concert reviews

[calimac]

Thursday I went back to Menlo for their last festival concert. This is already one of the most renowned chamber music festivals in the world, but they're really anxious about their reviewers: the publicity people made sure to greet me when I picked up my ticket, sewed me to my sheet, introduced me to the new executive director, and e-mailed me afterwards to check on when the review would be appearing.

Again I attended the free prelude concert first at the cost of not having any actual dinner, but was it ever worth it. I pretty much have to throw down my pen in the face of those youngsters' Dvořák "American" Quartet. What a treat. And they're giving this stuff away free!

The main concert was more mixed. A few weeks ago I'd heard (equally void of admission charges) a terrifically supple rendition at Stanford of Brahms's G Minor Piano Quartet, so when the same work turned up here as a big slab of undifferentiated Brahmsian pot roast, I couldn't help but feeling a bit disappointed. I was happier with the care given to Ravel's Violin Sonata, a work I normally don't much like, and to Copland's Vitebsk, a fierce work from his modernist period. And Beethoven's settings of Scottish songs could be listened to all day.

Saturday evening irontongue and I ventured down to Santa Cruz for my only Cabrillo Festival concert of the season, where we turned out to be half the SFCV delegation. She was the one writing the review, though a comment of mine makes a cameo appearance therein. The amount of ignorant prejudice out there against Philip Glass is greater than I realized. Even the local paper's reviewer claimed that Glass's symphony goes "boo-dee-dee, boo-dee-dee, boo-dee-dee," which he could only say if he's so deafened by Glass's stereotyped reputation that he didn't bother to listen to the music.

Comments

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

OK, we're playing that game again. One person "has had some encounter over the years," another "gave a cursory reading." Look, the SF reader is a fictional person; mutatis mutandis make his experience with SF equivalent to yours with Glass; it has nothing to do with my point. I don't know how extensive and varied your encounter with Glass has been; you couldn't tell me when I asked. But, like the realm of SF, his work varies, certainly vastly above the "boo-dee-dee" that the reviewer said it all consists of. You didn't say whether you agree with that as a total description of Glass, and indeed you can't say, because you don't know how much variety of his work you've heard.

You are, as I said the first time, not obliged to like Glass no matter how much of him you've heard, and neither is the reviewer, but he is obliged not to mischaracterize the music he actually did hear. His statement was not one of dislike but of prejudice.

The point, then, to put it as bluntly as necessary, is that expressing your dislike in the wake of someone else's prejudice would have been best dissociated from that prejudice.

[kip-w.livejournal.com]

I would have thought that not endorsing his caricature would be enough.

And if you think I'm playing a game, then I quit.