At a concert this winter, I ran into a friend, a practicing lawyer who also holds a degree in music. She admits she is baffled by classical music reviews and wanted to know, “What is the point of music criticism, anyway?”
Um … what is the POINT? I was aghast. As someone who devours music criticism, I was also stumped to come up with an easy answer to a question that sounds simple, but is not. My friend allowed that she could see the point if future ticket sales were involved, as in a Broadway show or a four-week run of an opera, but she didn’t see why a historical account of a one-off concert that will never occur again was worth reading about.
This question is certainly not a new one; it came up recently during New York Times critic Anthony Tommasini’s February “Talk to the Newsroom” Q&A with readers, where he addressed this question, among many others. Tommasini wrote, “Do my reviews sell tickets? I honestly try not to dwell on that too much. With artists and composers I am excited by, especially if I feel that they are not getting their due, I certainly hope that my enthusiasm and advocacy will make a difference. When I really don’t like something, say a lame, clunky and clueless production of a Mozart opera, I do not think about actively discouraging people from going to it. I just try to describe it in a way that makes it sound as ridiculous as I found it to be.”
Clearly, Tommasini doesn’t see his main role as ticket-seller or buzz-killer—though ticket sales or lack thereof are an inevitable byproduct. read more
In music performance today, one of the hottest presenters around is Wordless Music . If you’re a New Yorker, they seem to be suddenly everywhere, and their concerts have been getting raves from critics from The New Yorker, The New York Times, New York magazine, and Gramophone magazine, as well as attracting audiences that represent the demographic holy grail: twenty-something hipsters. Wordless Music’s self-professed goal is “to demonstrate that the various boundaries and genre distinctions segregating music today—popular and classical; uptown and downtown; high art and low—are an artificial construction in need of dismantling.”
At the moment, they’re doing some of their dismantling at the Whitney Museum of American Art, where at 7 pm. on four Fridays in June, you can hang out with the other cool kids from the class at concerts that are free with pay-as-you-please museum admission. read more
His “Nessun dorma” was the twentieth century’s definitive one—the one that launched a thousand imitators.
So it caused a bit of a flurry this week when The Guardian reported on a new book about Luciano Pavarotti that says the tenor was lip-synching a performance of that aria at the 2006 Turin Olympics. Not feeling well enough to perform live, Pavarotti reportedly recorded the aria days before the performance, and the orchestra pre-recorded its parts, too. So the performance that turned out to be the tenor’s last was canned.
“The orchestra pretended to play for the audience, I pretended to conduct and Luciano pretended to sing. The effect was wonderful,” writes conductor Leone Magiera in the book, Pavarotti Visto da Vicino. read more
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