Author Archives: Alan Rich

CARL STONE’S MUSIC IS THE FOOD OF, well, music. It feeds on found objects – a Schubert fragment, a Tokyo street noise – and raises them to a higher level. In his hands, and through his serendipitous, madcap brain, the … Continue reading →

MY OH MY, HOW THE LETTERS HAVE poured in! “How could you?” their writers fairly scream, as if I had turned my back on motherhood, America and a hot lunch for orphans — which, by the way, I haven’t. What … Continue reading →

1.34 METERS TALL, SHORT ARMS, SEVEN FINGERS — four right, three left — large, relatively well-formed head, brown eyes, distinctive lips; profession: singer — so reads, in its entirety, Thomas Quasthoff’s autobiographical entry on his Web site: a profile in … Continue reading →

Santa Fe‘s opera house is a scenery-studded 800-mile drive from Los Angeles; last week it seemed like home away from home. You ran into familiar Los Angeles faces everywhere — at the operas, and at other soul-renewing gathering places by … Continue reading →

What makes an opera work? If I had to guide a friend through the devious answers to that question, my final goal would be an understanding of the human interplay with Mozart‘s music in The Marriage of Figaro, tempered with … Continue reading →

San Luis Obispo, known affectionately to its residents as ”SLO,“ has had its own Mozart Festival for 31 years. The genial and capable Clifton Swanson, who teaches conducting at Cal Poly — the town’s major school and its major industry … Continue reading →

For better or for worse, director Benoit Jacquot has dealt with Giacomo Puccini’s Tosca — ”that shabby little shocker,“ in critic Joseph Kerman‘s immortal words — pretty much as the opera deserves. Nobody has ever mistaken the work for a … Continue reading →

At about 8:10 on the night of July 16, the sky above the Hollywood Bowl was dappled with small puffs of cloud, turned a soft pink in the rays of the setting sun. At the same moment, the sound came … Continue reading →