the lid of reviewing

In last week's editorial at SFCV, fellow reviewer irontongue addressed the question, how much should reviewers prepare for a concert? As one of the mere nonprofessional "experienced listeners" on SFCV's staff, my personal answer to this is "as much as possible." Few classical pieces have revealed all their beauties, let alone all their mysteries, to me on first listening. Part of my job as a reviewer is to judge the specific performance, and I for one cannot make an adequate evaluation of this unless I have a benchmark in the form of other performances sitting in my head. This was proven to me the first time I heard a recording of the famously eccentric pianist Nyiregyhazi. He was playing music I didn't know, and it didn't seem at all unusual to me. Then I heard him play some music I did know, and after that I could detect his unique style even in the music I didn't know.

But for most of the standard repertoire this has already been done. For a performance of something like Tchaikovsky's Fourth, I will prepare by doing what the Chronicle's Joshua Korman told Irontongue he does: exactly nothing. Whatever is going to make your interpretation special, I'll hear it. Thus that surprise in a recent performance of Beethoven's Fifth didn't get past me. It's getting my impressions codified in words that's the challenging part for me.

I can and have reviewed works I'd never heard before. The Rossini in a recent concert came as a surprise, as it hadn't been on the pre-concert program I'd been given. I simply stayed attentive. On the other hand, for another piece on that concert I was able to quote from an instruction on the score because I'd read that first (and listened to a recording along with it). Preparation helps.

Reviewers don't have to know all the music, but they have to know a lot or else they'll never catch up. Irontongue sounds like she's playing a round of David Lodge's game of Humiliation when she confesses she'd never heard Schubert's String Quintet before reviewing it last summer. Never heard Schubert's String Quintet? I must confess I find it hard to imagine how an experienced classical listener could be in that state. On the other hand, she'd probably be astonished at the number of operas I've never heard. So it goes. Mark Manning once dropped his jaw in incredulity when I revealed that I'd never seen any Italian films, even though I'd said I'm not much of a film-goer.

To buttress her claim that there's more recorded music out there than anyone can follow, Irontongue names three obscure composers: Havergal Brian, Franz Berwald, and Jon Leifs. Oh dear. Does it make me terminally geeky that I have full CDs of music by each of these? I'll admit Leifs is no more than a curiosity - the best-known composer internationally from Iceland, he spent his compositional career squeezed into the tiny space between Ilya Murometz and the Scythian Suite - and Brian is an interesting minor figure vastly over-rated by his admirers, but Berwald I'll make the case for. His symphonies of the 1840s are every bit as much masterworks as the ones his contemporaries Schumann and Mendelssohn were writing at the same time, and in some ways considerably more original. The San Francisco Symphony played one or two a couple decades ago, and made a nifty but now-deleted recording, but the experiment was never repeated. Too bad.

This week's editorial, by another hand, is about the weird disconnect between orchestras' empty bombastic marketing slogans and their hermetically obscure program notes. Seems to me that the orchestras I attend are fairly good with program notes - SFS relies heavily on Michael Steinberg, who writes clear English - though I may not be the best judge here, as I can understand all of Sandow's bad examples though I wouldn't call any of them easy reading, and not one is well-judged or appropriate. I prefer a program note that doesn't get all Schenkerian (and if you don't know what that means, then that's what it means) on you, but acts as a road map to the music. Broad structural analysis - "and the development starts when the last quiet echo of the lush second theme dies away and Tchaikovsky suddenly blasts you out of your seat with the full orchestra," that sort of thing - is the ticket for a general audience, I think.

And yes, I'd love to see biographies of soloists that didn't consist merely of a list of orchestras they've played with and prizes they've won. What do they do when they're not practicing? What music most inspires them? How old are they? What country are they from? A few answers would go a long way.