Quartet

C-sharp minor - the mere words conjure up a sense of anxious edge, which is the feeling that drives "A Late Quartet. " Starring Christopher Walken, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Catherine Keener and Mark Ivanir as the players, this is a chamber piece about chamber musicians that is set to Beethoven's emotional Opus 131 string quartet - in C-sharp minor. As much as the movie is shaped by the piece - Opus 131 is a complex, demanding work - "A Late Quartet" is not really about the music. Director Yaron Zilberman, a chamber music fan, is using the intimate collaboration required of a string quartet to examine the way in which lives become dangerously entangled over time.

Thanks to Sherlock Holmes and his Doctor Watson, we are used to detectives coming in asymmetrical pairs: Your Batman and Robin (superheroes, you say, but their career began in Detective Comics), your Poirot and Hastings, your Morse and Lewis, your Lewis and Hathaway. Your Doctor and his current companion. The hero and the protégé, the genius and the occasionally inspired sidekick. More satisfying to my sensibility is another sort of crime-solving unit: the cooperative team, with or without leader, in which each brings to the table a necessary specialty, the Scooby Gang, as it is often short-handed nowadays.

Though most serious music lovers have heard of it, Olivier Messiaen's long and difficult "Quartet for the End of Time" is not performed often. So listeners filled the cozy Unitarian Community Church in Santa Monica Friday night to hear a local group perform the work. Inspired by an excerpt from the Book of Revelation, Messiaen wrote the piece in 1940 while a prisoner of war in Germany, and he has described it as "transcendental."

Gordon Stoker, the lead tenor in the Jordanaires vocal group that backed Elvis Presley, died Wednesday at his home in Brentwood, Tenn., after a lengthy illness, his son, Alan, told the Associated Press. He was 88. Stoker joined the Jordanaires in 1950, two years after they formed in Missouri. He originally played piano for the group. They caught the attention of Presley in the mid-1950s when they performed with Eddy Arnold at the Grand Ole Opry in Nashville. When Presley burst onto the national scene in 1956 on Steve Allen's TV show, Stoker and the Jordanaires were with him. They also sang on the original New York RCA studios recordings of "Hound Dog," "Don't Be Cruel" and other hits.

Teenage girls are likely to drive the top movie at the box office this weekend as a quartet of low-budget movies debut. High school comedy "Easy A" is expected to be the most popular movie in the U.S. and Canada, said people who have seen pre-release polls of potential audiences. It probably will come in slightly ahead of Ben Affleck's crime drama "The Town" and horror film "Devil," and far outpace the 3-D animated family adventure "Alpha and Omega," which is debuting with minimal interest.

Revealing an authenticity that might have pleased its namesake, Thelonious--a quartet co-led by reed artist Marty Krystall and bassist Buell Neidlinger--played both familiar and arcane tunes written by Thelonious Monk with vim and vigor during its second set Friday at the Palace Court. The leaders, who have been musical partners in various local bands for more than 10 years, approach Monk's music provocatively.

"Getting old is not for sissies. " That's a Bette Davis line, as quoted by a retired singer in Dustin Hoffman's directorial debut, "Quartet," but the world-weary wisecrack serves equally well as subtext for a bittersweet batch of new films that examine something that has been largely missing from the big screen: the aging process. At 82, Christopher Plummer's Oscar-winning turn in 2010's "Beginners" stood as something of an anomaly. This year, the "senior cinema" entries have grown to include two late-spring releases: Clint Eastwood's grumpy-old-man showcase "Trouble With the Curve" and the surprise hit "The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel," in which Maggie Smith, Judi Dench and Bill Nighy appear as British pensioners in chaotic India.

In this celebrity-besotted culture, sometimes it pays to be anonymous. The San Francisco quartet the Residents has somehow managed to keep its collective identity a secret for close to 30 years--an astonishing feat in this Internet age of privacy pillaging.

ON the ledger sheet of life, it's not clear which of the two L.A. couples in Kate Robin's "What They Have" is more in the black. Both are attractive and artistically ambitious. Both are striving mightily for that ever elusive balance between self-actualization and self-acceptance. And both love to talk ad nauseam about where they're at. The play, which had its world premiere Friday at South Coast Repertory, is made up almost entirely of navel-gazing chat. In fact, the slightest of ambivalent feelings can launch an army of words on the different shades of emotional gray.

It's lunchtime at Punch Productions, Dustin Hoffman's company, and the Brentwood office is a hive of activity. As young female assistants scurry around offering up salads and beverages, Hoffman - in a blue button-down shirt, gray cords, running shoes and a pedometer - putters around, explaining his company's logo (it's based on the large-nosed Italian commedia dell'arte character Punchinello) and joking with a photographer ("You know why I look so good: extraordinary plastic surgery and a penile reduction.

