Virtuoso

Dorothy Stone, an award-winning composer and virtuoso flutist who in 1981 co-founded the new-music ensemble the California EAR Unit, has died. She was 49. Stone was found dead March 7 by police at her home in Green Valley, Calif. No foul play is suspected, said her father, Jerome J. Stone of Kingston, Pa. Results of an autopsy are pending, he said. Dorothy Ann Stone was born June 7, 1958, in Kingston. She earned a bachelor's degree in music at the Manhattan School of Music in New York, where she studied with Harvey Sollberger, and a master of fine arts degree at the California Institute of the Arts in Valencia.

Bill Tapia, a virtuoso ukulele player from Hawaii who learned to strum the instrument at age 7, performed for U.S. troops during World War I and was still touring and teaching well after hitting the century mark, has died. He was 103. Tapia died in his sleep Friday at his home in Westminster, said his booking agent, Mark Taylor. Tapia was born in Honolulu on New Year's Day in 1908. As a child he heard musicians playing at a neighbor's house and became fascinated by the size and sound of the ukulele, which had been introduced to the Hawaiian islands by Portuguese immigrants in the late 19th century.

As Harrison McIntosh tells his story, he had to be an artist. The diminutive, soft-spoken ceramist who's celebrating his 95th birthday with a retrospective exhibition at Pomona's American Museum of Ceramic Art is a virtuoso of pure, gracefully handmade form whose work represents the classical vein of Southern California's postwar crafts movement in museum collections around the world. He was born in Vallejo and raised in Stockton, not exactly the center of the art universe, but he watched with fascination as the Haggin Museum took shape and opened its doors in 1931 in a park near his school.

In the 1950s, three African American jazz guitarists emerged from the industrial Midwest, electrifying fans and showing very different paths forward on their instrument. By the mid-'60s, two of them were diminishing their gifts by venturing into slick, shallowly commercial settings. And thanks to heroin in one case and heart attacks in both, neither lived to see his late 40s. Lovers of the blues guitar talk about their heroes selling their soul to the devil, but the jazz six-string has been nearly as dangerous.

I should like to comment on various replies sent in by readers in reference to Martin Bernheimer's May 10 article on Andre Previn (Calender Letters, May 16 and 17). What most of these people don't realize is that most great music requires both a virtuoso conductor and a virtuoso orchestra, neither of which we have ever had here in Los Angeles. Mozart, Beethoven and Brahms demand a virtuoso conductor, while Richard Strauss demands a virtuoso orchestra, particularly virtuoso horns.

An eclectic group of people sat on floor cushions in a Los Feliz home earlier this month for a concert to mark famed sitar player Ravi Shankar's 90th birthday. In the same room where Shankar played in the 1960s sat atheists and believers, guests who were raised Catholic, Jewish, Muslim and evangelical Christian. They came together at the home of Shankar's longtime friend Jan Steward to hear Paul Livingstone, a Los Angeles-based virtuoso sitar player who, in the last year, has adapted various world music styles to church worship.

POP MUSIC Musical legend and recent alt-folk scene gadfly Jackson Browne is back in Los Angeles for a starry-skied performance at the Greek Theatre, this time with his full band and his longtime collaborator, the stringed instrument virtuoso David Lindley. With tickets in tow, you're almost guaranteed to be somebody's baby, alright. Greek Theatre 2700 N. Vermont Ave., L.A. 7 p.m. Fri. $40.50-$76. http://www.greektheatrela.com . (323) 665-5857.

I have two cavils with Peter Gelb's otherwise interesting article on the late Vladimir Horowitz ("Minding Mr. Horowitz," Oct. 5). First, Gelb rather extravagantly refers to Horowitz as " ... arguably the greatest concert pianist of all time." Has Gelb never heard of Franz Liszt, Clara Schumann, Josef Hofmann or Artur Rubinstein? Secondly, Gelb refers to Horowitz as a genius. This hallowed word is too often bandied about. I don't believe a mere virtuoso can be called a "genius." However beguiling Mr. Horowitz's eccentricities, it is the great composers who are the geniuses.

Re "Homecoming Vibes," June 10, about Lionel Hampton's special concert at Washington Preparatory High School: How does one describe this virtuoso? You don't. You listen, feel and listen some more. Will there be other Lionel Hamptons? I believe and hope so. While the audience watched and listened with indescribable delight, there was dedication pouring out for those performing students. This is the way it was during Hampton's earlier years and this is the way it should be today and can be again in our future.

After reading Daniel Cariaga's review of Evgeny Kissin's piano recital, we must have been at different venues ("Russian Pianist Kissin Allows Pessimism to Deflate Chopin," Feb. 11). Nearly everyone I spoke with left in a state of euphoria. A packed house that refused to let him leave the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion stage with approximately 10 standing ovations would seem to deflate Cariaga's review. As a classical pianist intimately conversant with his program, I was impressed with his musicality and composure.

