A Good Review (read Another Bad Review by David Hurwitz)

Considering Classicstoday.com’s review philosophy, which we’ve been over many times, how does this happen as often as it does? Here, David Hurwitz tackles a new recording of Vincent Persichetti’s 12 Piano Sonatas (for those who don’t know Persichetti, here’s a bio and some sound).

My beef today?

No. 11 is a spiky, very harmonically advanced (read atonal) essay in several linked sections that still somehow manages to preserve a sense of melodic flow.

Again, he manages to push his pointy-headed, ignorant opinions while maintaining a sense of compliment—“melody is the best measure of music and atonal music is melody-less, but this has some melody, which is surprising, because it goes against my outright dismissal and hatred of modernist harmony (read atonality); but this is good, because it has melody (read not atonal).”

It must be so difficult for him to include parenthetical qualifiers in a review that shouldn’t even be examining musical worth in the first place (see above review philosophy).

Oops. I spoke too soon.

This is in no small part thanks to [the pianist’s] extremely well-recorded and sympathetic performances, which capture the music's fundamentally lyrical inspiration in even the densest thickets of notes (and this music is packed with incident).

A period after “inspiration” would have sufficed (see above review philosophy). But noooo! Hurwitz can’t help but voice his anti-dense-thicket-of-notes (read atonal) fetish (see above review philosophy).

So, in Hurwitzian spirit, I would like to qualify my previous remarks: It must be so painful for him to exclude parenthetical qualifiers in a review that shouldn’t even be examining musical worth in the first place (read your review philosophy [see above review philosophy]).

*You'll all be happy to know that I scrapped my initial idea for this post: an awkward and extended metaphorical reference to Dead Poets Society and Mr. Prichard's essay on measuring the value of a poem. Something about a graph depicting melodic worth on the vertical and harmonic worth on the horizontal. You're welcome.