Author Archives: Alan Rich

THE LEAVING TRAINS OF THE WORLD: It has been a while since we’ve heard anything about the fate of KCSN, the radio outlet of Cal State Northridge once noted for its brave and enterprising programming including an enlightened attitude toward … Continue reading →

Forty years ago this week. at New York Magazine, Clay Felker  allowed me to get away with an entire music column in  rhyming doggerel. Bob Grossman supplied the artwork,  which I continue to use, in Bob’s color upgrade. He  asked … Continue reading →

BRUNDIBAR AGAIN. Five years ago the L.A. Opera’s Opera Camp project staged this endearing small  concentration-camp relic at a church in Santa Monica. Since then the work – by Hans Krasa, to a libretto by Adolf Hoffmeister, has had a … Continue reading →

IT WAS A FOREGONE CONCLUSION  that Mark. Swed and I would hear entirely different music at the Hollywood Bowl on Tuesday night, under the title of the Philip Glass Violin Concerto; we acknowledged as much in our pre-concert greeting. The … Continue reading →

CONDUCTORS A TO Z: It has been a while since I’ve been to the Cabrillo Festival, at least the 17 years of Marin Alsop’s time since this was my first first encounter with her work there. Santa Cruz apparently loves … Continue reading →

QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS FROM TODAY’S MAIL  Q.   Hello Alan, I’m a freelance writer (and former editor) with Symphony magazine, doing a story about the recent rounds of layoffs and cutbacks of classical music critics and other arts critics at print … Continue reading →

JAMES: Somebody on the radio recently, I forget who, was talking about James Thurber, to the effect that “nobody reads this great man anymore.” I had this book in my lap, open to page 171:   “The woan, so-called because … Continue reading →

MARTHA: “I hope he likes me,” says Martha Argerich of Robert Schumann, and it makes you think more intensely about both of them: this  elusive musician who moves through our world as though in a world of her own; this … Continue reading →

They’re still making discs, and probably always will. Here is EMI’s disc of the threee Stravinsky Symphonies done by Simon Rattle and his Berlin Philharmonic people – keen, incisive, aloof music-making, something of the perfect machine. I’m even happier that … Continue reading →

Survivors: Every account I’ve read of Clay Felker’s passing has one date wrong. New York Magazine began as a Sunday supplement to the Herald Tribune in September, 1963, not 1964. I had an article in the first issue; it was … Continue reading →