The Former Chief Critic of the Times

Marcus Maroney writes about a wholly inadequate Bernard Holland review of this week's Orpheus Chamber Orchestra concert. I've been toting up my own list of Holland horrors for a few years now. I don't understand why he still has a job. Everyone reviewing for the Times is more competent than he is. And I consider it an utter mystery that there's more frothing in the blogosphere about Anthony Tommasini's reviews than about Holland's, which can be so astonishingly unprofessional and damaging.

By me, Holland's sins are:

• Unnecessary cruelty, also known as misplaced nastiness.
  
  I'll never forget his review of the Westminster Choir's 1996 Christmas Concert. Note the condescending tone, the sneering suggestion that serious listeners need not attend, the slap at the chorus for attempting Schoenberg's difficult "Friede auf Erden."
  
  I don't review the Oakland Symphony with the expectation that it will perform with the precision of the San Francisco Symphony. That's not a hard lesson for most reviewers to learn - and any amateur chorus taking a shot at "Friede auf Erden" deserves praise. I would certainly never sneer at any audience attending a classical music concert, though I've commented at least once on how different an audience's reaction was from mine.
• Disdain for the work under review.
  
  In 1998, the Met opened with Samson et Dalila, a work Holland simply can't abide. My solution? Don't review works you hate! If you must, say it once at most, then review the performance. Believe it or not, even the former chief critic of the Times hasn't got enough power to chase Samson out of the repertory at this late date.
  
  Better yet, relax and have a good time. I've only seen Samson once, thought it a hoot, but maybe I have more tolerance for well-constructed camp with great tunes than Bernard Holland does.
• Relying too heavily on the program notes.
  
  In 2002, the San Francisco Symphony put on a semi-staged version of Rimsky-Korsakov's Mlada. I attended a performance and enjoyed it very much, excepting the acid-toned soprano singing the villain of the piece. Holland came out to review it; when I saw his review a few days later, I was surprised at how closely his remarks on the work and its history tracked with the program notes. I would have at least read the New Grove articles on Rimsky and the opera! (Re-reading the review, I'm surprised he didn't comment on the "Egyptian" music, so Hollywood-campy as to make Samson sound positively noble by comparison. And he's wrong about an opera company taking the thing on. The music is wonderful, and it would certainly be nice to give the lead dancer room to spread out, but nothing happens. The opera is completely unstageworthy.)
• Barely making the effort
  
  Okay, I admit that I read and admire Think Denk, pianist Jeremy Denk's blog. Don't hold it against me when I say that I was very sorry the Times sent Holland to review the Joshua Bell/Jeremy Denk recital a few weeks back. I get that they're young and peppy and accurate, but he says absolutely nothing else about the performance. Couldn't he have tried??

Updated, April 6. ACD replies, without actually discussing any specific points I make or any of Holland's reviews (and guess what? calling Holland the only Times critic worthy of the name is a defense of Holland). Marcus comments further on Holland. Steve Hicken takes note of the ongoing discussion; do read the very entertaining comments.

King Roger, Past Productions

Found in the Times archive:

• Will Crutchfield reviews Long Beach Opera's 1988 production and is unimpressed.
• Anthony Tommasini on the Bard Festival production of 2008. Right on, Tony: I admire Leon Botstein's guts and programming more than his conducting.
• George Loomis reviews the 2008 Mariinsky production
• Bernard Holland chats about the opera and reviews the Simon Rattle recording
• John Rockwell on a 1982 Wolf Trap production
• Bernard Holland was at Carnegie Hall when Charles Dutoit conducted it
• Paul Griffiths reviews Simon Rattle and the CBSO in 1998

I've seen Tony T. at King Roger and at both of today's Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival programs. I hope he liked King Roger as much as I did and got the performance he's obviously waited a long time for.

Miscellany

From my inbox and other places:

• Goodbye, Bernard Holland. Not that I think the downsizing of the Times newsroom and culture pages is a good thing, mind you.
• Joshua Kosman has some thoughts on Holland.
  
• Stanford has yet another interesting symposium that I wish I'd heard about a month ago, on Music & the Brain. It's this weekend.
• Tony Tommasini speaks at Stanford at noon tomorrow today, May 14. This I ought to have made time to get to, but alas. It's up to you to ask him about Holland.
• The English National Opera has a nifty digital opera guide on its web site.
• Goldstar is offering half-price tickets to two San Francisco Symphony Brahms Festival concerts. (I was shocked by the number of empty seats at last week's program, with the wonderful Leif Ove Andsnes playing the Second Piano Concerto.)

