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......

It was good to hear Earl Kim's music again; I knew him at Berkeley in the late '40s, when I had the job of working the Music Department's only tape recorder and he was already composing deep, dark, moving songs, from which I learned much. Susan Narucki sang his Exercises......

The Cat House Afire Edgard Varèse arrived in New York in 1915, age 32. His journey from his native Burgundy had taken in most of Europe’s cultural capitals, where his scores had been played, admired, and many lost in a couple of fires. He had attended the notorious premiere of......

Starting From Here December wasn’t much; you get so many sing-alongs. One night, a young man of scholarly mien, Jonathan Biss, tried out his fingers, but not apparently his heart, on the Beethoven Fourth Piano Concerto at Disney. Afterward, he sat in front of me, and many people, rather rudely......

More Sharp Than Flat Long faces greeted the last new year. Record stores went broke; so did the manufacturers; so did symphony orchestras; so (sob!) did music critics. Long faces were soon replaced around here, however, with one that was round, cherubic and positively agleam, when Gustavo Dudamel came to......

Art Thou Not Kent? In Munich one week last month, Kent Nagano conducted three operas on that many nights. Unsuk Chin’s Alice in Wonderland in Achim Freyer’s staging was as delightful the second time around as when I’d seen it last summer. Tristan und Isolde began with Isolde on a......

Spectral Delivery With a brassy blast onstage and an ethereal sigh from violas as if from another planet, the Monday Evening Concerts proclaimed their return in full force at Zipper Hall last week. Last year’s concerts had been a tentative set of “what if?” programs under guest curators, designed to......

Small PerfectionI like the L.A. Opera’s La Bohème, as I usually do. Hearing Puccini’s infinitely appealing score at Mrs. Chandler’s Pavilion the other night, in a generally excellent performance under Hartmut Haenchen, who had also led an okay Don Giovanni the night before, I found myself amazed once again (for......

Dirty Business Afoot “Don Giovanni,” the question ran, “is it the world’s greatest work of art, or merely Mozart’s greatest opera?” The late Winthrop Sargeant raised it, but left it dangling, in the old Life magazine in its juiciest days as pop-culture avatar. The Don Giovanni question — greatest vs......

Those Were the Days As we waited for Alex Ross to show up to talk about his new book at the Los Angeles Central Library a couple of weeks ago, the hypnotic sounds of Steve Reich’s Music for 18 Musicians came over the PA system: one masterpiece filling in for......