Alan Rich looks back upon sixty years as music critic on both coasts (The New York Times, New York Herald-Tribune, Los Angeles Herald-Examiner, LA Weekly, etc.) His writings have been collected in a volume, So I’ve Heard, Notes of a Bicoastal Music Critic (Amadeus Press) and that also provides the title for his weekly online report http://soiveheard.com
Now and then you couldn’t help but recognize the sound of the Vienna Philharmonic: in the grandiose oratory of the massed brass that brought the first movement of the Bruckner Ninth to its close; to the trio of the scherzo of the Schubert Ninth, when strings and winds conspired to force open vistas across the Vienna woods, with their ever-so-slightly gemütlich, off-the-beat accents that constitute the Viennese smile.