He Beat Me to It

Tim Rutherford-Johnson has written a sharp takedown of Bernard Holland's ghastly George Perle review, which ran in the Times on Sunday, April 20. Yes, Mr. Holland, as a professional music critic, you should feel guilty about your intellectual laziness. I don't mind the fact that you dislike serial and atonal music. I mind a great deal that you don't have the honesty to recuse yourself from writing about music you're incapable of writing about in a fair manner. And whoever continues to assign you to review music for which you happily demonstrate your contempt should feel ashamed of himself.

And Marc Geelhoed beat me to dissecting Holland's review of the Stravinsky concert held in the Park Avenue Armory. I hope Alex Ross made it there so I can find out what it was really like. Perhaps chere La Cieca will do one of her famous pie charts of the Stravinsky concert.

Correction: Marc tells me that his posting was not tongue-in-cheek. He admires the sentence he called out. This means I'll have to dissect the review myself, but since it's 3 a.m. my time, for now I'll just say that the review says quite a bit more about the Armory's acoustics than the performances.

I Suppose That's One Way to Read the Review...

...but it's still wrong. ACD thinks that Bernard Holland is somehow being subtle rather than lazy in his Bostridge/Quasthoff/Roeschmann review. I might believe ACD if almost every Holland review didn't read the same way. If you don't believe me, check out Holland's review of the Emerson Quartet in today's Times. It's 85% musings about Brahms and 15% a review of the concert supposedly under review.

Some Ramblings: Blogging, Identity, and the Variable Quality of Reviews

Some random musings, probably not well organized, after reading publicist Maura Lafferty's posting about who reviews and using social media effectively (make sure to read the comments).

Yes, indeed, the ABS review that Maura links to is not what I would call a music review, because there is just about no discussion of the music beyond the level of "it was pretty." Okay, well, it's Bach and Telemann. The question then arises, what is the article that is now going by "review"?

Well, it's one person's experience and observations about attending a concert. In the comments, John Marcher writes about the "slippery path" of blogging, noting that he was a rock listener who now writes about a range of performing arts, including opera and concert music.

That question of who reviews. SFCV's reviewers are mostly current or past performers, music students, music teachers, and music journalists, but I know of at least one reviewer who is a deeply experienced listener to and reader about music; he started writing for SFCV by sending in a review he'd written. SFCV liked it: hired!

Not all music criticism that gets published is of the same high quality and we should not pretend that it is. Because of the sheer number of reviewers (and because of the light hand of the editors, which is mostly a good thing), the reviews at SFCV do vary a good bit in quality. I've seen a few reviews there where I wish the editors had had a little talk with the reviewer, yes, I have.

This goes on at all levels. I mean, you've seen me slagging Bernard Holland, right? He was the NY Times's lead classical music reviewer, and during his last few years at the paper, after Anthony Tommasini took over as lead, man, Holland was pretty damn variable. I don't read Mark Swed regularly; I know there are folks who have a few bones to pick with him. The name Martin Bernheimer makes some people see red - and MB is an excellent writer, whether you agree with him or not. I once saw an article in the S.F. Opera program about sopranos that talked about how of course we prefer listening to Liu to listening to Turandot, because Liu "is a mezzo." Well, no, she's not. That was a failure both of the writer and the editor.

I realize that Maura is pointing to a slightly different problem, that of the person who apparently knows little about music but is getting a platform to write about it at a journalistic organization anyway; see, for example, the Madama Butterfly review she links to. This is happening now, more than before, because of general problems in the newspaper world, the decline of respect for expertise, and the rise of blogging and other social media. Everyone's always been a critic, but now it's easier than ever to get your opinions out there for people to read. As the lines between journalism, criticism, and social media continue to erode, yes, we are going to get more nonreviewers reviewing classical music, and we're going to see more sites like Bachtracks, which I discussed in a previous entry.

In the comments to Maura's posting, John Marcher also discusses what happened when his blog entries were also published at examiner.com. Well, if you're a blogger, it's a good idea to retain your own identity. Case in point: In October, 2009, Alex Ross greatly reduced his blogging at The Rest is Noise to blog primarily at The New Yorker. (I was apparently the only person to express doubts publicly about this move.) By June, 2010, he had resumed using Noise as his primary blog. Moral of the story: if you have a location that works, it's best to stay put and to have an individual identity.

