Seriously, Someone Got Paid for This

We’ve seen some doozey lead-ins in our time, ranging from outlandish to outlandisher. In general, they’re uninformative, putrid, zing-slinging shit bombs, like, “Oh my gosh! This concert was the most bestest, transcendentest, awesomest musical ejaculation ever heard, ever! The audience almost died it was so much more gooder than the goodest performance in the history of the universe.” But this one is a little different. It’s a little more subtle.

It was something of a family affair at Friday night’s concert by the Kansas City Symphony at the Lyric Theatre.

Alright. A family affair. Seems reasonable, if a little lackluster. A family affair. That's the thread to be expounded upon. Great. There's one question left to ask, then: How will the opening line play out this time?

Well, my friends, as the Chinese proverb says, the journey is the reward...er...or something. So, sit back and take it all in, in fill-in-the-blank form.

Concertmistress _______ took center stage as soloist in an exciting performance of _______.

_______ employed a sumptuous tone in the work’s famous opening theme. As the movement progressed, _______ also displayed impressive musicality and driving energy.

Music Director _______ conducted a well balanced [sic] performance, keeping the orchestra’s dynamic levels soft enough to let the solo lines dominate. In addition, _______ stretched the phrases beautifully in the movement’s slower central section.

In the second movement, _______ utilized a marvelous blend of lyrical line and rich tonal color. The exciting finale brought the audience to its feet.

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So far, this vapid assessment—which, by the way, is precisely for what the author received payment—makes one wonder whether or not he actually attended this performance. It has all the characteristics of a prefabricated review:

1. All the descriptors could equally apply to nearly any performer or performance (“exciting performance”, “sumptuous tone”, “impressive musicality”, “well-balanced performance”, etc., etc.).

2. All the music’s formal markers are generic (“soloist”, “famous opening theme”, “movement”, “phrases”, “finale”). Can you describe another piece using these terms? I can.

3. The lead-in thread is entirely absent, suggesting that it was added on later, as an afterthought.

Of course, I’m not suggesting this indeed is what happened. But, for fuck’s sake, a quadriplegic monkey could pound out better assessments.

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The _______ Symphony Chorus, directed by _______, joined the orchestra and four vocal soloists for _______’s thrilling and dramatic ______.

From the outset the chorus sounded strong and impressive, and balance with the orchestra was quite good, with the exception of the organ, which stuck out like a sore thumb.

The vocal quartet was better on the inner parts, mezzo-soprano and tenor rather than soprano and baritone. From the opening _______, soprano _______ sounded harsh, especially at the top of her range. Baritone _______ sang with beauty and resonance in his upper and middle range, but didn’t have the chops for the ungodly lowest notes in the _______.

Mezzo-soprano _______ was magnificent in the _______ and tenor _______ sang with lyrical beauty throughout the work.

While the performance was quite good overall, the violins never seemed to be together on the ornamental phrases at the beginning of the _______. The chorus suffered a few cases of a single tenor entering early and a few fuzzy-toned soprano entrances.

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Slightly better, but still, the observations could’ve been made by a dead parrot or a shrubbery.

But enough of that, let's return to the lead-in. Remember that the concert was “something of a family affair”? What could that have meant? How did it play out?

Even the opening work, Bach’s “Brandenburg Concerto No. 3,”conveyed a familial air:

Even? I didn’t smell a whiff of familial air in the above text. Did you?

...Bach’s “Brandenburg Concerto No. 3,”conveyed [sic] a familial air: [Michael] Stern conducted an intimate group of 10 strings and harpsichord.

Small, intimate group = family lead-in

Wow. That’s fucking weak. In fact, this whole review is fucking weak. First, we get a promising lead-in; second, we get nondescript, prefabricated statements about several pieces and performers (really, who cares what or who they were?); then, the lead-in returns to reveal a wafer-thin connection. In all, poor form, poor prose, poor critique, poor observations, poor everything. Calling this mediocre would be an overstatement.

Instead, I’ll offer this: embarrassingly lazy.

Figure 1. Sketch artist’s rendering of this review

A final hackneyed description:

Although the opening movement suffered from a handful of intonation slips in the violins, the performance was nicely shaped and musically satisfying.

Stupendous.
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Lazy Critics Who Write for Major Publications

Look. I understand that "classical" concert reviewers are given precious little space and time to submit their material, even in the nation's most prestigious newspapers. Thusly, I am not attacking, specifically, this writer, but the lack of substance of the post, which is endemic of the problem at large. That is to say, I don't necessarily blame the writer. Well, maybe a little.

Here, New York Times reviewer Bernard Holland gives a brief account of a recent recital in Carnegie hall by distinguished pianist Radu Lupu.

