“When the full Los Angeles Philharmonic returned to Walt Disney Concert Hall last week for its first concert of the new year, much had changed during the orchestra’s month away,” writes Mark Swed in Monday’s (1/17) Los Angeles Times. “The number of positive tests in L.A County was 28 times higher than in early December…. Attendance was light [on] the occasion of Michael Tilson Thomas’ first appearance here since he began treatment for a brain tumor…. All and all, the concert probably proved one of the safer public gatherings…. Tilson Thomas conducted a phenomenal concert [featuring Tilson Thomas’s] ‘Meditations on Rilke,’ in which he made vivid how the miracle of life … can be beheld in the single falling leaf, in everything we see, touch, taste and feel. Prokofiev’s Fifth Symphony bombarded listeners with our struggle for righteousness amid warring impulses…. None of this answers the essential questions of whether or not concerts should proceed…. The Grammys have postponed its January ceremony.… Meanwhile, the Super Bowl in Inglewood remains viable, despite the precedent of two … arena concerts in Puerto Rico last month becoming superspreader events…. In a certain German opera house, no talking is allowed in the theater.”
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