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A prized part of my collection of books on music is collections of essays by working music journalists. Among others, I have Harold Schonberg and Virgil Thomson and Samuel Lipman and Michael Steinberg, and a fellow named Robert Schumann.
I also have So I've Heard: Notes of a Migratory Music Critic by Alan Rich, who just died.
Like most of the best critics, Rich was not much of a one-liner man (though I did smile at his suggestion that the fashionable Three Tenors should undertake the fashionable Gregorian chant repertoire and put out a disk called Fat Chants). What he was was an enthusiast. "The best thing about this job - one of the best things, anyhow - is the chance it affords me to write about Mozart's The Marriage of Figaro as often as I like." He enjoyed many musics, and was merely hurt and puzzled at those few he didn't enjoy, like Stravinsky's L'histoire du soldat, which I don't like, either. His true blind spots, like Sibelius, he struggled mightily to repair. Unlike other music critics from L.A., he did not choose to spend the last year Dudamel-bashing.
Despite being well into his 80s, he became in his last years a web critic. You can see his recent writings, which is also where I swiped my Haydn user icon.
I also have So I've Heard: Notes of a Migratory Music Critic by Alan Rich, who just died.
Like most of the best critics, Rich was not much of a one-liner man (though I did smile at his suggestion that the fashionable Three Tenors should undertake the fashionable Gregorian chant repertoire and put out a disk called Fat Chants). What he was was an enthusiast. "The best thing about this job - one of the best things, anyhow - is the chance it affords me to write about Mozart's The Marriage of Figaro as often as I like." He enjoyed many musics, and was merely hurt and puzzled at those few he didn't enjoy, like Stravinsky's L'histoire du soldat, which I don't like, either. His true blind spots, like Sibelius, he struggled mightily to repair. Unlike other music critics from L.A., he did not choose to spend the last year Dudamel-bashing.
Despite being well into his 80s, he became in his last years a web critic. You can see his recent writings, which is also where I swiped my Haydn user icon.