For the 5 Browns, a quintet of sibling piano virtuosos who will play Mozart, Saint-Saëns and Mussorgsky in Irvine, classical music skill is all in the family. Many parents dream of their children mastering a serious instrument — middle-class homes across America are filled with gleaming, stately pianos bought with high hopes and left unplayed, even untuned — for years. So how did the parents of the 5 Browns — a beaming quintet of piano virtuosos who record and perform together with palpable pleasure — beat the odds?

Alisa Weilerstein is used to leading a double life. As an accelerated high school student, she was already a concertizing cellist who lugged her unwieldy instrument on and off trains and planes. As a Columbia University undergrad she wrote philosophy papers while airborne, traveling from one performance venue to another. But make that a triple life. The 28-year-old New Yorker, growing toward a stellar career, is also diabetic and has been since age 9 ? all of which makes her over-achievement understandably remarkable.

No one ever forgets the first time they see the breathtaking "Battleship Potemkin," the most bravura 69 minutes in film history ? actor Douglas Fairbanks called it "the most powerful and the most profound emotional experience in my life. " But, paradoxically, since its 1925 release, Russian director Sergei Eisenstein's masterpiece has been impossible to see on a big screen in the form the director intended. Until now. Playing at the Nuart in West Los Angeles for one week only is a new 35mm print of a "Potemkin" restoration that is the result of a 20-year collaboration between film archives in three countries.

Eugene Fodor, a swashbuckling violin virtuoso who was a media darling of classical music in the 1970s but whose substance abuse fractured a fairytale career, has died. He was 60. Fodor died of liver disease Feb. 26 at his home in Arlington, Va., said his wife, Susan Davis. He had struggled with addictions to alcohol, cocaine and heroin, she said. At 24, Fodor became the first American to win top honors on violin at the International Tchaikovsky Competition in 1974.

At almost 92 years old, Fred Katz is about as easy to sum up as the contents of the Smithsonian. Growing up a classical cello and piano prodigy before falling in love with jazz in the Manhattan clubs, Katz went on to help define the sound of West Coast jazz with the Chico Hamilton Quintet, where he was the first to introduce a bowed cello into the jazz vernacular. He also worked with Lena Horne and Tony Bennett, composed film scores for Roger Corman, backed Beat poet Ken Nordine on his "Word Jazz" albums and taught courses in anthropology, shamanic magic and religion at Cal State Fullerton for almost 30 years ?

It's tempting at this time of year, with worn-out Christmas tunes blaring nonstop through every grocery store, hair salon and shopping mall from here to the Atlantic, to believe that, musically speaking, there's nothing new under the holiday sun. But you've never really heard "Jingle Bells" until you've heard it sung by Tuvan throat singers in an arrangement that sounds like bluegrass from one of the outer rings of Saturn. That's one of the sonic surprises that's likely to greet audiences this weekend when forward-gazing banjo player Béla Fleck brings his band, the Flecktones through Southern California on a brief holiday tour highlighting music from their Grammy Award-winning 2008 album, "Jingle All the Way. " For that collection, which snagged the pop instrumental album award two years ago, 11-time Grammy winner Fleck and his genre-blind associates did what they'd been doing for nearly two decades: They threw out the rule book, abandoned all sense of musical convention and let their inspiration run wild.

There's no doubt about it: Audiences love Lang Lang. At his Walt Disney Concert Hall recital Sunday night there seemed to be fewer empty seats than at Gustavo Dudamel's sold-out Verdi Requiem on Friday. And before the standing ovation faded for Lang, a long line had formed downstairs to meet him. As David Remnick suggested in a New Yorker profile last year, Lang is "an avatar of the Chinese ascendance" whose punishing programs display a titanic technique that thrills listeners. Here he performed two big Beethoven sonatas.

If "Noises Off," Michael Frayn's perfect geometric proof of backstage zaniness, isn't the most ingeniously calibrated farce of the last few decades, then there's an Einstein writing screwball mayhem who has somehow eluded my radar. Art Manke's production of this still-sparkling 1982 comedy, which opened Friday at South Coast Repertory, boasts a tireless ensemble that makes up in sweat what it lacks in seamlessness. This may not be the most meticulous display of theatrical tomfoolery you've ever seen, but the earnestness of the collective effort manages to just about do the trick.

POP MUSIC Musical legend and recent alt-folk scene gadfly Jackson Browne is back in Los Angeles for a starry-skied performance at the Greek Theatre, this time with his full band and his longtime collaborator, the stringed instrument virtuoso David Lindley. With tickets in tow, you're almost guaranteed to be somebody's baby, alright. Greek Theatre 2700 N. Vermont Ave., L.A. 7 p.m. Fri. $40.50-$76. http://www.greektheatrela.com . (323) 665-5857.

Imagine a world-class soloist who, after performing Brahms' demanding Violin Concerto, joins the orchestra's string section to play Brahms' Symphony No. 1. That is exactly what Danish violinist Nikolaj Znaider did two years ago with the Los Angeles Philharmonic at Walt Disney Concert Hall. At the time, it was an intriguing display of commitment and stamina. But now his main objective is clear. On Thursday, Znaider again joins the Philharmonic but this time on the podium for his Hollywood Bowl debut as a conductor, in a program of Mozart, Brahms and Schumann.