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calimacI attend the local symphony concerts on Saturday evenings: that's tonight. This year they're beginning some Thursday concerts, and the local newspaper's reviewer went to that. I just read his review in this morning's paper. He hated it.
Not only does that cast a pall over my anticipation (I'll pass in silence over what it does to the musicians), but I'm reviewing it myself. Reading a bad review puts a kind of pressure on me as a reviewer that a good review doesn't. Will I agree with this? Will, in fact, the Saturday concert have the same problems as he heard in the Thursday concert?
For me the best time to read other reviews of a concert I attend is after writing my own but before submitting it. Then I can triangulate their thoughts against mine: sometimes they'll write something that makes me think, "Yes, I heard that effect, but I didn't quite grasp it in a way I could express in words. But from reading these words I can find my own."
But reading a review of a previous performance before attending mine usually does no harm. Unless it's a real slam, because while I'm a very experienced listener, I'm still cautious about putting my views on formal record and probably always shall be. It'd take an awfully bad concert for me to express myself as vehemently as this. (I will cheerfully whack bad Tolkien scholars over the head in my reviews of their books, but there I'm more sure of my ground.) And while I attend a lot of lackluster concerts (and much amateur music-making by admitted amateurs, which one acknowledges but allows for, but this orchestra aren't amateurs), really bad ones are rare. The San Francisco Symphony in the 1970s could be embarrassing to listen to, but they got much better; and the old San Jose Symphony could sometimes drop clunkers that would crumple me up in pain, but the bad concerts I've heard from SSV haven't been that bad. (I remember one conductor who was totally out of depth at a symphony concert, and another whose interpretational choices were inane, but even those had their good points, and I didn't review them for publication.)
Well, off to freshen the music in my mind again, and then gird up for the event.
Not only does that cast a pall over my anticipation (I'll pass in silence over what it does to the musicians), but I'm reviewing it myself. Reading a bad review puts a kind of pressure on me as a reviewer that a good review doesn't. Will I agree with this? Will, in fact, the Saturday concert have the same problems as he heard in the Thursday concert?
For me the best time to read other reviews of a concert I attend is after writing my own but before submitting it. Then I can triangulate their thoughts against mine: sometimes they'll write something that makes me think, "Yes, I heard that effect, but I didn't quite grasp it in a way I could express in words. But from reading these words I can find my own."
But reading a review of a previous performance before attending mine usually does no harm. Unless it's a real slam, because while I'm a very experienced listener, I'm still cautious about putting my views on formal record and probably always shall be. It'd take an awfully bad concert for me to express myself as vehemently as this. (I will cheerfully whack bad Tolkien scholars over the head in my reviews of their books, but there I'm more sure of my ground.) And while I attend a lot of lackluster concerts (and much amateur music-making by admitted amateurs, which one acknowledges but allows for, but this orchestra aren't amateurs), really bad ones are rare. The San Francisco Symphony in the 1970s could be embarrassing to listen to, but they got much better; and the old San Jose Symphony could sometimes drop clunkers that would crumple me up in pain, but the bad concerts I've heard from SSV haven't been that bad. (I remember one conductor who was totally out of depth at a symphony concert, and another whose interpretational choices were inane, but even those had their good points, and I didn't review them for publication.)
Well, off to freshen the music in my mind again, and then gird up for the event.
