who shall decide when critics disagree?

[calimac]

Heuwell Tircuit (who writes for the same outfit I do) liked the string quartet concert that athenais and I enjoyed so much last week. Joshua Kosman (who writes for the San Francisco Chronicle) didn't. (General opinion around the SFCV editorial staff is to tsk gently at "dear Joshua's testy moods." See this week's editorial by George Thomson.)

I wouldn't go so far as to say that Kosman's review seemed to be of a different concert than the one I attended. I have to agree with him that there were some intonation problems now and again. But we've been through this sort of thing with great pianists who hit a lot of wrong notes: the real question is, does the interpretation work? Yes, the performance of Death and the Maiden was "underpowered", if one must put it that way; but it was also crisp, precise and focused. I thought so, anyway. The Quintet, though, was just riveting throughout, even though Ronald Leonard's cello didn't blend with the others (not a disadvantage in the 2d cello part in this work). The elegance and smoothness of the Adagio in particular astonished me: I wanted to take it home and bottle it.

In other news, Saul Bellow has died. You know, I've never read a single book of his. I guess I read fiction mostly to be taken out of myself and my environment, and intensely ethnically Jewish-American authors don't seem to offer much of that for me.

Comments

[wild-irises.livejournal.com]

I know that Tircuit has been through a lot and I don't like to dismiss him out of hand; however, I will never be able to trust his reviews since he made that horrible error of judgment (I bet it was 20 years ago) by panning a performance he did not attend (proved by the fact that he particularly criticized the performance of a dancer who was injured and did not dance).

I'm more interested in your opinion, and in Joshua Kosman's (a critic I respect) than in Tircuit's.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

It was indeed over 20 years ago (I only heard about it afterwards, because it happened while I was in Seattle, but I looked up the relevant newspapers much later).

True, I haven't forgotten this, and I never read a Tircuit review of a concert I've attended without half an eye open for a factual slip that would prove he wasn't there. But I also believe in forgiveness.

In this case, my own ear (which I only trust because I've found over the years that it usually tells me what more experienced critics also say) agrees more with Kosman than with Tircuit about the intonation. But Tircuit describes well the overall effect of the concert as I experienced it, and Kosman does not.

I enjoy Kosman's writing, and agree with some of his reviews, though sometimes he surprises me. Of the symphony concert I attended this week, Kosman wrote, "who else but Bruckner, that endearingly naive believer, would have thought to dedicate a symphony to God?" Uh, try Haydn, who dedicated every work he wrote to God.

[athenais.livejournal.com]

I went off to SFCV to read the various reviews and was surprised to see that Laurette Goldberg died on Sunday. I saw her just two months ago at a concert in Brisbane given by Jacques Ogg. I'm a bit shocked that she's gone.

As for Kosman, he gives me a pain most of the time. He wears his agenda on his sleeve too much for my taste. I disagree with his assessment of the Calder Quartet, and of their performance. I agree only that the first half was perhaps a little quiet, or "understated" as he put it, but not that they had excessive problems with wrong notes.

[nellorat.livejournal.com]

My favorite Bellows is Henderson the Rain King, which as the title suggests has some odd elements to it. I've read a couple other of his novels, and while I admire the writing, there's too little action and I don't care quite enough about his characters.

[wild-patience.livejournal.com]

The nuns had us reading a Saul Bellows novel in high school, but I don't recall it knocking my socks off.