Alan Rich, Boston-born classical music critic
NEW YORK — Alan Rich, a critic whose eloquent and passionate writing about classical music in New York and Los Angeles made him an important voice in the American musical world over a long career, died Friday at his home in West Los Angeles. He was 85.
His death was announced by Vanessa Butler, a longtime friend.
Mr. Rich’s enthusiasms ranged from the 14th-century composer Guillaume de Machaut to contemporary music, including experimental and electronic works, Serialism, and Minimalism when it was new and still considered suspect in mainstream new-music circles. After his move to Los Angeles in 1981 — first as a critic for California magazine, and later as music editor of Newsweek, The Los Angeles Herald Examiner, and LA Weekly — he made the development of the city’s musical culture a special cause.
Los Angeles, he said in a 2007 interview with the Web magazine Fine Arts LA, “is the liveliest music center in the country, both in terms of a very progressive attitude toward performances and toward new music.’’
“In terms of quantity we can’t match New York or even Boston, but in terms of quality and state of mind I think we’re right up there,’’ he added.
He could be cantankerous and direct about music, performers. or productions that did not meet his standard. And that standard was intensely personal and difficult to predict. Among the canonical composers, he revered Mozart and Schubert and was dismissive of Brahms. He was an early advocate of Philip Glass, but when he disliked some of Glass’s later works — “La Belle et la Bete,’’ for example — he said so unequivocally. “The saddest news about this new concoction,’’ he wrote of that work in 1997, “is that its music is grindingly, achingly dull.’’
He was often critical of Placido Domingo’s direction of the Los Angeles Opera, and wrote that the company needed new leadership. But though he was always suspicious of musical prodigies and wary of performers or music that seemed trendy or popular, he was among the first to champion Gustavo Dudamel, the young Venezuelan superstar conductor who was recently appointed music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic.
When a reader wrote to him at LA Weekly to admonish him about a harsh review and asserted that “there is no composition of any era’’ that should be described as “trash’’ or “abomination,’’ Mr. Rich responded in a 1993 column that dealt with the complaint head on:
“Ah, if only it were true,’’ he wrote, “the post of music critic could then be abolished, and we professional listeners could spend our days eating lotus and wallowing in the trashy abominations of the Scharwenka Fourth Piano Concerto or the Rach 3,’’ the last a reference to the Rachmaninoff Third Piano Concerto.
But more generally, he saw criticism as advocacy for music and performers worth hearing.
“My role,’’ he said in the 2007 interview, “is to create a curious audience, to tell people, ‘I went to this concert, I’m really enthusiastic about it, they’re doing it again next week, so let’s go.’ That’s the best I can do.’’
Alan Rich was born in Boston on June 17, 1924, and attended Harvard with the intention of going on to study medicine. But he also found a job, during his student years, as an assistant critic for a predecessor of The Boston Herald, and instead of pursuing medical studies, he enrolled at the University of California, Berkeley, and earned a master’s degree in music in 1956.
Mr. Rich became a music critic for The New York Times in 1961, and moved to The Herald Tribune in 1963. When New York magazine, originally a Sunday section of the Tribune, became a freestanding publication in 1968, he was its first music critic, a post he held until 1981. Toward the end of his tenure there he contributed to New West, a spinoff of New York that was soon renamed California.
He left California magazine to become music editor of Newsweek in 1983.
In the late 1980s, Mr. Rich wrote criticism for The Los Angeles Herald Examiner, and from 1992 through 2008 he was the critic for LA Weekly. When it canceled his column in a cost-cutting move, Mr. Rich began a blog, “So I’ve Heard,’’ after the title of a 2006 compilation of his reviews, “So I’ve Heard: Notes of a Migratory Music Critic,’’ and contributed reviews to Bloomberg News.
Mr. Rich was the author of several books, among them “Music, Mirror of the Arts’’ (1969), “The Simon & Schuster Listener’s Guide to Opera’’ and “The Simon & Schuster Listener’s Guide to Classical Music’’ (both 1980), “The Lincoln Center Story’’ (1984), “American Pioneers: Ives to Cage and Beyond’’ (1995), and the “Play-by-Play’’ series of books and CDs, with volumes devoted to Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, and Tchaikovsky (all 1995).
Mr. Rich leaves a sister, Sue Rice of Boston.