Voice

“It’s hard to not to think of just a person playing the violin.” This is how my roommate James Taylor (not that James Taylor) jokingly responded after posing the question, what do you imagine while listening to classical music? James had been hired by classical music radio station KUSC to help come up with a possible interactive visualization tool for the station’s website, and was pondering ways in which to illustrate the complex string section of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring.

To help enliven his task, I invited James to come see the American Youth Symphony’s (AYS) final performance of their season at Royce Hall in the UCLA campus. He was unable to join me, but as soon as I sat down and took a look at the program, I realized he should have. The night was entitled, “The Goldsmith Project: The Middle Years (1971-1982)” and was dedicated to the late Oscar-winning film composer Jerry Goldsmith, specifically his works in the golden age of cinema—arguably the peak of his career. It marked the second installment of a planned three-year ‘Goldsmith Project’ the American Youth Symphony was doing in collaboration with the Film Music Society.

The opening number was not from a film, however; it was called “Music for Orchestra,” and was a single-movement commission piece Goldsmith composed for the St. Louis Symphony in 1970. This was the same year Goldsmith lost a wife to divorce and a mother to serious illness. Needless to say, the 8-minute-long dodecaphony expresses some dark themes, and as I examined the young performers (nobody a day past 27) arranged upon the stage, I was afraid the themes might prove too dark. But once I saw internationally-acclaimed conductor, and music director of AYS, Alexander Treger standing up on stage, baton in hand, fully confident in his fresh-faced ensemble, I knew I was in for a professional treat.

And such was the case. The kids—if I may call them that—finished “Music for Orchestra” flawlessly, their faces not showing the slightest hint of consternation, or effort even. As they went on to the next piece, excerpts from Aaron Copland’s The Tender Land (1954), I thought of how when I was the same age as some of the violin section, I rarely did anything without making a mistake. Meanwhile, these musicians—though even that title seems insufficient—flew through the gently epic tones of America’s most celebrated composer like it was breakfast.

Soon the much older members of the Angeles Chorale joined their youthful counterparts for the second movement of Tender Land. And it might have been the Whitman-esque phrasings in Copland’s lyrics, or the brassy Americana of his melodies, but the hall—mainly older folk—started to balloon with such a sense of hope. I couldn’t help but attribute this feeling to the mutual offerings of respect operating between the orchestra, the chorus, the audience, and even Copland himself.

Then came the film score section, led by guest conductor David Newman (that’s right…the man who brought you the legendary scores of Norbit, Scooby-Doo, Galaxy Quest, The Flintstones, and yes, Alvin and the Chipmuks: The Squeakquel). But who am I to kid? If anything Newman’s resume, and his affiliation with AYS, tells me that he’s comfortable catering to younger audiences, as well as adapting older themes into new ones. Which is almost exactly what he did. Under his direction, the young players—does that description work?—breathed life back into the forgotten, and in some cases never performed Goldsmith-penned soundtracks behind such films as Capricorn One and Papillon.

The real ticker of the night, however, came when they rolled down the giant projection screen above the stage and dimmed the lights, the orchestra members turning on their miniature stand-lights to see the sheet music for the score of the film Alien. Along with Chinatown and The Omen (which was performed later), this is probably one of Goldsmith’s best known works, only we were posed to hear the part of the score never before heard by a large audience—the part edited out of the original cut, yet inserted back in with precision for the night’s performance.

What became immediately apparent to me as I watched Sigourney Weaver and cohorts wrestle their way through a dark spaceship, the encroaching alien behind any corner, was the significance of silence in a film score. Long, sharp notes from an instrument called a serpent (a predecessor of the tuba), followed by just enough space for the action to take precedence over the music. I realized that film scores like Alien, or even more solemn ones like QB VII—another Goldsmith composition for the first-ever miniseries about the Holocaust—aren’t necessarily multi-layered. But they contain a lot of whimsy and neat tricks; they’re more interested in whisking you along the ride, rather than getting you lost inside it. They provide the space for images, so that the audience doesn’t just picture a person playing the violin. A good film composer must be versatile, proficient, and able to bend their distinct voice in service of another artist. Come to think of it, much like a young musician.

The American Youth Symphony 2009-2010 season has ended, but will start up again next year with yet another series of admission free performances at UCLA’s Royce Hall. For more information, please call (310) 470-2332, or visit www.aysymphony.org.

