Sex and opera go together like peanut butter and chocolate, believe it or not. After all, opera plots revolve around one character trying to remove another's clothes. That and what happens to those characters after coitus has transpired.

Rest assured, then, that an opera featuring tell-all diarist Anais Nin as the main character will involve plenty of sexual shenanigans. As part of the LA Philharmonic's Green Umbrella series tomorrow night at Walt Disney Concert Hall, Louis Andriessen's one-act musical drama Anais Nin certainly delivers on that front. Nin blows Antonin Artaud's mind, and then him. (Or maybe it's the other way around). And then there's the part where she drives Henry Miller crazy with lust.

Craig T. Mathew/Mathew Imaging

Gustavo Dudamel concludes The Mahler Project at Shrine Auditorium. Not visible here: 1000 more musicians and singers

Did you have a WTF moment Saturday night, a tug towards the ocean followed by a sensation of heaviness pulling downward for a second?

What you felt was the Mahlerian center of gravity in North America, shifting from Manhattan to snap into place beneath Los Angeles, minutes after Gustavo Dudamel and over 1000 musicians onstage at Shrine Auditorium finished Gustav Mahler's Eighth Symphony.

That performance was the last piece of the LA Philharmonic's ambitious Mahler Project: all nine of Mahler's ginormous symphonies performed in a little over three weeks. By one conductor. From memory. 101 years after Mahler's death, nobody to our knowledge has done that before. When it comes to Mahler, that makes The Dude, well--The Dude!