Alan Rich

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On Closer Observation: Janine Jansen at Disney Hall

Alan Rich
Not So StinkyEduard Hanslick, a.k.a. Beckmesser, cast one of his notorious thunderbolts in the direction of Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto in 1881 when the ink on its mss. was barely dry, and generations of us hot-pen scriveners have feasted on his words ever since. “It gives us for the first time......
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The Axe Manual: Bang the Drum Quickly

Alan Rich
Good Old Sir Harry Betty Freeman (Click to enlarge) Composer Harrison Birtwistle Two of the world’s most endearing originals showed up at the most recent Monday Evening Concert — their music did, at least. One was Ralph Shapey, long gone but long remembered by us ex–New Yorkers for his fiery......
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Stirring, Terrifying

Alan Rich
Lesser Is Better Sheila Rock (Click to enlarge) Berlin’s Simon Rattle Wendy Lesser is the founder and editor of The Threepenny Review, a quarterly collection of thinking and, therefore, writing that I find indispensable. I don’t know her musical credentials, but her piece in the latest issue, on Simon Rattle......
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Arnold and Edward, and Their Morning at Disney Hall

Alan Rich
Edward is 12, loves the piano and is beginning to take lessons at his school in Mar Vista. Sometimes he comes to my house, when his mother comes to clean, and he picks out tunes on the piano. Arnold is 13, loves basketball and pretends not to care about music......
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Total Immersion: Long Beach Opera's Orpheus and Euridice

Alan Rich
The Devil in the Deep Blue Pool Keith Ian Polakoff (Click to enlarge) The lovers afloat There is this problem I have, trying to describe almost any production by the Long Beach Opera. Elektra in a Malibu beach house, Boris Godunov in a corporate boardroom ... and now I'm up......
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Splendid Company at Disney Hall

Alan Rich
Paradise Lost and Found Robert Millard (Click to enlarge) Verdi’s Otello at the Music Center "We are not the sole owners of our past," wrote Jordi Savall, music's great and original spirit, in a note accompanying his marvelous appearance at Disney Hall last week. His concert, with his ensemble of......
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Some Enchanted Evenings

Alan Rich
Gustav Mahler's Sixth Symphony is the elephant in the parlor, bedecked with garlands of roses. Its every dimension is wrong. From within the 85 minutes of Christoph Eschenbach's performance with the Philharmonic last weekend, any composition student with an X-Acto knife could shape a nicely proportioned 40-minute symphony. Yet that......
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Itzhak Perlman and Olivier Latry at Disney Hall

Alan Rich
Dutch Treat (Click to enlarge) Organist Olivier Latry I envy anyone his first look at Amsterdam. You step out of Central Station and there is the perfect urban landscape: old buildings in grand array, trolleys in front, everything numbered so that you know exactly where to go. Never mind that......
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In and Out of Church

Alan Rich
  Bill Bernstein (Click to enlarge) Conductor Lorin Maazel Full ServiceThe crowd observed a moment of silence as Lorin Maazel brought his performing forces to a reverent ending in a darkened Disney Hall last week, then burst forth in high-decibel approval. As with Messiaen's pictorial panorama the week before, and......
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In Living Color

Alan Rich
In 1973, the story goes, the wonderful, if eccentric, New York patron Alice B. Tully asked Olivier Messiaen to compose a piece for the American Bicentennial. Messiaen hesitated at first; the notion of celebrating American skyscrapers or the like did not appeal. Then Tully told him she had been invited......