Bass-baritone Davone Tines performs Julius Eastman's "Prelude to the
Holy Presence of Joan d' Arc" at the Monday Evening Concerts in Zipper
Concert Hall. (Brian van der Brug / Los Angeles Times)
Sergio A. Mims forwards this article:
Music Critic
January 24, 2017
Julius Eastman was a lost Minimalist and a lost soul. He was a
composer, baritone and pianist of blinding, brilliant talent who died in
1990 at age 49, homeless and forgotten, in Buffalo, N.Y.
Two decades earlier he had helped to usher in the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s
first contemporary music festival at the Music Center, Contempo ’71.
Performing with Music Director Zubin Mehta, Eastman was called by critic
Martin Bernheimer in these pages “a young man who can do anything with
his voice.”
He could do much more. He was a composer ahead of his time, which
is what mainly led to his self-destructiveness and subsequent neglect.
But attention is now being paid, as the Monday Evening Concerts series
proved by opening its season at the Colburn School’s Zipper Concert Hall
with an all-Eastman program. The hall was packed with new music
old-timers and many younger newcomers.
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