Roaming on Grand Avenue

Friday was a day to appreciate just a few of the special offerings of Grand Avenue on Bunker Hill in L.A.  The morning started with a L.A. Phil rehearsal at the Disney Hall.  Marin Alsop was the guest conductor.  She is the music director of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra.  I was impressed how she directed the orchestra to achieve the exact sounds she wanted.  She first led the orchestra in Barber's Second Essay for Orchestra.  This is the first time I heard this and was deeply moved. The notes state that Samuel Barber was born into a musical family in 1910 in West Chester Pennsylvania.  His first writing was of an opera at age 10.  The Second Essay was composed in 1942 and is 10 minutes long comprised of several themes with contrasting moods ending in a bold triumphal coda. Barber died in 1981 in New York.

The second piece was Azul composed by Osvaldo Golijov a 52 year old genius from Argentina.  This cello concerto is 27 minutes long and includes interesting percussion:  bells, bottle shaker, cajon, caxixi, conga, cricket, 2 djembe, dumbek....  Joshua Roman played the cello.  The almost 29 year old from Oklahoma studied at the Cleveland Institute of Music.  In addition to playing cello solos with orchestras, he plays jazz, rock and bluegrass.  Azul is played in six parts with the final called "Shooting Stars."  The program describes how Golijov has blended Argentinean music, traditional Jewish idioms, and modern sounds into a distinctive style.

After the break, Marin Alsop led the orchestra in Tchaikovsky's Symphony No. 6 in B Minor, "Pathetique."  Tchaikovsky dedicated this symphony to "Bob" Davidov, the nephew with whom he was in love in his final decade.  "Pathetique" suggests "impassioned suffering" in its Russian context.  He died a sudden death a week after the world premier in 1893 at the age of 53 due to an "accidental" drink of cholera-contaminated water.  Tchaikovsky had declared that "he had put his whole soul into this work."
The emotion felt was very powerful.

Afterwards, I strolled across the street and South one block to the Omni Hotel where I had a delightful lunch with my friend Paul overlooking the fountain and the Museum of Modern Art.  Afterwards I visited MOCA to view the new exhibit "Destroy the Picture:  Painting the Void, 1949-1962.  The artists painted and sometimes destroyed their canvases seemingly expressing the war and terror around them.  The assaulting process they used in creation including puncturing, ripping cutting and burning.  Others used layering, relief, and assemblage to emphasise three dimensions.  The works are from artists from Europe, Japan and the United States.  Kazuo Shiraga, from Japan painted with his feet.  He would lay sheets of paper or canvas on the floor of his studio, cover his feet with paint, usually red symbolizing blood,  suspend himself over the surface from a rope and slide over it to apply paint.

Shozo Shimamoto is picture in the act of his creation.  He shot cylinders of paint from a cannon, bombarding the surface.  Most of these works were destroyed as they were created.  He them moved to hurling glass bottles filled with paint onto canvases laid on the floor using reds, oranges and blacks that alluded the firestorms that swept through Japan during WW II.

A work by Lee Bontecou, 1962 with welded steel and wire on a canvas.