When I was a young, impressionable, and far too enthusiastic (okay, fine: totally nerdy) college student, I jumped at the chance to fulfill a required GE credit by taking a class called “The History of Opera.” I grew up singing opera, but it wasn’t until I explored the academia behind the music that I was able to truly realize that German opera, especially that of Richard Wagner, was the most dramatic, intense, goose-bump inducing music of all.

Just a few days ago, my friend, colleague, and fellow opera student/patron Nicole C. wrote an article for our beloved site on the current German invasion of Los Angeles arts institutions, Das Ring Festival ist Upon Us.  According to Nicole, the LA Opera has spent a whopping $32 million dollars producing the definitive Ring Festival, including its production of the four operas that comprise Wagner’s famous Ring Cycle (a feat unto itself), and a wide selection of events, exhibitions, and concerts at many of LA’s cultural havens. As a Wagner aficionado and someone who thinks German culture is wunderbar, I gladly hopped on this Nordic bandwagon and visited LACMA’s current exhibition Myths, Legends and Cultural Renewal: Wagner’s Sources.

First with the bad news: after visiting two of LACMA’s box offices and confusing three separate security guards in what seemed a futile attempt to be directed toward this exhibition, I started to believe that the existence of the show was some sort of myth or legend. I was starting to feel as if LACMA’s heart was not in this exhibit, but finally, my fourth attempt at harassing a museum guard proved victorious, and I was led to a small, dark, hidden room, approximately the size of a walk-in closet.

The good news: even though tiny, the exhibition did teach me something about the essential role that myths and legends play in cultural renewal.  Reinvented and passed down through the generations, myths and legends are a constant inspiration to artists.  Germany’s mythological heritage was best captured in the 19^th Century in the work of Richard Wagner.  Wagner’s operas utilize subject matter from the Edda (a collection of Norse tales from the 13^th Century), and on the Nibelungenlied (verses rooted in pre Christian oral traditions, which in the High Middle Ages were codified into an epic poem). During Wagner’s time, these once lost and forgotten traditions were renewed upon the discovery of manuscripts, which contributed to the renewed German national identity and the development of Romanticism.

The exhibit begins with a series of sixteen postcards (c. 1894-96) based on the watercolors of Emil Nolde.  I have always been mesmerized by mountains and the monsters that inhabit them; my favorite part of The Matterhorn ride at Disneyland was when the Abominable Snowman lumbers out from behind a cropping of rocks to growl a warning to the bobsled team whizzing by.  Nolde apparently shared my dangerous attraction to mountain creatures.  His paintings portray the anthropomorphization of Germany’s alpine peaks and reveal the fantastical presence of mountain monsters.  Some of my favorite scenes within these postcards were silly, cartoon humans running away from the spirit of the mountains, while the faces of old men, with their long white beards serving as the snow capped summits, laugh maniacally.  I was able to understand why this series of postcards became so popular in modernist Germany, for the realm of fantasy came to life, and the spirit of Mother Nature was more attainable than ever.

On the far wall of the exhibition, Henri Fantin-Latour’s Tannhauser on the Venusberg (1864) represented the international fascination with the legends utilized in Wagner’s work.  Latour, who considered himself a French Wagnerite, fell in love with Wagner’s operas in the early 1860s after attending a performance of Tannhauser.  His painting is a study in modernist technique, and reveals the incident when Tannhauser, a knight and poet, finds the secret home of the Venus of Teutonic legend.  In this painting, Latour offers an alternative to popular genre painting and achieves unison of gestures, staging, and poetic sources.  The painting itself looks like a drowsy, unconscious dream state, perfectly representing the transformation of myth to reality.

The finale of the exhibition is Achim Freyer’s set design and installation, based on the prototypes for the LA Opera’s 2010 production of the Ring Cycle.  Freyer, the director and designer of the the Ring Cycle, belongs to the post-World War II generation that felt alienated from a national culture left in ruins and misrepresented by the horrific plunder of the Third Reich.  In an effort to redeem his culture, Freyer strives to recuperate the idea of Wagner for our own age. The abstraction of his drawings brings to mind the sense of the absurd and the surreal, but also eliminates any specificity of time by pulling the audience into an everlasting present. A true Wagnerite, he managed to never waver from the composer’s stage direction and vision.  His allusions breathe life into his productions, and withhold a sense of universal significance. Just as Wagner hoped for his Ring Cycle to be eternal, Freyer’s representations are freed from the constraints of time.  Too bad the installation looked like a makeshift Halloween haunted house in some wacky neighbor’s garage.  I can only imagine Freyer throwing a fit at LACMA’s sorry production value.

