Los Angeles has little history with Wagner’s four-opera “Ring” cycle, his epic on how to save the world from conniving gods, power mongers and hoarders of wealth with their ruinous fancies. Compared with contemporary “Ring” productions, particularly in Europe, where Wagner’s warning is often treated as a compellingly dysfunctional family drama, this might seem old-school conventional. The L.A. Phil’s other …
In 2016, Colburn — the community music school, conservatory, academy and dance school — bought a cheerless outdoor parking lot on the corner of 2nd and Olive streets downtown for $33 million. It was on a steep, pedestrian unfriendly hill that led to the Colburn’s Grand Avenue campus, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Walt Disney Concert Hall and the Broad. …
The Grand is rising. As the decades-delayed mixed-use facility designed by Frank Gehry begins to take towering, and possibly transformative, shape across the street from his Walt Disney Concert Hall, crucial missing pieces of that transformation are suddenly noticeable: two concert halls and a public plaza by Gehry that are keys to making Grand Avenue an arts arena like none …
