 2011 at the Théâtre Raymond Kabbaz of Le Lycée Français de Los AngelesBased on Roy Andersson’s apocalyptic Swedish film, Songs from the Second Floor more...


Photography Dissolves into Cinema                                                                                               Animating the Spectator at Edward Cella Art + Architecture

George Legrady’s Refraction: Research in the Form of a Spectacle

There are so many ways to enter George Legrady’s new work; I must claim at the outset that my forays into his art stem from my individual interests in cinema and its relation to photography, especially in the context of very recent filmmaking in the world and my personal experience with cultures here and abroad more...   


A World-Premiere Production at the La Jolla Playhouse                                            A Playwright Sparked by Her Students

Kirsten Greenidge’s Milk Like Sugar: A View from the Inside

“Be careful what you wish for,” you want to tell the three sixteen-year-old girls who hold center stage, “...you might get it.”  And what they say they want is someone they can call their own, manifest — in their eyes — in a baby, in the unconditional love of a child for its mother.  Yet most likely what they’ll get will be the life more...  


An Eclectic Mix of Sounds and Cultures                                                                      An Idyllic Summer Setting

The 65th Ojai Music Festival’s “First Blast”

Since 1947, composers such as Stravinsky, Copland, Foss, Messiaen, Boulez, Berio, and Adams have graced Ojai’s stage, presenting their works.  Conductors Michael Tilson Thomas and Kent Nagano began their careers there. Marilyn Horne, Grace Bumbry, André Previn, and the Kronos Quartet have all performed more... 


An American Classic                                                                                                                                Inspired by a Russian Master

Antaeus Doubles the Ante in Hellman’s The Autumn Garden

Lillian Hellman’s The Autumn Garden as staged and performed by the Anteaus Company is one play you want to see twice.  Forget that it runs three hours with an intermission; that will never occur to you as you settle into its balmy intimacy in the parlor and porch of a summer resort home on the Gulf of Mexico more... 


A Georgian Mezzo and a German Tenor                                                                                     Kaufmann Is to Die For!

To and From La Scala: Carmen on the Screen

Thank God for mediated sounds and images, I am thinking at just this one moment, because these days, most any time, I would kill for a live performance of music or song, theatre or dance.  But who would imagine it would come to the point of audiences preferring to look at a screen image of the conductor waving his wand more...


The Broadway Musical, an American Idiom                                                          Enchanted Evenings in Los Angeles
Younger than Springtime: South Pacific Soars at the Ahmanson

What American musical has not projected a symbolic, mystical place that offers in its embrace a release from taboos, a liberated spirit, a healed heart?  The extended imagination and the yearning for communion, whether personal or social, are quests at the core of the lyrical form. “Some Enchanted Evening,” “Bali Ha’i,” and more...


Tactile Memories, Internal Landscapes                                                                                        A Chilean Writer, A California Artist

 Musing with Mary Heebner and Pablo Neruda

To take in a series of paintings at a gallery is to dwell with them in an architectural site: their colors vibrate in the light and shadow of the hall as people pulse past them, to and from their sheen, wishing to run hands over the sensual surfaces and forms that change with distance and perspective.  All of this is gone from the flat more...


From California to Beijing

Painting Like a Poet

China in Motion:  Jian Wang’s Fresh Strokes

 

A “Beijing Girl” is never at rest.  Patches of pigment dance across her face, swelling and bursting from its surface in a buttery lather you could spread for miles.  Each swish bends its own band of hues; each meddle makes its own light.  Bold strokes volley across the bones, over the flesh, jostling and tossing with each other.  Her more...


Dreaming for Peace

Trang Lê Paintings at Ruth Bachofner Gallery

Mesopotamia by Trang Lê: Bringing the Visible to Light

Have you ever been on a boat at night, looking up at the stars, where the sky and the water become one? You could be Ishmael on the Pequod with Captain Ahab, or Huck Finn on a raft with Jim on the Mississippi, or a small girl in the South China Sea, adrift in the dark, perhaps in flight.  You could be lost in the heavens more...


























 

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