“Franz Schubert and Samuel Beckett don’t immediately appear to have all that much in common,” writes Scott Timberg in Sunday’s (3/19) Los Angeles Times. “But ‘Night and Dreams,’ a recital Tuesday night at Walt Disney Concert Hall, seeks to frame them as brothers under the skin—two artists whose work has all kinds of stylistic and emotional affinities. Julia Bullock, the soprano who will be leading the recital, points out that ‘the things Schubert and Beckett circle around—mortality, love, depression, the pendulum swinging back and forth between the light and dark of existence’—are almost identical.… ‘Night and Dreams,’ put on by the Los Angeles Philharmonic, will alternate Schubert lieder with short plays by Beckett … The connection would not have puzzled the author of Waiting for Godot … ‘Beckett loved Schubert,’ says Yuval Sharon, 37, the mad genius who dreamed up the recital. ‘Schubert was his favorite composer.’ … When Bullock, bass-baritone Ryan McKinny, actor Barry McGovern and their fellow performers take to the Disney stage Tuesday, the openness and abstraction of Beckett’s work may be what suits it to such a range of interpretations. … The recital, Sharon hopes, will make the incongruences fade.” Read an interview with Julia Bullock in the current issue of Symphony magazine.
Posted March 23, 2017
