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.

It was a mound of mystique, on a day of magic. Sandy Koufax threw the first pitch. Clayton Kershaw threw the last pitch. Koufax brought thousands of Dodger Stadium fans to their feet. Kershaw kept them there. In a day filled with symmetry and sizzle, Koufax summoned memories of Dodgers greatness while Kershaw offered promise of its return Monday in the Dodgers' season-opening 4-0 victory over the defending champion San Francisco Giants. Koufax threw a ceremonial first-pitch curveball that bounced, and Kershaw threw a bunch of them that baffled, completing a four-hit shutout that was complemented by one shout-out blast - he improbably broke a scoreless tie in the eighth inning with the first home run of his career.

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.

At the Woodstock music festival in 1969, the British blues-rock band Ten Years After burst onto the U.S. music scene with a searing rendition of "I'm Going Home" featuring the fleet-fingered Alvin Lee whaling away on guitar. When the "Woodstock" documentary was released the next year, the band's 11-minute version of the song - and Lee's guitar virtuosity - were regarded as a highlight. His speedy, taut playing would earn him the unofficial title of "the fastest guitar in the West.

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.

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.

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.

Few musicians have forged a closer professional and personal collaboration than that of conductor-composer Esa-Pekka Salonen and pianist Yefim Bronfman. Their regular appearances together performing concertos from the standard repertory have captivated audiences for some 20 years, first during Salonen's 17-season tenure as music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic and more recently while he's been principal conductor of the Philharmonia Orchestra in London. But that relationship broadened six years ago, when Bronfman gave the premiere of Salonen's Piano Concerto, written for the soloist and commissioned by the New York Philharmonic.

Loud grumbles can be heard by travelers at this busy time of year under normal circumstances, but what is that noise going on with itinerant virtuosos carrying on board million-dollar-plus Strads and Guarneris on their way to concert dates? It's the sound of bureaucracy. And it's overtaking what used to be a well-understood, mutually respectful transaction - between cellists (mostly) and the industry that transports them and their treasured instruments. Cellists have been bearing the brunt because their cargo is too precious to check as regular baggage but so large that it requires an extra cabin seat.

Anyone who believes that rock and roll is dead would have gotten a defibrillator shock at Gary Clark Jr.'s Troubadour set Tuesday. The two-hour show revalidated the idea that an inspired guitar, bass and drums combo on a small stage can still be more overpowering live than pummeling dance beats and a hundred-foot LED wall. The 28-year-old Austin, Texas, singer-guitarist is perhaps the most exciting blues-based instrumentalist to emerge since Jack White. His sound culls from a century of American guitar music, performed with a panache that's wholly contemporary.

Whether setting, digging, hitting, serving or passing, 16-year-old Zana Muno of Sherman Oaks Notre Dame is volleyball's version of a utility player. There isn't a position she can't play or a skill she can't master. As her brother, JJ, a football-baseball standout for the Knights, points out, "She can do everything. She has the height, the speed, the athleticism, the smarts. " Seeing her on the court with her smile, energy and constant competitiveness helps explain why she was able to accomplish what no other teenager had done in the 19-year history of the junior beach volleyball tour.

Violinist Ruggiero Ricci held the audience spellbound when he debuted at the Hollywood Bowl in 1932, a "wunderkind" of classical music with marvelous showmanship and beautiful tone. He was all of 13. What he accomplished in the ensuing decades is perhaps even more impressive: He made the rare leap from child prodigy to serious artist. He was regarded as one of the greatest violin virtuosos of his generation. Ricci, 94, died of heart failure Aug. 6 at his Palm Springs home, said Shelley Bovyer, a violinist with the Los Angeles Philharmonic who regards Ricci as her finest teacher.

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.

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.

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.

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?