In Monday’s (4/26) Los Angeles Times, Keith Thursby reports, “Alan Rich, a longtime classical music critic for a variety of newspapers and magazines who wrote with such unabashed gusto that he helped create a major new music scene in Los Angeles, has died. He was 85. Rich died Friday afternoon of natural causes in his sleep at his home in West Los Angeles, said longtime friend Vanessa Butler. During his long career, Rich wrote for such newspapers as L.A. Weekly, the Los Angeles Herald Examiner, Variety, the New York Times and the New York Herald Tribune, and magazines including Newsweek, New West and California. He also was the first music critic of New York magazine, which he helped to found. … Rich championed Esa-Pekka Salonen’s forward-looking music directorship of the Los Angeles Philharmonic and the building of Walt Disney Concert Hall, and he always found time to attend the concerts of emerging composers and to support smaller concert series that might otherwise have been overlooked.”
Posted April 26, 2010