I'd say there's one semi-exception to this. Bogging at a high-profile, high-prestige group site such as ArtsJournal, Sequenza21, or Inside the Arts is a major benefit. You're in the kind of company where there are synergies. Somebody reading you will read other bloggers at that site and vice versa.

Compare and Contrast 9

The Brentano Quartet's Late Style concerts:

• Bernard Holland, already discussed here


• Alex Ross, in The New Yorker

I realize this is not an entirely fair comparison, given the paltry space allotted Holland - but other Times reporters, including Alex in his stint there, somehow make much better use of that space.

Even the Lazy

Bernard Holland reviews the Brentano Quartet in today's Times - well, no, actually he doesn't. The quartet is allowed only 97 of the 307 words in the review. The other 210 are ruminations on the matter of late style in Brahms, Shostakovich, and Mendelssohn, and those 97 words tell me only that the Brentano is young and energetic. Holland closes with this gem:

One awaits the Brentano’s late period. As excess energy wears off with the years, I think it will settle into the possibility that music making, like life, is more than trying hard; it also incorporates the easygoing, the calm, the gently ironic — even the lazy.

Score one for Holland.

I'm known not to be much of a fan of Bernard Holland, but this review is a winner all around. Tip of the hat, also, to the author of that headline, without which I probably would have ignored the review.

Getting It Wrong

Marcus Maroney called a Bernard Holland opinion piece - for lack of a better term, since it's obviously not a review - to my attention a couple of weeks ago. The piece opens with this paragraph:

Schubert died at 31. How much music did his early death deprive us of? Not a lot.

Really? And how can you tell? Gosh, I wish I had a crystal ball.

The whole article is a muddle, though he does get that we'd have lost quite a lot if Carter had died young or if Verdi had died at 78, and that Mozart had more to say. Schubert, too, I'm willing to bet.

Gibberish?

In his latest commentary stemming from Bernard Holland's George Perle CD review, ACD has this to say:

It's something much more fundamental: the lack of a perceptible and coherent musical narrative from work's beginning to end, which is to say the lack of the work's saying comprehensibly something beyond and exclusive of commentary on its own processes and methods which are — or ought to have been and be — but the mere tools used in its making.

And this (you should read the Justin Davidson quotation at Sounds & Fury):

To put the matter more bluntly and much less eloquently than Mr. Davidson, a musical composition absent a perceptible and coherent musical narrative from beginning to end is gibberish, and not music.

(Justin's point is quite a bit subtler and more suggestive than ACD's matter put more buntly.)

As in so many things, one's personal experience of music is one's own. It's not necessarily universal. I don't have problems following Carter's narrative. If you can't, it's not necessarily Carter's fault.

I don't have a problem with the outright dislike of any particular style of music. We all have our own ears and preferences. I know people who can't follow a Mozart symphony and others who can't follow Wagner. As I've posted, I couldn't deal with St. Francois d'Assisse. I just don't happen to think it's Messiaen's fault.

Fish, Barrel

Bernard Holland on Nico Muhly's concert:

Explaining why Elizabethan church music and pieces by the young American Nico Muhly were found together onstage at Zankel Hall on Friday requires intellectual gymnastics beyond my competence.

Read the whole stupid thing here. I'm betting that Alex or Steve will have something a little more cogent to say.

Eight in Twelve

We interrupt the Bernard Holland discussion with late-breaking news: Madama Butterfly comes to San Francisco Opera yet again. Here's the record:

October, 1995 - 8 performances
December, 1995 - 4 performances
June, 1997 - 20 performances (with several rotating casts)
January, 1999 - 8 performances
June, 2002 - 9 performances
January, 2003 - 5 performances
May/June, 2006 - [some number of performances I don't have handy]
December, 2007 - 5 performances

Perhaps this clarifies why I think it's a good idea to give the classics a rest once in a while. I would actually like to see Patricia Racette in this role, but, you know, it'll only encourage them if I buy a ticket.

Compare and Contrast 7

Comments and reviews on Carl Nielsen's music:

• Bernard Holland in the Times
• Alex Ross in The New Yorker and on his blog
  

I bet you can tell which of them I agree with.

