Alan Rich

Firm Foundation The Philharmonic hires well. Last week’s classical concerts at the Hollywood Bowl were entrusted to the orchestra’s second-tier leaders, assistant conductor Joana Carneiro and associate Alexander Mickelthwate. They represent an orchestra’s crucial support system, the young conductors, recently out of conservatories or competitions, sometimes with a few years......

Missing the Moonlight Maurice Ravel composed his Piano Concerto as a handshake to the American audiences who awaited his first tour of this country. His first movement teems with his new love of the American vernacular; the jazz licks are straight out of Gershwin, maybe a line or two of......

Hope Remains The grandiose pillared portico of Munich’s National Theater — built in 1825, gutted by our boys in 1943, reopened in 1963 — bespeaks a city that honors and is honored by its opera. Tristan and Die Meistersinger had their premieres there; the shadows of the Richards, Wagner and......

Composers What can a composer say about his or her music that the music itself cannot say better? The question is voluminously argued, with results that fill libraries. Lately they’ve been filling DVDs as well, with results of varying quality. Here are two DVDs of recent issue or reissue. Both......

{mosimage}Déjà Vu All Over Again: Plácido Domingo zoomed out from the wings at the Hollywood Bowl on opening night, encased in Kristin Chenoweth as wraparound, and I was suddenly overpowered by memory. On October 23, 1966, at the New York State Theater, a somewhat younger Domingo gathered up a fragile......

Swan Songs And still they come. There’s no way of knowing where the latest classical disc releases may be had — something-or-other dot-com seems to be the easiest manner of acquisition — but some producers continue to behave as if the market were happy and flourishing, and there are releases......

The Fateful Tick Only György Ligeti could have dreamed it up. And while his Poème Symphonique actually had had its premiere several decades ago (in 1962) and many thousand miles away (in the Netherlands), it proved exactly the right curtain raiser for this 61st run of the wondrously indescribable festival-like-none-other......

Flat Tortilla The opera company that rose to distinction with Don Carlo, Poppea and Mahagonny during its excellent season lurched toward triviality at season’s end, first with last month’s overproduced, overstuffed Merry Widow and now with Luisa Fernanda. In a press briefing a week before the premiere, general director Plácido......

The Bullshit Factor The elderly white-haired gentleman sat on the stage and smiled. “This is one of the world’s greatest composers,” said Steven Stucky by way of introducing his old teacher from Cornell University days. “He is the world’s greatest composer,” repeats KUSC’s Jim Svejda about his Czech mate, week......

{mosimage}Some of the liveliest music making has come to my attention this season under the least-promising circumstances: one proud parent or another entreating my presence at some doted-upon offspring’s high school’s annual musical production. Los Angeles being the proverbial talent hotbed, the prospects are usually not so dire as at......