Author Archives: Alan Rich

Something in the air at holiday time impels me to write about Bach, and why not? Any one of his choruses shames the fraudulent warblings of the carolers on Muzak at the Mall. Any single fugue from his reams of … Continue reading →

BY RIGHTS, HANSEL UND GRETEL SHOULD have been cast onto the discard pile generations ago. The opera simply doesn’t work. Some of the tunes by Engelbert Humperdinck (the First) are pretty enough to blend into shopping-mall Muzak; on the opera … Continue reading →

THE FIRST THING TO KNOW ABOUT SOLO percussion concerts is that they are fascinating to watch, in ways that piano-virtuoso displays or trained-dog acts couldn’t begin to approach. The stage for Steven Schick’s three-concert “minifestival” in the County Museum’s Leo … Continue reading →

A MILELONG TOY SHOP, A SELF-REFILLING box of Godiva chocolates, an entertainment both profound and giddy: Each of the above can pass as an accurate metaphor for any one of the half-dozen orchestral concertos by J.S. Bach generally but inaccurately … Continue reading →

While maintaining his official residence in the frozen wastes of Cornell University, Steven Stucky remains one of the major shaping forces in our local new-music scene. He served as the Los Angeles Philharmonic‘s composer-in-residence starting in 1988; four years later … Continue reading →

Between the movie screen and the concert stage, traffic moves in both directions. During the month of October you could have watched two great bygone film classics, Carl Dreyer‘s 1928 silent The Passion of Joan of Arc and Tod Browning’s … Continue reading →

Mnemosyne is the Goddess of Memory, the mother (by Zeus) of the nine Muses, and the title of a magical two-disc release on ECM that might persuade you to discard all your other CDs and stay with this album alone. … Continue reading →

Around me at the Music Center, the crowd stomped and cheered. The forces onstage had aimed a dazzling rocket into their midst, and the sparks flew. Whatever the more substantial virtues (if any) of the composer Rodion Shchedrin, whose Fifth … Continue reading →

AT 8, MICHAEL ROUSE CHANGED HIS FIRST NAME TO “Mikel” because, he says, he liked the spelling. At 15, he ran away from home — in the “boot-heel” area of southwestern Missouri — and joined a carnival. “I did all … Continue reading →