Compare and Contrast 8

Reviews of Kaija Saariaho's string quartet Terra Memoria:

• Bernard Holland in the Times
• Me, in San Francisco Classical Voice
• Richard Scheinin in the Murk, best of all

Goings-On at the Rubin Institute Panels and Talks

Over at LiveJournal, frequent commenter Kalimac has been writing up the public events of the Rubin Institute for [Classical] Music Criticism. The postings that are up are here:

• Wednesday keynote, Anthony Tomassini, NY Times
• Thursday panel, Introduction to Classical Music Criticism (Tim Page, Anne Midgette, Alex Ross, John Rockwell, Heidi Waleson, Stephen Rubin)

Big thanks to Alex Ross for the shout-out, which has now been reported directly to me by two friends, in addition to Kalimac's mention. From the time stamp, I think one of them sent email about three seconds after Alex finished talking. I wish I could have been there, and also at Tommasini's talk, but after missing more or less seven weeks of work while on sick and family leave, there was just no way I'd be attending events at 2 p.m. and 5 p.m. in San Francisco. I do plan to come to tomorrow's firing squ...er, "Master Class in Classical Music Criticism."

I think for every critic who wanders into music criticism from another field, there is at least one with a music degree. In high school, I thought I would grow up to be a full-time critic. Robert Commanday was a flutist and chorus director before he became a music writer. Joshua Kosman has undergraduate and graduate degrees in music. Anthony Tommasini was a pianist and piano teacher, and I believe so was Bernard Holland before him. Alex Ross may not have majored in music, but it's clear that he took music classes in college. It is important to have technical knowledge of music if you're going to write about it, but you don't have to be a music major to acquire that knowledge.

As far as Gil French's question goes, okay, maybe they're not training writers for jobs that don't exist. There is still a shortage of outlets that pay, not to mention paying well, for classical music criticism and journalism. I am a very, very part-time writer, and I have never made more than $3,000/year for my music writing. I told Andy Doe earlier this year that I thought that with some effort I could probably make $25,000 - $30,000/year working half- to full-time. That would be fine as additional income after I stop working full time, but I am a technical writer and get paid more than that.

I am not sure what to say just now about Anthony Tommasini's keynote other than to mention that if you heard a loud noise last night, it was me banging my head against the wall as I read Kalimac's write-up.

Once More into the Breach

At the end of an article about how much performers move around when they're playing, Bernard Holland asks:

At the end of the day, whom do we take more seriously, Rubinstein or Lang Lang?

To which I answer:

Ask me when Lang Lang turns 75.

Then there's this:

The television program I happened to come across was produced by or for (probably both) a major American piano competition, and the young people I saw on it were part of that process. The program also offered commentary by an eminent conductor talking about the differences between Apollonian and Dionysian approaches to art. The Apollonian refers (and I paraphrase) to symmetry, invention and elegance; the Dionysian, to art more from the gut, more spontaneous.

More personal too. Dionysus had the stage when I was watching: two ambitious young people were taking part in a system that asks them to use Beethoven and Schumann as ways to sell themselves. Maybe our eminent conductor could have added another distinction to his two-sided debate: that Dionysian pianists care about Dionysian pianists, whereas Apollonian pianists care about music.

So, is this a veiled assertion that, for example, Leonard Bernstein didn't care about music?

[Thanks to rootlesscosmo for calling out this bit of Hollandish nonsense.]

Critics, Journalism, and the Internet

It's been a bad year for music journalists, with critics losing their jobs left and right, through buyouts, layoffs, and resignations. Some have been replaced; Tim Page by Anne Midgette, Peter Davis by Justin Davidson. Most have not: Bernard Holland, Melinda Bargreen, Alan Rich, and others. Davidson's spot at Newsday was not filled.

Martin Bernheimer has an article in the Financial Times, dated tomorrow, that discusses the role of critics as arbiters of excellence and maintainers of standards, and the trend away from respect for expertise toward the view that everyone is a reasonable critic. Along the way, he mentions the Internet as one reason for the decline of journalism and professional critics.

I think a number of the points he makes are on target, but others are truly arguable. The consolidation of the news media has been going on for decades, since the relaxation of rules on how many types of media a particular company could own in a particular market. Some newspapers are losing money - for reasons including their own failure to move their advertising onto the Web, pronto - but many others are profitable. They're just not making high enough profits for their corporate masters and Wall Street; therefore, their staffs get cut. (Justin Davidson provides some context in a Musical America article. Justin, about that last point you make: San Francisco Classical Voice is independent of both arts organizations and print journalism.)

I have to especially argue with this point in Martin Bernheimer's article:

A primary cause of our imminent extinction must be the internet. An impatient generation is succumbing to the free and easy lure of computer-enlightenment. Not all those who cover the arts in old-fashioned print are paragons, badness knows. Still, most have sufficient education and/or experience to justify their views. On the web anyone can impersonate an expert. Anyone can blog. Credentials don’t count. All views are equal. Some sort of criticism may indeed survive the American media revolution, but professional criticism may not.

