Author Archives: Alan Rich

The greatest of the romantic operas — the panoramas of lovehate, deceptionredemption, hearts broken and hearts aflame that drew the sellout crowds in Verdi’s time and sent them home singing the tunes — gleaned their life force from one basic … Continue reading →

I smoked my first joint to the Beatles‘ Sgt. Pepper, and my second to George Crumb’s Ancient Voices of Children. The year was 1970 or thereabouts, and I was already pushing 50; I had been slow to ripen. These two … Continue reading →

Hotshot gangster meets pure-at-heart Salvation Army lass; they kiss, they sing, they fall in love; at the curtain, the gang vows to abandon its evil ways. Guys and Dolls? Yes, but no. Twenty-one years before Frank Loesser’s snazzy musical won … Continue reading →

photo by Fredrik Nilsen Daniel Marlos HOTSHOT GANGSTER MEETS PURE-AT-HEART SALVATION Army lass; they kiss, they sing, they fall in love; at the curtain, the gang vows to abandon its evil ways. Guys and Dolls? Yes, but no. Twenty-one years … Continue reading →

I left the Paris Opera on a damp November night in 1983, bored out of my gourd. I made it to the last Metro with only seconds to spare, determined to spend the rest of my time on Earth avoiding … Continue reading →

Down in the depths of Lower Manhattan there stands the Knitting Factory, a dilapidated four-story walkup where Avon Products once stored its lipsticks and bubble baths, and, since 1987, a shrine where aficionados of multimedia now keep tabs on the … Continue reading →

THERE’S SOMETHING TO BE SAID — although I’m not sure exactly what — for the process of confronting the spirits of eminent dead composers with the less-than-eminent works that they themselves disowned or at least surpassed. Some will argue that … Continue reading →

Comes a time when even the youngest at heart among the critical confraternity simply runs out of new ways of expressing the awfulness of Gounod‘s Faust — the drabness of its musical invention, its lurid insult to Goethe’s great poetry … Continue reading →

By the end of the first millennium — around 999, say — California could boast a “politically stable, sedentary and conservative” population (Encyclopaedia Britannica, Volume 13, Page 327), with a strong sense of community that included avid cultivation of the … Continue reading →

Robert Beaser isn’t what you‘d call a sublime composer, but in that one tiny scene at least he seems to suggest that he knows what opera is all about. His opera is the final part of Central Park, a trilogy … Continue reading →