Author Archives: Alan Rich

Gustav Mahler’s Sixth Symphony is the elephant in the parlor, bedecked with garlands of roses. Its every dimension is wrong. From within the 85 minutes of Christoph Eschenbach’s performance with the Philharmonic last weekend, any composition student with an X-Acto … Continue reading →

Dutch Treat I envy anyone his first look at Amsterdam. You step out of Central Station and there is the perfect urban landscape: old buildings in grand array, trolleys in front, everything numbered so that you know exactly where to … Continue reading →

Full ServiceThe crowd observed a moment of silence as Lorin Maazel brought his performing forces to a reverent ending in a darkened Disney Hall last week, then burst forth in high-decibel approval. As with Messiaen’s pictorial panorama the week before, … Continue reading →

In 1973, the story goes, the wonderful, if eccentric, New York patron Alice B. Tully asked Olivier Messiaen to compose a piece for the American Bicentennial. Messiaen hesitated at first; the notion of celebrating American skyscrapers or the like did … Continue reading →

It was good to hear Earl Kim’s music again; I knew him at Berkeley in the late ’40s, when I had the job of working the Music Department’s only tape recorder and he was already composing deep, dark, moving songs, … Continue reading →

The Cat House Afire Edgard Varèse arrived in New York in 1915, age 32. His journey from his native Burgundy had taken in most of Europe’s cultural capitals, where his scores had been played, admired, and many lost in a … Continue reading →

Starting From Here December wasn’t much; you get so many sing-alongs. One night, a young man of scholarly mien, Jonathan Biss, tried out his fingers, but not apparently his heart, on the Beethoven Fourth Piano Concerto at Disney. Afterward, he … Continue reading →

More Sharp Than Flat Long faces greeted the last new year. Record stores went broke; so did the manufacturers; so did symphony orchestras; so (sob!) did music critics. Long faces were soon replaced around here, however, with one that was … Continue reading →

Art Thou Not Kent? In Munich one week last month, Kent Nagano conducted three operas on that many nights. Unsuk Chin’s Alice in Wonderland in Achim Freyer’s staging was as delightful the second time around as when I’d seen it … Continue reading →

Spectral Delivery With a brassy blast onstage and an ethereal sigh from violas as if from another planet, the Monday Evening Concerts proclaimed their return in full force at Zipper Hall last week. Last year’s concerts had been a tentative … Continue reading →