Author Archives: Alan Rich

Photo by Cylla Von Tiedemann People have been heard to say, once in a while, that chamber music is an alien art hereabouts, that Los Angeles prefers its music loud. That might have been the case at one time – … Continue reading →

If you needed a couple of perfect lab specimens to illustrate the philosophical gap between East Coast and West Coast music, you couldn’t find worthier paradigms than the events at either end of a recent five-day stretch. At one end, … Continue reading →

Having served us nobly, for the past 30 years or so, in resurrecting both the music of the distant past and its surrounding ambiance – baroque chamber music in a baroque-rip-off Pasadena mansion, say – MaryAnn Bonino’s Da Camera Society … Continue reading →

MARK-ANTHONY TURNAGE LOOKS like a bloke and composes like a diabolical horde. He first invaded our awareness at Ojai in 2000 with Blood on the Floor, 70 minutes of exquisitely controlled mayhem. The title came from one of Francis Bacon’s … Continue reading →

FINALLY, THERE IS CLOCKS AND Clouds. I have entertained a private passion for György Ligeti’s 14-minute gathering of moonbeams and distant thunderclaps ever since Esa-Pekka Salonen performed it with the Philharmonic in 1993. It was scheduled for inclusion in Salonen’s … Continue reading →

BARRING A STUMBLE OR TWO, the Los Angeles Opera usually strikes gold in its forays into bel canto comic opera: Don Pasquale and L’Elisir d’Amore, La Cenerentola and The Barber of Seville. This is not, as some believe, an easy … Continue reading →

EVEN IF WILLIAM BOLCOM’S SONGS of Innocence and of Experience were less excellent than it mostly is, it would rank as a monument to rampant artistic ambitiousness and, for that matter, sheer artistic gall. The fact that last week’s performance … Continue reading →

Photo courtesy Opera Pacific THE FLIMSIER THE PLOT, SO IT seems, the greater the urge to meddle. Mozart’s Abduction From the Seraglio, his first real operatic smash, plays on one of the hoariest of opera plots: maiden, captured by tyrant, … Continue reading →

At the Philharmonic these weeks there have been concertos: the old standbys (Tchaikovsky, Mendelssohn) hacked at by wet-behind-the-ears virtuoso wannabes, but also new stuff for new combos: works for cello, solo and multiple, under the Green Umbrella, big pieces for … Continue reading →

Luciano Berio was to have been among us these weeks, with his new edition of Monteverdi‘s Coronation of Poppea at the Music Center and several other performances of his music in the area planned to honor his special genius. An … Continue reading →