pas d'obituaire

[calimac]

It's sad, and a bit odd, that we should have to wait for Heuwell Tircuit's obituary to learn his side of the story of the strange incident 23 years ago when he was dismissed from the San Francisco Chronicle's staff for filing a notoriously inaccurate ballet review. He just hadn't received the insert in his printed program that listed the replacement of a ballerina, his defenders say.

Oh, well, if that's all it was, it could have happened to anybody,¹ and it would have been good to get the story out earlier. All that was announced in the notice of his dismissal was that "He said that he believes he was ill when reviewing the performance Sunday and has no clear recollection of how he made the error,"² and the subject has been pretty much hush since then.

But, you know, the "missed the insert" explanation won't do. I'm sorry. It's not polite to speak ill of the recently deceased, but I can't let this pass uncorrected. Even the casual reader should already smell something wrong with this story. If all he did was get a name wrong, why should this be a firing offense? Why, in that case, should his friends feel anxious to testify that he was actually there? Why would that kind of mistake make anyone think he was filing absentee? And if these folks were sitting with him, why did nobody in the party notice that his insert was missing?

Because that's not what was incorrect about the review. Yes, the originally scheduled ballerina was out (back problems). But she wasn't the only thing replaced: the work was as well. Tircuit described the originally scheduled performance of a pas de deux to music from Bizet's La jolie fille de Perth.³ But if you check it against the review by Allan Ulrich in the Examiner,⁴ you'll find that the Bizet pas was replaced by a men's quintet to music by André Messager. Only the choreographer, Henri Tomasson, was the same. In fact the photo accompanying Tircuit's review shows five male dancers, and presumably came from the universe Ulrich was living in.

I suppose it's possible for a sufficiently ill reviewer to fail to realize that he's listening to the rather frothy operetta composer Messager and not to what is, after all, not one of Bizet's three or four best-known works, though it's disturbing in one of Tircuit's experience, but how ill do you have to be not to notice that you're watching five men dancing on stage and not a male-female couple? Especially when your review compares the absent ballerina's imaginary performance to her previous work? ("Lopukhova's potato-drenched Russian training seemed less heavy than in the past." You think so?)

I think in that case he was better off saying that he "has no clear recollection of how he made the error" rather than seeking an excuse from a lack of program notes. Really.

When I joined SFCV six years ago, I already knew that Tircuit was on the staff. I wondered about that, but I never said anything. SFCV was then still edited by its founder, Chronicle retiree Bob Commanday, and I figured solidarity had gotten Tircuit the job. I met him once, at a staff social. He was a small, delicate-looking man with a soft voice. I introduced myself and shook his hand, and we exchanged a few pleasantries. And I was grateful for the one time I substituted for him, when his absence to attend a funeral got me to cover the Takacs Quartet in Berkeley, one of my all-time best concert experiences.

But let's leave it at that.

1. With the larger orchestras that I cover, it's frequently the case that the players on stage don't quite match the personnel listing in the program book. The concertmaster will be out that week, or something. Unlike changes in the program, or in the members of a chamber ensemble, this is never mentioned in an insert. So, if in a review I'm going to mention by name a particular orchestral or choral member whom I don't already know by sight, I will always check, either by inquiring of somebody connected with the ensemble, or if it's a small orchestra and I have no reason to suspect a listing mismatch, by looking the person up in Google Images.⁵

2. San Francisco Chronicle, Aug. 7, 1987, p. 74.

3. Chronicle, Aug. 3, 1987, p. 54.

4. San Francisco Examiner, Aug. 3, 1987, p. E1.

5. See, I don't always hate Google.

Comments

[wordweaverlynn.livejournal.com]

You're right. The vague excuse was much, much better.

critical reviews

[magscanner.livejournal.com]

I didn't understand what happened when he was fired back then, and after reading the obituary I still don't. Perhaps there was a pattern, perhaps he simply pissed off someone in the hierarchy.

The comments gave me a link to Jason Serinus's webpage, and I eagerly brought up the video and audio files. I am somewhat of a fan of classical whistling, and enjoy his work and flourishes, but sometimes his vibrato resembles a Theremin a little too closely.

Re: critical reviews

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

The only mystery is what he was thinking when he wrote the thing, a question even he couldn't answer. The editorial response is no mystery. As far as I know, there was no pattern, and the hierarchy need not have been out to get him. Editors have to be able to back up their reviewers' opinions in cases of dispute or controversy, and a reviewer who can't be reliably backed up is of no use to the editors. This was not the kind of mistake you get to make twice, not with the same publication, anyway.

If you want to hear Jason whistle, you can do so next week here.

Re: critical reviews

[magscanner.livejournal.com]

I think they should have said something like "Turk is in rehab and we'll see what he's like when we dry him out." Whether or not it was true. Someone was out to get him. I think.

I've gone off and listened to enough YouTube whistlers to frighten the bats out of the pepper tree. A few are marvelous.

[whswhs.livejournal.com]

I must say, I found it startling to see you talk of looking someone up in Google Images after seeing them as one member of a chorus performing on a stage at some distance from you. I wouldn't count on doing it with someone I'd talked with face to face, unless they had said something really memorable. I would never even think of trying to identify a stranger, someone I didn't already know by sight, by face recognition. Human brains really have amazingly different sets of capabilities.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

That's one reason I said smaller ensembles: they're not so distant. And I'm not trying to pick out the right person from a lineup, just to confirm that the person whose picture I'm looking at fits the one I saw on stage.

Just as a for instance, assuming I didn't know from any of them, if I were watching - even at a distance - a speech by George Bush, and I had no idea whether the guy I was watching was George W. Bush, George H.W. Bush, or George P. Bush, a Google Image search would quickly settle the matter.

[whswhs.livejournal.com]

That probably wouldn't work for me. I think I might recognize a photo of George W. Bush, because I've seen a lot of photos of him; I have no idea what the other two look like. And I'm doubtful that I'd recognize the three-dimensional George W. Bush face to face from having seen photos of him.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

I don't think we're imagining the same thought experiment here. Never mind.

[whswhs.livejournal.com]

Perhaps not. It just hit me, are you perhaps assuming that you can google the face while you are at the event looking at the person? That's outside my powers, but not for reasons of brain quirks!

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

No. But I can remember that, for instance, the timpanist is a short, balding, round-headed dark-haired man with a mustache, who looks rather like the clerk at the newspapers desk in my local library, long enough that if I google his name and get pictures of a short, balding, dark-haired man with a mustache, who looks rather like the clerk at the newspapers desk in my local library, I can be pretty sure I've got the right guy. If, instead, I get pictures of a tall, long-faced, clean-shaven man with a shock of reddish hair, I can kind of guess there's been a change of personnel.

[irontongue.livejournal.com]

(LOL at footnote no. 5.)

I also met Tircuit only once - um, you drove me to that event, in fact!