Just how familiar is Mr. Bernheimer with the classical music blogosphere? The bloggers I read can be loosely classified as follows (and apologies to those of you I've omitted from this incomplete list):

• Professional critics such as Alex Ross, Joshua Kosman, Jessica Duchen, Steve Smith, and Tim Mangan


• Composers and composer/critics such as Elaine Fine, Kyle Gann, Steve Hicken, Matthew Guerrierri, and the whole gang at Sequenza 21


• Performers such as singer/arts administrator Sidney Chen, pianist Jeremy Denk, conductor Kenneth Woods, and singer Anne-Carolyn Bird


• Consultants such as Drew McManus and Greg Sandow. Oh, did I mention that Drew has a past as a performing musician and Greg is a composer and critic?


• Well-informed and educated listeners such as A.C. Douglas, Patrick Vaz, and sfMike.

These voices are provide invaluable viewpoints, even the ones I spend too much time arguing with. I cannot say that any of them are in any way "impersonating" experts; the non-pros are perfectly clear about the fact that they're not professionals. I'd really like it if Mr. Bernheimer could point out some people who are impersonating classical music experts or taking jobs away from professional critics. And I hope he'll keep in mind the fact that the blogosphere is more like a salon than like a newspaper: a bunch of people sitting around exchanging opinions with themselves and their readers.

He's not the only critic who has gone astray writing about classical music on the Internet recently. The anonymous bloggers at The Detritus Review had a fine time taking apart an article by Mark Swed. And Out West Arts reports that newly-minted blogger Alan Rich said recently that there are "no important music blogs on the West Coast at this time." Welcome to the blogosphere, Mr. Rich, and check out those of us who've been here a while.

Update, July 5: A.C. Douglas has a few words on the same subject.

Critical Opinion

Jonas Kaufmann is on a recital tour of the United States, with his usual pianist, Helmut Deutsch. Kaufmann is famous, cute, and rarely seen in this country, where he hasn't appeared much in opera west of the Hudson River, if ever, and hasn't done a concert tour in about a decade. He has many fans. It turns out that two of the critics who've seen him aren't among them.

• Alex Ross, The New Yorker
• Joshua Kosman, S.F. Chronicle

Both of these reviews are well-reasoned and make similar points about where Kaufmann's strengths and weaknesses are. The two reviewers are by no means in accord at all times when they've reviewed the same performances.

Joshua got some heated blowback and wrote a commentary about it, which you can read here.

I'm genuinely shocked at his mention that "a fellow music critic asserted that I should never be allowed to review anything at all." There is no other reviewer I agree with all the time and it would not be a good thing if there were. Suggesting that someone shouldn't be "allowed" to review over a single disagreement is ridiculous and wildly unprofessional for someone in the business. (I'm not sure whether to read Joshua's Twitter timeline and FB feed to see who said this, out of concern that it might be someone I respect...and would respect a little less.)

As for me, I missed this recital, but both of the reviews I link to are in accord with what I heard at Kaufmann's 2011 recital and in a couple of opera broadcasts, including the Met HD of Die Walküre. I didn't blog the earlier recital, which was mostly Lieder with a couple of light classics thrown in for fun. I recall wondering what all the fuss was about. I found Deutsch a recessed and anonymous player, much more of an accompanist than a partner, which is unfortunate. The right pianist can make an enormous difference.

Kaufmann's interpretations seemed generalized and worked best with the most operatic of the songs, where a good line and dynamic control can take you a long way. I did not find his interpretations particularly insightful or detailed. I did note in email to a friend that "Die Rose, die Lilie" from Dichterliebe was not very successful, because it didn't have the requisite light touch.

I found Kaufmann similarly generalized in opera. I'm sorry to have missed him in the Met Parsifal, in a role that's a real dramatic test for the tenor.

It's not, by the way, that I haven't read ludicrous reviews and reviews that I disagree strongly with. I have blogged about a fair number of eye-rolling reviews or specific remarks from reviewers. Bernard Holland criticizing an amateur group for having the nerve to sing a challenging work at Carnegie Hall comes to mind. And back in 2017, the year that Mason Bates premiered a better opera than John Adams, there was a fair amount of disagreement among critics about both The (R)evolution of Steve Jobs and Girls of the Golden West. You could look it up! Reasonable people can, and do, disagree all the time.

To This We've Come

Bernard Holland reviews the Radio City Music Hall Christmas Spectacular.