Listeners could forget about thematic unity at Radu Lupu’s Carnegie Hall recital on Monday night.

Thank God! I am so sick of thematic unity in concert programs. Wait, what? Is this important? Why would you open your article with this sentiment? Because I totally usually go to the concert review section of the paper with a critical eye towards the thematic unity of the program. Did you see that time that that guy programmed Brahms with Palestrina? Total faux pas. What a rube.

A sold-out house heard Schubert’s Piano Sonata in D (D. 850) before intermission and Debussy’s first book of “Préludes” after it. The Schubert represents the composer’s strenuous efforts to be big-time in the manner of Beethoven. The Debussy is a series of scenes painted by a master.

Okay...different composers from different eras are...different? Also, since Beethoven is clearly infallible and the best composer ever gee whiz, Schubert's "strenuous" [read: failed] efforts are to be "big-time"? "Big-time"? Whoah, stop with your fancy words, there, wordsmith!

If much of Schubert’s best music drifts to the point of sleepwalking, the sonata’s first movement is wide awake, hammering out hard-headed little themes, then massaging them in orderly, Germanic fashion.

Germans love order! And Schubert's best music is totally boring. Soporific, even. However, I will grant kudos for the awesome alliteration of "hammering...hard-headed."

The human touch comes in the lovely echoes that trail after these sharp attacks.

Read those two passages again. Implication: Germans are not human!

The image of Schubert the cuddly tunesmith is deceptive.

Cuddly! Cuddly? Oh, right, he may have been gay! Also, citation needed? Whose image? Oh, the image.

After sufficient lubrication at his tavern of choice, he was not too shy to announce his big ambitions and his qualifications to achieve them.

And drunk! He liked beer. Beer, I tell you! And after drinking, had the courage to...compose? Or: to compose something other than songs? That cuddly tunesmith? Dude, the man wrote like 15 String Quartets, 18 Piano Sonatas, 9 Symphonies (in various states of Finished-ness), and a crapload of other piano, orchestral, and chamber music. Oh, but only when he was drunk. (I need a drink.) Not to mention that the Sonata for Piano in D, D. 850 was composed in 1825 by a mature composer near the end of his (tragically short) life (1797-1828). Oh, those song composers and their wacky aspirations to be Beethoven!

Now: to explicate the ways in which Schubert is not Debussy!

Debussy’s 12 pieces occupy a different world.

Wow! Tell me more, Mr. Expert! I mean, besides that they were composed 85 years apart (Schubert: 1825, Debussy: 1910) in completely different eras, with different tonal resources, by completely different composers.

People who find in them some sort of charming travelogue and little more

Citation needed?

would do well to remember the visual arts, in which mundane subjects are routinely raised beyond their ordinariness.

That is a fair point. In some eras. Certainly, the 19th, and sometimes 20th centuries saw many artists treat mundane subjects to great effect. However, 1910 saw things like this and this. I am not an expert in visual art.

You do not need sonata form to write great music.

And all this time I've been going around saying how Palestrina was an idiot.

Piano sound is a mysterious business, and Mr. Lupu manages to sit at one end of this sizable hall and fill it with color and clarity. There is no sense that he is trying hard to do so; it simply happens. If these two composers speak in different voices, they were unified here by Mr. Lupu’s tender respect for what the written score in each case was asking him to do.

Well put, sir. Also, I respect how you respect Mr. Lupu's respect for the score.

The end of the article is a description of the music using vague adjectives, the sort that my co-blogger Empiricus loves to deride. I won't bother right now. What? I should? Oh, okay, but just one thing.

The glory of the sonata is its slow movement: a long, nostalgic sigh, but one that thrives only if Schubert’s written admonition not to dawdle is observed. Its brief opening phrase occupies a harmonic world of vast and sudden change, offering modulations filled with delight and surprise.

That sounds great! I love the harmonic ambiguity of Romantic music. Delight and surprise are outstanding qualities of this kind of music.

Wait, what's that, Mr. Holland? You have a technical explanation? Outstanding! I love analysis. Are you going to describe how these surprising modulations are achieved? Oh, you'll probably only describe one of them in any detail; you wouldn't want to ostracize your less technically-minded readers. Okay, that's fair.

How Schubert arrives at one place from another with the flick of a raised or lowered tone can be analyzed, but no one else seems to have been able to do it.

Uh, I am pretty sure that's patently false. Oh, wait, you're a critic. Analysis tells us nothing! How dare those intellectual elites tell us how music works?! I just feel it, okay?! Analysis tells us nothing. NOTHING! [yelling, shakes fist at sky, looks vainly for god, head explodes]

To reiterate, in closing:

no one else seems to have been able to do it.

Citation needed?
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