In all honesty, this exhibition is worth seeing if you’re an avid German history fan, or like me, get embarrassingly excited about anything and everything Wagner. Otherwise, I might advise that you spend your weekend doing something else. With a little bit more time, PR effort, and space, the exhibition could have been much more enlightening and rewarding.  I give LACMA credit for joining the Ring Festival effort, but for Pete’s sake, what good does it do if you can’t find the exhibition?

-By Brittany Krasner

Myths, Legends and Cultural Renewal: Wagner’s Sources is on view through August 16^th. Visit http://www.lacma.org/art/ExhibWagnersSources.aspx for more information.

The kind people at UCLA Live have offered, exclusively to Fine Arts LA readers thank you very much, a discount on tickets to see that tortured, irresistible Englishman we wrote about last night at Royce Hall!  The man: Ian Bostridge.  The performance: Schubert’s Winterreise. The time: tomorrow evening, 8pm.

Click here to go to the event page and make sure once you’ve chosen your tickets that you enter in the following secret password: WINTERREISE.  That will get you 25% off — just cause you’re so in-the-know. Enjoy the show!  (The offer only lasts for a limited time and can’t be combined with any other offers.)

Discovering a new talent is always an exciting and enriching pursuit.  When contemporary classical musicians like Joshua Bell, Janine Jansen, and Nathan Gunn first hit the scene, goose bumps hit classical music fans in waves and they’ve yet to die down.  Among the latest string of virtuosic performers offering spine-tingling performances and inspiring such juicy nicknames as “barihunks,” are Juan Diego Florez (recently of LA Opera’s The Barber of Seville) and English tenor Ian Bostridge, performing this week for the first time at UCLA’s Royce Hall.

Ian Bostridge is an Englishman through and through.  A born and bred Londoner with an Oxford education in philosophy and history, it wouldn’t shock any of us to learn he’s also in line for the throne.  (He’s not.) He’s won the Royal Philharmonic Society’s Debut Award, Gramophone’s Solo Vocal Award, a Grammy, an Edison Award, and a Brit award among others.  As you may have imagined, he has performed on the world’s most prestigious stages in Paris, Lisbon, Brussels, and Stockholm and alongside the London Symphony Orchestra, English National Opera; in the late 1990s he sang at The Frick Collection in New York and at Lincoln Center.  So why is it that we haven’t heard much about him? Have we been too focused on our Latin heartthrobs to notice an English gentleman’s been looking over this way?

Well, he’s caught our attention and we can assume that his performance on Wednesday evening will only help to keep it.  He’s performing Franz Schubert’s Winterreise, which is a cycle of poems written by Wilhelm Muhler and set to music. It’s melodic, dramatic, and really showcases the singer’s technique.  It’s a notoriously difficult undertaking to sing the Winterreise, so pay attention – he’s pulling out all the stops.  We still get to keep Dudamel and ballet dancer extraordinaire Marcelo Gomes.  They’ll just have to make room for Ian Bostridge is all.

Ian Bostridge will perform Winterreise at Royce Hall on Wednesday, March 24, 2010 at 8pm.  For more information, please call (310) 825-2101 or click here.

What is Mindulful Awareness?  And how do you do it?

Right now my brain is thinking of a way to describe this new-age, medical concept while sending signals to the muscles in my fingers in order to type out, letter by letter, the words and eventual sentences to communicate this notion to an imagined, future audience.  Oh, and I’m hungry.  That’s Mindful Awareness: the “moment-by-moment process of actively and openly observing one’s physical, mental and emotional experiences.”

To hear more specific information about the proven health benefits of such exercises, as well as how to do them, head to the Hammer Museum at 12:30 PM this Thursday for their free weekly “drop in” session.  Leading the discussion is the UCLA Mindful Awareness Research Center’s Director of Mindfulness Education, Diana Winston, alongside Dr. Marvin Belzer, an expert practitioner of Mindful Awareness.

What is Gesamtkunstwerk?  And how do you sing it?

Well, Gesamtkunstwerk, pronounced ‘guess-amt-kunst-verk,’ is a term made famous by German composer, conductor, director, anti-Semite, and writer Wilhelm Richard Wagner, and it’s usually translated to mean “total artwork.”  Wagner, in all his “Ride of the Valkyries” gusto, had a vision of a kind of ‘future art,’  in which the end-result would be a synthesis for every art-form known to man (i.e. music, performance, drama, architecture, poetry, etc.).  It’s debatable whether or not Wagner actually achieved a true Gesamtkunstwerk in his work, but his deep influence and brilliance as a composer/writer of opera is hard to match, let alone perform.

