A Few Articles to Read Together

Regular readers know that I have been rolling my eyes at Music@Menlo's programming for the last ten years or so. The festival directors, Wu Han and David Finckel, work pretty much in the dead-white-European-male canon, even when there are obvious opportunities to break out of that particular line of programming.

The pair are also directors of the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center. Weirdly, the one time I saw them in SF, they played a new song cycle and Amy Beach's piano quintet, the sort of thing various people wish they'd do more of.

CMS's season opener led to the following:

• Review: Chamber Music Society Returns, Unchanged, by Zachary Woolfe. Subhead: The organization opened its season with a program encapsulating a persistently conservative vision of the repertory.
• Chamber Music Society's Leaders on Balancing Old and New, by Javier Hernández. An interview that contains a ton of gobbledegook, including the ridiculous claim by Finckel: "I mean, there is more variety and diversity in a single string quartet of Haydn than you can find in about a hundred works of other composers." W the actual F. This is a willful dodge around what "diversity" means.
• Diversify the world of classical music? Some key players are digging in their heels, by Joshua Kosman, wielding a very sharp pencil.
  
• Catalyst Quartet shines a spotlight on the chamber music of Black composers, also by Joshua Kosman. Lack of diverse programming means omitting a lot of terrific music from our concert halls.
  
• The Programmatic Lightness Of Being, by Drew McManus at Adaptistration.
  
• There's plenty of mockery of the CMS/LC on Twitter, as well.

The Underappreciated Critic

Joshua Kosman, fellow blogger and classical music critic of the San Francisco Chronicle, comes in for a lot of stick from his readers, as do all critics. Goodness knows, I disagree with him often enough (he was wrong wrong wrong about Die tote Stadt and The Bonesetter's Daughter, for example, just going back a couple of months, and apparently he was immune to the luminous beauty of the last Runnicles Tristan).

One criticism I've heard is that he's burned out, and this I really do not get. His reviews are consistently enthusiastic, perceptive, and often very funny, regardless of whether he loved or hated the music and performances. I read a Kosman review, I wish I'd been there.

Take, for example, his review of this past weekend's Elliott Carter Centenary Celebration concerts, which I'd consider a model: there's enthusiasm for the performers and respect for the composer and what he inspires, even as Joshua ruefully admits that the music itself leaves him in "a state of bewildered incomprehension." (I, a Carter fan, must admit that if you've been grappling with the music for a couple of decades and still don't get it, you probably won't.)

I wish critics' jobs gave them more opportunities to write about music beyond concert reviews. Joshua's extremely good at this, at taking a moment of music and explicating its meanings. See, for example, his remarks on Mahler in the comments section of this Detritus Review posting. Or the series of postings he calls This Magic Moment on his own blog. Give us more!!