San Francisco's Kronos Quartet will play musical chairs this spring. A new cellist, USC graduate Sunny Jungin Yang will replace Jeffrey Zeigler, who is leaving Kronos to pursue solo projects and will join the faculty of Mannes College the New School for Music in New York. Yang, 28, was born in Incheon, South Korea and grew up in Pretoria, South Africa. She studied at the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, New York. Distinguished cellist Ralph Kirshbaum served as a mentor at Manchester, England's Royal Northern Conservatory of Music and USC, where Yang earned a master's degree in music.

Like the clang of the trolley car bell, the smell of baking fudge and the turn-of-the-century architecture, the Dapper Dans barbershop quartet is part of the fabric of Disneyland's Main Street USA. As part of a yearlong Limited Time Magic marketing campaign, the turn of the century inspired Dapper Dans will be performing songs this week by boy bands from the 1990s to today at Disneyland and Florida's Magic Kingdom. Billing themselves as the "original boy band," the Dapper Dans will sing a medley of "Bye Bye Bye" by 'N Sync , " What Makes You Beautiful " by One Direction and " Rock Your Body " from Justin Timberlake's post-boy-band solo debut.

The story of one of the greatest jam sessions in music history comes alive in “ Million Dollar Quartet ,” the latest Broadway show to arrive in Las Vegas . The musical opened this month in the Harrah's Showroom. The production tells the true story of the December 1956 gathering of four legendary musicians - Johnny Cash, Jerry Lee Lewis, Carl Perkins and Elvis Presley - at Sun Records in Memphis . Sun founder Sam Phillips, often referred to as the father of rock 'n' roll, helped launch the careers of each of the recording artists.

Flight Paramount, $29.99; Blu-ray, $39.99 Available on VOD beginning Feb. 5 "Flight" marks Robert Zemeckis' return to live-action filmmaking after a decade-plus of making motion-capture animated features, and it proves that Zemeckis still has the strongest visual storytelling chops of any blockbuster director not named Steven Spielberg and still knows how to elicit great performances from movie stars. Denzel Washington is stunningly heartbreaking as an alcoholic airline pilot who saves nearly 100 people when his jet malfunctions, then has to deal with the public scrutiny over whether he's a hero or a heel.

It's lunchtime at Punch Productions, Dustin Hoffman's company, and the Brentwood office is a hive of activity. As young female assistants scurry around offering up salads and beverages, Hoffman - in a blue button-down shirt, gray cords, running shoes and a pedometer - putters around, explaining his company's logo (it's based on the large-nosed Italian commedia dell'arte character Punchinello) and joking with a photographer ("You know why I look so good: extraordinary plastic surgery and a penile reduction.

[This story has been updated.] This year's Grammy Award nominees in the classical music categories feature a typically diverse mix of recordings, ranging from gargantuan undertakings such as the Metropolitan Opera's production of Wagner's "Ring" cycle operas, to more intimate albums like the newest release from the Los Angeles Percussion Quartet. Among the more notable nominees are soprano Renee Fleming, the group eighth blackbird and composer Steven Stucky. The L.A. Percussion Quartet received two nods for its album "Rupa-Khandha," in the categories of chamber-music performance and surround-sound album.

Jazz supper clubs pose unique problems for musicians. How loud is too loud for dining listeners? How much unfamiliar material can be offered up to an audience more receptive to familiar standards? What's the proper mix of slow tunes and fast numbers? All those questions came to mind during the performance of the Rich Eames quartet on Thursday at Spazio in Sherman Oaks. Eames is a pianist, a stellar studio artist and a composer with a substantial resume of television credits.

Spring accessories from a quartet of L.A. designers send you out the door in style.

Making "Quartet," a film about life in the spotlight and the drive to stay in the game, doesn't seem like much of a stretch - or a risk - for Dustin Hoffman. With a storied career that is still lively at 75, he certainly knows the terrain. But instead of delving into the human psyche, as he's done so unflinchingly in too many roles to mention - though I will point to the sheer range that took him from "Midnight Cowboy's" dying gay grifter, Ratso, to a newly single dad in "Kramer vs. Kramer" - the actor's first turn in the director's chair is a genteel comedy.

"Getting old is not for sissies. " That's a Bette Davis line, as quoted by a retired singer in Dustin Hoffman's directorial debut, "Quartet," but the world-weary wisecrack serves equally well as subtext for a bittersweet batch of new films that examine something that has been largely missing from the big screen: the aging process. At 82, Christopher Plummer's Oscar-winning turn in 2010's "Beginners" stood as something of an anomaly. This year, the "senior cinema" entries have grown to include two late-spring releases: Clint Eastwood's grumpy-old-man showcase "Trouble With the Curve" and the surprise hit "The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel," in which Maggie Smith, Judi Dench and Bill Nighy appear as British pensioners in chaotic India.