At 7:00 PM on Thursday night at the Hammer Museum, Wagnerian singers Linda Watson and John Treleavan of the on-going Ring Festival LA (an enormous cultural compilation of lectures, exhibitions, shows, and conferences revolving around the first-ever Los Angeles performance of Wagner’s four-opera masterpiece, The Ring of the Nibelung) will discuss the intricacies of belting out complex tonal and chromatic changes, while still remaining a simple piece of the overall Gesamtkunstwerk.

What is the connection?  And why would you attend both lectures?

Besides the obvious similarity in setting, there does seem to be a thematic crossover between these two programs.  Both attempt to explain the whole in terms of its parts, and those parts in terms of their smaller parts, and so on.  This mode of thinking assumes there’s a greater organism at work, spinning wheels inside wheels, and what better way to get lost inside these rotations than to spend a day at the Hammer?  Either that, or write an opera.

“Mindful Awareness” starts at 12:30 PM on Thursday, March 11.  “Ring Festival: The Challenges of Singing Wagner” begins at 7:00 PM.  Both programs are free of admission, and take place at The Hammer Museum, located at 10899 Wilshire Blvd.  For more information, please call (310) 433-7000, or visit hammer.ucla.edu.

The last time the Dirty Projectors played in Los Angeles was on Halloween at the Jensen Recreation Center in Echo Park, where frontman David Longstreth wore a ten-gallon foam cowboy hat and his upside-down guitar with the confidence of a newly minted visionary. Fans of the Projectors’ odd, brilliant, shimmering music had been waiting for the band to play at Disney Hall since November, anticipating their breakout hit, 2009’s Bitte Orca, amplified by a lush string section.

But on Saturday night, Longstreth looked small and befuddled on the Disney Hall stage, fiddling with the tuning of his guitars for a half an hour during intermission. Longstreth is 28, with the refractory brain of a brilliant twelve-year-old with attention deficit disorder and the composing abilities of Mozart on mushrooms in Africa. After Saturday night, the audience learned his musical influences include Ligeti, Wagner, Ravel, and Don Henley.

Don Henley might seem like an odd choice. The program notes include an earnest letter Longstreth sent Henley in 2005, accompanying a free copy of The Getty Address, Longstreth’s 2005 opera about materialism, the homogenization of FM radio, and Sacagewea, or something like that. “I have included a copy of it here for you,” Longstreth wrote to Henley. “The album examines the question of what is wilderness in a world completely circumscribed by highways, once Manifest Destiny has no place to go- but in the end it is a love story.” Clearly, this makes sense to only one person: Longstreth himself.

The program was divided into three parts: the Philharmonic playing alone, the Projectors playing The Getty Address along with the ensemble Alarm Will Sound, and the Projectors playing alone. The program began with selections Longstreth hand-picked for the Philharmonic. Highlights included Ligeti’s Etude No. 13, played by gray-haired John Orge, who lingered on the piano keys after the last high notes for a long, indulgent silence, and Ravel’s beautifully orchestrated Mother Goose Suite. After a long intermission, the Projectors emerged, wearing color-coordinated hooded jackets, to play The Getty Address in its entirety. And here is where the problems began.

Truthfully, the opera is an indulgent college project from a very, very talented student, with glimpses of the Projectors’ current, much more successful musical incarnation nestled in like raisins studded into a very wobbly gray oatmeal. In the first song (er, movement), “I Sit on the Ridge at Dusk,” the beat kicked in, and the Projectorettes (Amber Coffman, Haley Dekle, and Angel Deradoorian) wailed “got a world of trouble on my mind,” in an indistinct language, moving very slightly from side to side, like shy sirens. But momentum was lost on the second song, and the album is so complex, the time signatures so twisted, it seemed that no amount of practice could have nailed it down. It didn’t help that Alarm Will Sound had some spotty synchronicity and tuning moments. The long, drifting passages on “But in the Headlights” and “Gilt Gold Scabs” sounded misguided and naked, as though a player were missing. Some members played on wine bottles, and a base flute was involved, as well as lots of gratuitous hand-clapping, which sounded messy at times, perhaps on purpose. Many in the audience began to get restless, but the ensemble soldiered on to no avail.

