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On August 16, author, pundit, and radio personality Dennis Prager — who also happens to be an amateur conductor — led the Santa Monica Symphony Orchestra in a performance of Franz Joseph Haydn’s Symphony No. 51 in B-flat major before a sold-out house, amidst the unique architecture and near-flawless acoustics of the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles. Prager, a lifelong classical-music devotee, has, through his guest-conducting efforts, helped a number of orchestras raise operating funds and reach a wider audience. Knowing this, the SMSO approached Prager earlier this year to enlist his help, and he was keen to...

Conservative talk radio host Dennis Prager received a standing ovation from a near-capacity crowd the moment he walked on the stage Wednesday evening to conduct the Santa Monica Symphony Orchestra at Walt Disney Concert Hall. The audience was not only applauding the music, but the principle of freedom of expression, after several left-wing members of the orchestra had attempted to organize a boycott of the event by the musicians and by the public. A letter circulated by the boycotters exhorted: “Please urge your friends to not attend this concert, which helps normalize bigotry in our community.” One boycotter, violinist and...

Most Americans are at least somewhat aware of what is happening at American (and European) universities with regard to conservative speakers. Universities disinvite conservative speakers, never invite them, or allow the violent (or threatened violent) prevention of them. No non-left-wing idea should be permitted on campus. But we may have hit a new low. For years, I have been conducting symphony orchestras in Southern California. I have conducted the Brentwood-Westwood, Glendale, and West Los Angeles Symphony Orchestras, the Pasadena Lyric Opera, and the Los Angeles Philharmonic at the Hollywood Bowl. I have studied classical music since high school, when I...

Some Things You May Not Know About Vivaldi Msgr. Charles Pope • May 3, 2016 • One of my favorite composers is Antonio Vivaldi (1678-1741). While I love his secular pieces (such as The Four Seasons), I am especially fond of his Church music. It is so light, bright, and tuneful! Vivaldi loved to go up and down the musical scale, varying the theme a half step at a time.Ah, Vivaldi, he’s right up there with Handel, Bach, and Mozart! I consider him to be an especially Catholic treasure given his large body of sacred Latin liturgical music.Here are...

Dr. Philip Gossett, a retired music scholar and professor of music at the University of Chicago who was considered one of the world's foremost experts on 19th-century Italian opera, died Monday at his home in the Hyde Park neighborhood. He was 75. The cause of death was progressive supernuclear palsy, a rare degenerative disease, according to his son, Jeffrey. Gossett was widely respected as an authority on the operas of Gioachino Rossini and Giuseppe Verdi, having served as general editor of the collected Rossini works and coordinating editor of the collected Verdi works. The latter edition was published by the...

The management agency for Sir Jeffrey Tate has confirmed his death, this afternoon, at the age of 74. The eminent British conductor suffered a heart attack while visiting the Accademia Carrara in Bergamo, Italy, and could not be revived. Sir Jeffrey Tate, who was 74, was knighted six weeks ago for services to music.

While organizations in other artistic fields — theater, literature, the visual arts — attempt, however haltingly and imperfectly, to broaden the scope of their activities to include a range of creative voices and life experiences, the leadership in classical music keeps on ignoring the whole subject. The field is just as committed now to the work of white men as it was 100 years ago or more. That’s a very bad look for any cultural organization in 2017. And it’s a particularly bad look for a field that needs to be thinking seriously about how far the traditional models can...

Minnesota Orchestra Conductor Laureate Stanislaw Skrowaczewski has died. He was 93. Skrowaczewski came to Minnesota decades ago to lead what was then the Minneapolis Symphony Orchestra, and he never left. He changed the face of classical music in Minnesota, and remained a towering presence in the classical music world until the end.

 youtube.com/watch?v=bVKVB0MImOg After an Intro, Ferde Grofe's 'Grand Canyon Suite', Donkey Theme, starts with a picturesque depiction of pack mules on the trail for the first 8 measures. The second 8 measures of a descending, frenetic theme, don't make programmatic sense, unless there is an explicit visual depiction of a donkey tumbling off the trail. In the third 8 measure section, the donkey's plaintive hee-haw is heard.

