Alan Rich

Bananas At the sound of Elisabeth Schwarzkopf’s singing, strong men fell weak, nightingales blushed with envy, sunsets went pale. The pleasures she purveyed were guilty as hell, but how she could dish them out! We all had our favorite lines of her music, and they delivered sweet dreams: a defiance......

Minimally Elderly How the decades fly past! Steve Reich turns 70, with Phil Glass in hot pursuit; John Adams glides into 60 with nary a wrinkle. Reich’s new choral work resounds at next Sunday’s Master Chorale concert; Adams’ classics retains their bloom at a couple of Philharmonic events; the mail,......

Times Change Get this: “New music has never been an integral part of the winter-season diet of the Los Angeles Philharmonic. On those rare occasions when our orchestra ventures an acknowledgement of the contemporary composer, the subscription audiences respond with stoic endurance at best, rude disdain at worst . . . The......

Being There My relationship with Bela Bartók’s Concerto for Orchestra has been historic and loving. I attended the world premiere, as a second-balcony usher in Boston’s Symphony Hall, December 1, 1944. Backstage after the performance, on my way to change out of uniform, I met Bartók and shook his hand......

Concerted Efforts Two segments remain (February 17-18, March 17-18) of the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra’s two-year sweep through the piano concertos of Mozart: Saturdays at Glendale’s Alex Theatre, Sundays at UCLA’s Royce Hall. The turnouts have been close to capacity; it’s not just my imagination that I’ve absorbed these concerts......

Paradoxes The collapse of Tower Records was, as much as anything, a failure of relevance. The new generation, which in the past would have become the next record-buying public and the next, now download the infinite riches of the market onto their iPods. The hi-fi crowd of my youth, with......

Words’ Worth “Music is never pure,” wrote Luciano Berio of his Circles, “it is attitude; it is theater.” Berio’s great vocal adventure ended the 1961-62 season of Monday Evening Concerts, to a capacity crowd. It began the 2006-07 season last week, again with a turn-away box office. Much has happened......

Straight to the Kisser The Sixth Symphony of Antonin Dvorák disarms all protest. It snuggles into your awareness with a warm-hearted, syncopated throb, eases onto your lap and delivers an irresistible wet kiss. No other music in my acquaintance, large-scale or small, comes at you quite this way, although the......

Sex Triumphant . . . Beyond the memories — pleasant, as far as they go — of The Coronation of Poppea with the Emperor Nero cruising his realm in a Ferrari bearing ROMA-1 license plates, and far beyond the abject journalistic misrepresentation of the pristine work in last week’s hometown press, two aspects......

Out of Mothballs Large-scale chamber works by Gabriel Fauré, I would have thought, might comfortably rest on one of the less accessible shelves in my musical larder, their presence acknowledged from afar. After succumbing to the absolute enchantment of one of these works, the C-minor Piano Quintet, at a recent......