I am puzzled. I’ve known for most of my life that my reality didn’t necessarily coincide with that of other people, but today I hit a wall. I’ve been having fun all week, singing in the Verdi Requiem – one of my top five faves of all time – with the New York Philharmonic and Lorin Maazel and a great bunch of singers. It doesn’t get much better than that. There have been two performances so far, and they have both been dazzling. I had a great time, and the capacity audiences went wild. Case closed, or so you’d think.
I sat down with the Weekend Arts section of the NY Times this morning, and the reviewer, well, I don’t think that he and I were at the same show. He claimed to have been at last night’s performance, but he made the whole thing out to be this somber snoozefest. Well, it’s a REQUIEM mass, idiot. C’mon, you’re a critic. You’re supposed to be up on this stuff. What were you expecting? “Mr. Ed” reruns? And it was anything but a snooze. Lush, certainly; considered, absolutely; boring, no.
The guy didn’t actually use the phrase “ho-hum”, but it lurked behind every bland adjective. I guess that’s also a New York thing, that blasé, noblesse oblige pose. Maybe it would be uncool for a critic to openly appreciate a brilliant performance of such a gigantic pile of corn, but I have to wonder if he wasn’t somewhere else, thinking that he was listening to the Verdi Requiem when he was really listening to Kenny G.
Maybe I just don’t get the gestalt of the critic. I confess to a flimsy notion of why they exist at all. They seem so extraneous to the artistic process. I guess concerts need to be reported, like political revolutions and car accidents, but I fail to see why we need to read qualitative judgments based on the purely subjective views of a writer who isn’t talented enough to be a creative artist, yet considers himself enough of a maven to evaluate those who are.
How would it be, for instance, if there was a Times critic for auto accidents? “The blue Toyota minivan, while obviously driven with a panache usually attributed to skilled professional drivers, performed a perfect 360 before spectacularly crashing into a row of parked cars. Minivans, widely known for their ability to carom off a sequence of vehicles, were well represented in this incident. An elderly pedestrian, trapped between two of the stationary vehicles, earned praise from onlookers and EMT’s alike for his vocalism following the painful pinning of his legs between the vehicles, although his screams sounded hoarse and grating to the trained ear. Moreover, they lacked the urgency and volume one associates with grievous bodily damage, making them pallid and unconvincing.”
When it comes to skewering the skewerer, nobody did it better than the chorus master at City Opera during my years there. When the entire company migrated to LA for a month of performances, the local moron lambasted every single show, and it seemed like he saved up an entire year’s worth of invective for the big orgy of flagellation he reserved for our entirely undeserving company. After years of his predictable grandstanding buffoonery, which always resulted in smaller audiences, the company stopped going to LA, and the poor critic wept and wailed that LA couldn’t even support a non-resident opera company. He was just pissed that he’d be missing his annual target practice.
One morning at a rehearsal out there, our chorus master strode stiffly into the studio with a folded copy of the LA Times. The Arts section carried a review of the previous night’s performance, and again it was highly doubtful that the critic had been in attendance, having named and excoriated performers who hadn’t even appeared in the show, even though their names were listed in the program. “He has outdone himself”, our maestro announced, and proceeded, with great flourish, to locate the flatulent article and give it an impassioned dramatic reading, his tone rising in volume and stridency as he approached the closing insults. At the final nastiness, he snapped the paper shut with bravado and flung it the short distance to his podium, where it landed with a muffled thwack! After a round of applause, he added this postscript: “Critics perform much the same function as eunuchs at an orgy. They watch.” That earned him a standing ovation.
There’s a caveat buried somewhere in this painful little circumlocution. Don’t listen to critics. Don’t invite them to your shows. Ignore their reviews when they do come, and then puke out their stupidity for all to see. Unless, of course, your review is a glowing encomium to your talent, in which case the reviewer is a person of taste, breeding, refinement, and all is forgiven. Concentrate on your art, and pay no attention to the parasites that populate the press. If you still harbor doubts about the loutish, mean-spirited nature of the critic, read the “Lexicon of Musical Invective”, a collection of vituperative reviews stretching back to Beethoven. Critics, those ancillary nitwits, have been getting it wrong for hundreds of years, and they’re still at it. Add as favorites (69) | Quote this article on your site | Views: 4275
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