Alan Rich

Homecoming Esa-Pekka Salonen’s return to the Philharmonic at the Hollywood Bowl began a week of cultural overload such that you’d ordinarily expect in mid-January. Yet here we were in summer’s waning days. Well, for starters, it wasn’t just any old week at the Bowl; it was the kind of challenging,......

Fiddling on Grand Thursday was chamber-music night on Grand Avenue: indoors with the Calder Quartet in Zipper Hall, outdoors with the Kronos Quartet, plus Wu Man and her magical pipa a short walk down at the Water Garden in California Plaza. The timing was sufficiently staggered so that you could......

Madame ButterballStephen Hartke’s The Greater Good is something we’ve long awaited: an American opera of genuine musical stature that uses the elements of opera in proper balance to create dramatic ebb and flow consistent with a storyline. The opera is out on a two-CD Naxos album, recorded at its premiere......

Madame ButterballStephen Hartke’s The Greater Good is something we’ve long awaited: an American opera of genuine musical stature that uses the elements of opera in proper balance to create dramatic ebb and flow consistent with a storyline. The opera is out on a two-CD Naxos album, recorded at its premiere......

Madame Butterball Stephen Hartke’s The Greater Good is something we’ve long awaited: an American opera of genuine musical stature that uses the elements of opera in proper balance to create dramatic ebb and flow consistent with a storyline. The opera is out on a two-CD Naxos album, recorded at its......

Madame Butterball Stephen Hartke’s The Greater Good is something we’ve long awaited: an American opera of genuine musical stature that uses the elements of opera in proper balance to create dramatic ebb and flow consistent with a storyline. The opera is out on a two-CD Naxos album, recorded at its......

The End of Mozart Someday I will have my own music school, and the course I will teach will be devoted to Mozart, one movement at a time per semester. I would start with the slow movement of the D-minor Piano Concerto (K. 466), which was on the Hollywood Bowl......

Waiving Rules, Ruling Waves A mighty man is he, this Nicholas McGegan. You might not think so at first; he’s a fellow slight of build, and he has a way of approaching the Hollywood Bowl podium a little like a demure bunny rabbit, but the might is there nevertheless. It’s......

Ninth, but Not to the Nth Something, I am sorry to inform you, stood between me and the paroxysms of delight with which the other 12-or-so thousand happy spectators greeted the efforts of Michael Tilson Thomas of San Francisco in his two concerts leading the Philharmonic at the Hollywood Bowl......