Author Archives: Alan Rich

There’s nothing wrong with an occasional wallow in the lower depths. I go to Norm’s for lunch now and then; I own two pairs of Doc Martens; I’ve been known to watch a soap or two. But gee whiz, folks, … Continue reading →

A couple of Saturdays ago, several of us, in a corner of the performance space at the Schindler House in West Hollywood, watched as a small spider did what spiders do best. She had anchored her new web between two … Continue reading →

A superb performance of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, such as Matthias Bamert led last week at the Hollywood Bowl, carries a huge array of incidental baggage. Like a rhinoceros at a tea party, the Ninth lumbered onto the musical scene in … Continue reading →

For better or worse, we tend to associate the so-called ”serious“ side of the Hollywood Bowl’s musical smorgasbord (i.e., the ”classical,“ or TuesdayThursday, programming) with a gathering of old friends. A succession of Rachmaninoff toe-tappers with their hit tunes that … Continue reading →

The big picture-book history of the Hollywood Bowl — Tales of Summer Nights — is full of happy memories. In times long gone there were stage spectacles: A Midsummer Night‘s Dream with Mickey Rooney as Puck, Die Walkure with the … Continue reading →

My first recording of Verdi’s Otello came in a fat album – 20 pounds’ worth of 78-rpm discs. My latest recording comes on a five-inch silver disc weighing less than an ounce. It contains not only the sounds of Verdi’s … Continue reading →

The House of Atreus, immortalized by Sophocles some 2,400 years back, has become a beachfront motel complete with pool, perhaps in latter-day Long Beach. Elektra, her sister Chrysothemis, their mother, Clytemnestra, and her lover, Aegisthus, have rooms there, in the … Continue reading →

The June gloom settled over Ojai for most of the Festival weekend; the skies remained gray, the air downright chilly. What light and heat there was came from the stage, in the usual admirable abundance. Have I ever not had … Continue reading →

Who would have believed it? On February 29, 1988, England’s Arditti Quartet played its usual killer new-music program in its first-ever Los Angeles concert, and lured a gathering of some 20 people to LACMA‘s Bing Theater. Last week the Arditti’s … Continue reading →

Toward the end of a recent symposium celebrating hardcore musical creativity, someone asked what seemed to be a sensible and important question: How can a listener, confronted with an abstruse piece of new music, recognize what‘s going on? How do … Continue reading →