Monday 4 August 2014

Critics


I first came across music critics around 1953-4 when I began to read every issue of the Gramophone magazine. Over the decades I have often been well informed by music critics, and quite often led astray by someone's misplaced enthusiasm. The first time this happened was in the 1950s when a friend asked me to recommend a set of the Brahms symphonies; having just read a rapturous review in the Gramophone, I recommended a new Pye-Nixa set from Adrian Boult … little realising that the reviewer, Trevor Harvey, was an acolyte of Sir Adrian and thought the sun shone out of Boult and everything he did. My friend was disconcerted listening to the LPs he purchased on my recommendation (the recorded sound was pretty awful). And I marvelled at a recent review of a recording of Ysaÿe's six sonatas for solo violin where the critic (International Record Review?) began his critique by saying he had never heard of the works before receiving that CD for review and had no knowledge of any other version. So how much was his opinion worth?

Critics inevitably reflect all kinds of biases. One of the most common biases is to review for a publication dependent on major advertisers. Advertisers get preference (one reason I like reviews in the American Record Guide, a publication that does not accept advertising). Another common bias is to give priority to a known local artist where the critic may have been cajoled into good reviews by invitations to concerts and receptions over the years; don't bite the hand that feeds you. And yet another common bias is the wish to favour one's local tribe – fellow American, fellow Jew, fellow German, fellow Russian, etc.

One of my bêtes-noires with many critics is laziness. Given that any major classical work can probably boast around 100 recordings, of which a dozen may be excellent, the lazy critic always dives back to good-old standbys: “Oistrakh in 1965 remains the main choice …. in this work you have to have Karajan, 1969 … no need to look further than Grumiaux in 1971”, etc. Really good performances are reviewed every year, then forgotten by the time the next review of the same work comes around. Josef Spacek's account of Prokofiev's first violin & piano sonata was (deservedly) reviewed with enthusiasm by pretty well all critics but, by the time Alina Ibragimova's recording came out around a year later, Spacek was no longer mentioned by British critics, even though Ibragimova's recording is badly balanced and Spacek's performance is easily as good, and better recorded. But Ibragimova lives in England, and her recording company here (Hyperion) is British, whereas Spacek is a Czech, recording for a Czech company.

And, finally, we have fashion. The current fashion in the world of music criticism is to extol “original instrument” recordings and performances and to sniff at “old style” playing of music before 1900 or whatever. In the 1950s, critics sniffed at Furtwängler and praised Toscanini's frantic and dry recordings to the skies. Anything Yehudi Menuhin did was praised by British, French and German critics, even though the violin playing was often pretty bad.

After around 60 years of listening to music, I tend to know what I like. I do value the opinion of others, especially if I know their tastes and their track records. Commercial critics tend to get short shrift from me these days, unless many of them share the same enthusiasm for a particular performance or recording, in which case my interest perks up. Anyway, my blog certainly is not prejudiced. ???

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