ENTERTAINMENT
March 6, 2013 | By David Ng, Los Angeles Times
Perhaps the best way to describe "The Gospel According to the Other Mary" by John Adams is to borrow a phrase from the composer's frequent collaborator Peter Sellars, who wrote the libretto for the piece and is directing a newly staged production premiering Thursday at Walt Disney Concert Hall before traveling with the Los Angeles Philharmonic on its upcoming tour to Europe and New York. "It's not something you would see at the Crystal Cathedral," Sellars said during an interview following a recent rehearsal.
ENTERTAINMENT
June 1, 2012 | By Mark Swed, Los Angeles Times Music Critic
Many of John Adams' scores pursue the big ideas. His subjects have included the U.S. relationship with China, Middle Eastern terrorism, the L.A. earthquake and riots, caring for the dying, the Nativity, the bomb. On Thursday night at Walt Disney Concert Hall, he tackled perhaps the biggest of all when the Los Angeles Philharmonic premiered Adams' "The Gospel According to the Other Mary. " Taking on the most monumental narrative in Western civilization, Adams' part-opera/part-Passion is - in subject, meaning, emotion, relevance, historical resonance and musical ambition - huge.
ENTERTAINMENT
May 1, 2012
Saying that he "took the starch out of the Bugs Bunny version of opera," director Peter Sellars was honored at the Opera News Awards on Sunday. The Pittsburgh-born Sellars accepted the award at the Plaza in Manhattan, sounding appropriately like an evangelist for the art form in his acceptance, where he described opera as "the deep end of the pool, where we get real. " Among Sellars' memorable works are his collaborations with composer John Adams that include the Grammy-winning "Doctor Atomic" and the recently staged "Desdemona," a collaboration with Toni Morrison and Malian singer-songwriter Rokia Traoré performed in Berkeley last year that Times Music Critic Mark Swed described as "a great, challenging, haunting and lasting work.
ENTERTAINMENT
November 27, 2011 | By Sergei L. Loiko and Reed Johnson, Los Angeles Times
As Olga Digonskaya held the faded, long-lost documents, her body shaking with emotion, she was transported backward 70 years into Soviet-Russian history. "I sat there speechless and my hands and legs were trembling," Digonskaya recently recalled of that gray December day in 2004. Had she stumbled upon Joseph Stalin's secret diaries? Or perhaps a trove of his political enemies' trumped-up "confessions"? Not quite. But in some ways, what the eminent musicologist had discovered speaks volumes about the hopes surrounding the early Soviet Union, the artistic flowering of that short-lived era, and the dark forces that soon would enshroud them both.
ENTERTAINMENT
January 30, 2011 | By Kevin Berger, Special to the Los Angeles Times
Watching Peter Sellars rehearse is to observe a man possessed. Last week at the Metropolitan Opera House, L.A.'s reknowned theater director was fine-tuning "Nixon in China," which opens Wednesday. The new production of the John Adams opera, about the pre-Watergate president's historic meeting with Chairman Mao Zedong in 1972, will mark, at long last, Sellars' debut at the Met. It will be broadcast live in movie theaters worldwide Feb. 12. Working on a scene in which Premier Chou en-Lai greets the Nixons in the Great Hall of the People, an ornate banquet room, Sellars raced across the stage like Puck, wearing a polyester shirt left over from "Starsky & Hutch.
ENTERTAINMENT
May 18, 2009 | Mark Swed, MUSIC CRITIC
Before "A Flowering Tree," which the Los Angeles Philharmonic festively mounted Friday night in Walt Disney Concert Hall, John Adams created five theater works with Peter Sellars that shunned the miraculous. Simple solutions were simply not an option in subject matter that incorporated the cumbersome conflicts between East and West ("Nixon in China"), Arab and Jew ("The Death of Klinghoffer"), creation and destruction ("Doctor Atomic"). In "I Was Looking at the Ceiling and Then I Saw the Sky," a Los Angeles earthquake transforms society.