Author Archives: Alan Rich

. . . the faithful flee: So goes the rhyme in support of equal temperament. Music, your old prof surely had you believe, draws its strength from its harmonic progressions, and they derive their strength from the set of falsities … Continue reading →

One special image comes to mind when Toru Takemitsu’s music is at hand. It is the final moment in Akira Kurosawa‘s Ran, for which Takemitsu composed the score that is one of film music’s supreme achievements. The film is Kurosawa‘s … Continue reading →

Within a week in late April the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra played in two local venues, at Glendale‘s Alex Theater and UCLA’s Royce Hall, and three on the East Coast, Portland, Hartford and at Manhattan‘s Carnegie Hall. I heard the … Continue reading →

Photo by Christine Alicino WHERE MUSIC CAME FROM, WHERE music stands today, where music is going: lovely questions, these, that nobly sustain motor-mouth moderators of pre-concert “symposiums” and writers of program notes. They were more easily answerable in my younger … Continue reading →

THE PERPETRATORS OF DEAD MAN WALKING — the opera inflicted upon the stage of Costa Mesa’s Segerstrom Hall these past few nights — have gone to some lengths to distance themselves from Tim Robbins’ 1995 film of the same name … Continue reading →

“Schubert’s dynamics,” asserts the Isabelle Huppert character in Michael Haneke‘s gut-wrenching new film The Piano Teacher, “range from scream to whisper, not loud to soft.” Her student-victim is struggling with the slow movement of the A-major Sonata, one of the … Continue reading →

TIMIDLY PLANNED, HANDSOMELY EXECUTED, the Philharmonic’s “Schoenberg Prism” ended a couple of weeks ago with the one work most likely to draw cheers, the early Transfigured Night — originally a sextet but later expanded by the composer for string orchestra. … Continue reading →

Pity the deprived soul whose spinal column cannot vibrate to the way Mozart uses clarinets and trombones in The Magic Flute. Shed a tear for the misguided misanthrope who fails to find the presence of God — by whatever name … Continue reading →

Here come the pianists; it’s odd how events tend to clump sometimes. Two weeks ago Peter Serkin and Marino Formenti played interesting, out-of-the-ordinary programs. This week hordes of pianists vie for Rachmaninoff Prize money in Pasadena, with mostly ordinary programs … Continue reading →

Anton Bruckner’s Eighth Symphony, played by the Vienna Philharmonic at Orange County‘s Segerstrom Hall last week, oozed along its murky path for almost exactly 90 minutes. Any one of Arnold Schoenberg’s piano pieces, at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion four nights … Continue reading →