We have been informed by close friends of the death of Gervase de Peyer, the foremost British clarinet player of his time. Gervase was 90. A founder of the Melos Ensemble, with whom he recorded extensively, Gervase was principal clarinet of the London Symphony Orchestra from 1956 to 1973. He was also a founder of the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center and an influential teacher.

French maestro Georges Pretre, who regularly conducted the renowned Vienna Symphony Orchestra, died Wednesday aged 92, the Austrian capital's Philharmonic society said.

Influential and internationally acclaimed composer and conductor Karel Jaroslav Husa, who taught at Cornell for 38 years and conducted major orchestras as well as campus ensembles, died Dec. 14 at his home in Apex, North Carolina. He was 95... Husa was born in Prague on Aug. 7, 1921... Husa became an American citizen in 1959... Husa won the Pulitzer Prize in Music in 1969 for his String Quartet No. 3, and the 1993 Grawemeyer Award for his Concerto for Cello and Orchestra, and many other composition prizes over his career. His best known work is the four-movement “Music for Prague...

Sir Neville Marriner, one of the world’s greatest conductors, has died. The founder of the Academy of St Martin in the Fields, who has conducted many of the world’s best orchestras, died in his sleep on Sunday, aged 92, the academy said.

Phyllis Curtin, an American soprano celebrated as a champion of new music, died on Sunday at her home in Great Barrington, Mass. She was 94... A mainstay of the New York City Opera in the 1950s and ’60s, Ms. Curtin was noted for the purity of her voice, the sensitivity of her musical phrasing and the crystalline perfection of her diction. On the opera stage and in recital, she gave the premieres of dozens of works by 20th-century composers — “more first, and last, performances than any singer in history,” as she was fond of saying, ruefully...

Sunday, May 22 | 7 pm 
PDT / 8 pm MDT / 9 pm CDT / 10 pm EDT Gustavo Dudamel, conductor Tamara Mumford, mezzo-sopranoWomen of LA Master ChoraleLA Children’s Chorus Mahler: Symphony No. 3

Almost 90 years after it was first performed in Paris, the copyright runs out on Sunday on one of the most popular and unique pieces of classical music, Ravel's "Bolero". "We are accustomed to say that a performance of Bolero begins every 10 minutes in the world. As the work lasts 17 minutes, it is therefore playing at all times somewhere," said Laurent Petitgirard of France's Society of Authors, Composers and Music Publishers (SACEM). "And it is likely that we will hear it even more now, in advertisements or in films".

I first played under the baton of Pierre Boulez more than a quarter of a century ago, shortly after I joined the Chicago Symphony. I always admired him as a human being. He was kind, brilliant, generous, and by all accounts a great and loyal friend. On more than one occasion he rescued the Chicago Symphony on short notice after other conductors had to cancel on us. Indeed, he and Bernard Haitink stepped in to steer the orchestra’s artistic fortunes following Daniel Barenboim’s abrupt departure in 2006. All of us in the orchestra are very much in his debt. But...

Celebrated British composer Sir Peter Maxwell Davies, a former Master of the Queen's Music, has died at the age of 81. He was known for his modern and avant-garde works, but his most famous piece was a simple, haunting lament for solo piano - Farewell To Stromness. "He was, right to the end, a pioneer," Stephen Lumsden, Managing Director of music agency Intermusica, said. The Salford-born musician, who had leukaemia, died at home in Orkney.

The celebrated Austrian conductor Nikolaus Harnoncourt - considered to be the "pope" of the baroque music revival - has died in Vienna aged 86.

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, christened Johannes Chrysostomus Wolfgangus Theophilus Mozart, was born January 27, 1756. He died December 5, 1791.