After the opera finally ended, the Projectors (minus their drummer) took the stage for three songs: a very slow cover of Dylan’s “I Dreamed I Saw St. Augustine,” as well as their own “Temecula Sunrise” and “Cannibal Resource” from Bitte Orca. They sounded good, and Longstreth’s singing sounded much more comfortable, but the band would have sounded much better with a whole orchestra backing them up. None of the women got to sing lead on any song, though Angel Deradoorian singing “Two Doves” would have sounded lovely in this acoustic setting.

All in all, the event demonstrated what the Projectors are capable of musically. It also showed that some misguided musical experiments are better laid to rest, no matter how brilliant their 23-year-old composer may be. As the Eagles said, “And I don’t want to hear any more/ No, no, baby/ I don’t want to hear any more.” Here’s hoping the Projectors stick to Bitte Orca from now on.

By Cassandra McGrath of CWG Magazine

The Walt Disney Concert Hall is located at 111 South Grand Avenue in Downtown Los Angeles.  For more information on upcoming shows, please call (213) 972-7211, or visit www.laphil.com.

American composer Robert Kurka’s only opera, Good Soldier Schweik, began life in 1956 as a six movement suite based on characters from the popular Czech antiwar novel of the same name, by Jaroslav Hask. New York City Opera became interested in turning the suite into an opera and Kurka expanded the orchestra from his original scoring for 7 woodwinds, to 16, plus brass and percussion, and began working with librettist Lewis Allan – a songwriter known for the celebrated anti-lynching song, “Strange Fruit,” and the Frank Sinatra hit, “The House I Live In,” but chiefly, as the adoptive father of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg’s sons after the couple had been convicted of espionage and executed.

Kurka died in 1957 at the age of 35, four months before the opera’s successful NYCO premiere. Within the next 40 years, Good Soldier Schweik had seen over one hundred productions throughout the world, and been translated into 12 languages.

The work combines elements of American musical theatre, jazz, and Czech folk music, to underscore an explicitly anti-war story. The Long Beach Opera company’s cast of singing and dancing actors – led by tenor Matthew DiBattista in a powerhouse performance – delivered the goods in director Ken Roht’s dazzling multi-media production at Barnum Hall in Santa Monica. The orchestra – well, band, in this case – played with stylish pizzazz under Conductor/Artistic Director Andreas Mitisek.

Ably realized through Dan Weingarten’s inspired lighting and Justin Jorgensen’s novel set design, the production utilized scrims, projections, choreography, and outlandish props to whisk the plot from scene to scene at a breakneck pace, so that the audience was as disoriented as Schweik by the experience.

The house – mostly all long-time Long Beach Opera fans, and mostly very elderly – was packed, attesting to their pleasure at not having to endure a schlep to Long Beach. This brings me to my only gripe with this enterprise: somehow, LBO’s marketing missed the mark, hugely. Where was the large, 20-to-30-something demographic that would have been enraptured – and captured – by this stunning example of what opera has become in the 21st century?

- By Penny Orloff

To see Long Beach Opera’s full calendar, please click here.

This week marked an emergency situation for LA Opera – they needed a $14 million bailout from the city on Tuesday in order to even stay afloat through the middle of next year.  Stephen Rountree (CEO of both LA Opera and Music Center), as reported by the LA Times said the company is “$20 million in debt,” and since LA Opera is “by far the most important tenant at the Dorothy Chandler, its failure could set off a chain of events that takes down the Music Center.”  Disaster was narrowly averted when the city agreed to loan the money, which will be repaid in one lump sum in January 2013.  It’s not hard to imagine that this debt largely came from LA Opera’s somewhat controversial decision to stage an avante-garde and severely expensive production of Wagner’s Ring Cycle – both the individual productions during the last and current seasons as well as the full Ring Cycle Festival, set to include over 100 artists and institutions next summer.  They’ve spent $32 million staging the Ring Cycle.  County Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky said, rightly, that the LA Opera is a significantly important artistic organization for LA county continuing to say, “For all they have built up… this is almost no price for us to pay… we’ll save the opera.”  [LA Times]

Given how rare it is to hear of money being given to artists in non-emergency situations, you’ll be glad to hear that a new prize awarding $100,000 to artists under 35 has been announced by the Victor Pinchuk Foundation.  A Ukrainian billionaire and art collector, Victor Pinchuk will present his Future Generation Art Prize every two years to artists who can apply online and artists that have been nominated by professionals in the art world.  The international jury set to decide the winner is said to include Elton John, Miuccia Prada, and in some small way, the public.  Winners can’t have just made one great piece and then run off with the money, however – the New York Times reports that “$40,000 of the purse must go into the production of art.”  General Director of the Pinchuk Art Center Eckhard Schneider said, “We also wanted to make sure that an older generation of artists helps the younger.” [NY Times]

Figaro had a life before he got married, you know.  He was the kind of man that men wanted to be and that ladies wanted to be with – a barber to the stars, if you will, roaming around Seville singing his own praises.  In Rossini’s The Barber of Seville, on now at LA Opera, Figaro happens upon Count Almaviva who’s cleverness has been trumped only by his hopeless love for Rosina, who is the ward of the tyrannical Doctor Bartolo.  Almaviva convinces Figaro, with the promise of “gold in abundance” to help him win his heart’s affection.

What follows is a phenomenally witty opera filled with comic nuances that are only enhanced by this production’s stellar cast.  Nathan Gunn returns to LA Opera as the arrogant, but not without reason, Figaro – his polka dot vest and coiffed brown locks both proof of his status as premiere “barihunk.”  Renowned tenor Juan Diego Florez makes his LA Opera debut as the love-struck, earnest Count Almaviva.  These two have a George-Clooney-and-Brad-Pitt-in-Ocean’s-Eleven dynamic right from the start; their planning and plotting makes for fantastic comic fodder and both men go far beyond impressing the audience with their abundant solos.  Where Gunn’s clear, skillful baritone strikes just the right note in Act I’s “Largo al Factotum,” Florez’ sweet songs in Act II captivated and held the audience with his strong and multifaceted voice.

It’s quite clear why Florez’ Count Almaviva is so enamored with Rosina.  Played by Joyce DiDonato, it almost seemed like the audience wanted to clamor up on stage and serenade her themselves.  When she sang, I believe no one in the audience could even fidget – she has such control over her voice that her girly, giggling, and somehow manipulative character still left room to hear a masterful performance.  The three of them together, Florez, Gunn, and DiDonato, make for a powerful trio – their wily chemistry on stage was not only hysterical, but beautiful.

The rest of the cast is certainly not to be overlooked.  The genius of Don Basilio, played by the overwhelmingly large and deep voiced Andrea Silvestrelli, is matched perfectly with the bumbling, gullible, and simply cruel Doctor Bartolo, played by Bruno Pratico.  Both of their voices are suited so well to their roles it’s hard to imagine them playing anyone else.

I can’t say enough about the set design – it starts out in an entirely white and black palate only to be transformed in the second act to a striking (and typical to Seville) set of fantastic colors.  And that includes the costumes – Florez’ all hot pink suit at the end of Act II is nothing short of a miracle.  From the Overture, you may be surprised as to how recognizable this music is – if you’ve never listened to The Barber of Seville on purpose, you definitely have without knowing it.  And it’s always an added treat to attend the opera when you’re familiar with the music.

I only wish there was a more eloquent way of saying: see this opera.  Doesn’t matter where you sit, just go.

The Barber of Seville is playing at LA Opera through December 19, 2009.  Please call (213) 972-8001 or click here for more information.

Listen to “Una Voce Poco Fa” (Rosina’s famous aria) here:

‘Tis the season not only for holidays, but museum birthdays as well.  MOCA turned the big 3-0 recently and we wanted to remind you in case you forgot — the GRAMMY Museum is turning a year old on December 6th.  Our favorite GRAMMY Museum is growing up right before our eyes!

Instead of the ol’ cake and candles routine, the GRAMMY Museum is making it memorable with the one, the only critically acclaimed soul singer Maxwell.

He won us over with his debut album Urban Hang Suite, which he released at the tender age of 23.  And making his way up the charts, we have heard his smooth sound develop into its latest and fourth incarnation: BLACKsummers’ night.

The party is on December 2nd.  The night begins with the kick-off to the entire GRAMMY season – the televised The GRAMMY Nominations Concert Live!!: Countdown to Music’s Biggest Night, with Maxwell making an appearance and showing us a taste of what he’s got.  And then Maxwell will take the stage over at Club Nokia L.A. LIVE, baring all his soul and talents.

We’re just not sure our birthday present can top Maxwell’s live performance…

For more information about The GRAMMY Museum Presents: Maxwell, call 213.765.6800 or click here.