The art of the bad review

Long Road Out Of Eden
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Those are my principles....

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Norman Lebrecht: Slipped Disc and   Lebrecht Weekly, 12/05/2023   "Why I cannot, in good conscience, review this record I cannot, in all conscience, give this recording a star rating, or even a detailed review. The soloist is Elisabeth Leonskaja, a legendary pianist whose introspections are perhaps the strongest living reminder of her late friend Sviatoslav Richter....Christian Thielemann, in the recent film ‘Music under the Swastika’, claimed that Wilhelm Furtwängler’s complicity in the Third Reich was justified by his legacy of extraordinary recordings.  Leonskaya’s presence in Putin’s Russia is not dissimilar. What are we to make of them?... The performances, per se, have nothing to do with the present situation. And yet, everything.I cannot review them". . ..and if you don't like my principles... well, I have others . Norman Lebrecht: Slipped Disc , 19/11/2025 "The Muziekgebouw in Eindhoven has cancelled a December 4 concert by the Russian-Georgian Jewish pia...
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David Munrow - more than early music

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'David Munrow and the Early Music Consort of London transformed our view of medieval music. The impact of their performances far surparssed any that had gone before: by demonstrating how medieval music could sound normal, they created a niche for it in the concert hall and on record that it has never lost' ~ From Daniel Leech-Wilkinson's notes for Music of the Gothic era May 15 2007 is the thirty-first anniversary of the death of David Munrow. His contribution to the acceptance, understanding and performance of early music almost defies summary. He was born in 1942, and learnt the bassoon and recorder as a child. Between school and university he travelled and taught in South America , and started the collection of ethnic instruments that were to give him, and the world, a new perspective on early music making. He read English at Pembroke College , Cambridge, and was encouraged by Thurston Dart to take an active role in the music-making of that most musical of cities. ...
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Know your audience

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Recently Pulitzer Prize winning composer John Luther Adams (seen above)  announced he had moved  from the USA to Australia, explaining "the current situation in the United States was a major element in my decision to leave". Even by Slipped Disc standards the response to that announcement on Norman Lebrecht's industry-endorsed website was deeply unpleasant. Here are just a few of the comments deemed acceptable for publication on Slipped Disc .  Good riddance. Maybe he’ll take his rather tiresome music to Antarctica next. He can be closer to Muslim assassins. Wise choice Absolute loser  If that’s what passes as a top classical composer these days, no wonder the genre is doomed. What a jerk. As a critic you cannot possibly ignore how unbearable his compositions are (I carefully avoid the word music). Let's ignore what a potential classical music funder would conclude from a typical Slipped Disc narrative . Yes, the defense of free - if not particularly intell...
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The purpose of puffery and closed-mindedness

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Two contrasting responses from America to my post Third rate music on Naxos' American classics? Flinging merde - ' Granted some of the stuff that Naxos has packaged in that series has been less than distinguished but operating in a cultural establishment where critics treat every cow patty ever dropped by the likes of Alwyn (above) and Bax and Finzi and Michael Tippitt (sic) as if it were fois gras, Clements is hardly in a position to fling merde' - from Sequenza21 , and I'm sure Norman Lebrecht would approve of that misspelling of Tippett. The true beauty of the effort - ' Personally speaking I expect listener reaction to concert music is heavily dependent on emotional mood and cultural/historical context . The concept of "ratings" and "tiers" for composers is pretty much an over-rated specialization of critics, which serves the purpose of puffery and closed-mindedness. My father is the American composer George Frederick McKay (photo be...
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Requiem psychedelia

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Award-winning author, environmentalist, Zen Roshi , and womanizer Peter Matthiessen - seen in photo above - featured in a recent post here . This drew on Lance Richardson's engrossing new biography of Matthiessen. So now here is a a short and deliciously inappropriate vignette from the biography. When he wasn't hosting his girlfriend, Matthiessen smoked pot at Polgeto , swam in the castle pool, and caught up on writing. He also took LSD which was readily supplied by John Abbot . On a previous visit, Matthiessen had bought a small green notebook with ' Appunti ' stencilled on the cover - this became his LSD journal. One day he added 300 micrograms of Sandoz LSD to a cup of coffee, put Fauré's Requiem on the stereo, and pushed through an onslaught of paranoid self-pity.
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Young Britten

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That photo was taken by me today on the seafront at Lowestoft . Here is the opening section of Young Britten  in Alex Ross' acclaimed book The Rest Is Nois e. Homosexual men, who make up approximately 3 to 5 per cent of the general population, have played a disproportionately large role in composition of the last hundred years. Somewhat around half of the major American composers of the twentieth century seem to have been homosexual or bisexual: Copland, Bernstein, Barber, Blitzstein, Cage, Harry Partsch, Henry Cowell, Lou Harrison, Gian Carlo Menotti, David Diamond, and Ned Rorem. In Britain, too, the art of composition skewed gay. The two young composers who seized the spotlight in the early postwar era were Britten and Michael Tippett, neither of whom made an effort to hide their homosexuality.   Alex's book provides a salutary reminder of what we have lost in the era of lowest common denominator music writing . As does his long-running The Rest Is Noise website ;...
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Pushing the classical music envelope

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'In his short life and his art, the French Canadian composer Claude Vivier was a man diving, often recklessly, into the ultimate…. And from the edge of experience, he began to bring back, in the years leading up to his death in 1983, a new sound.' – Paul Griffiths , The New York Times I recently asked Who is pushing the classical envelope? My header photo shows a little-known figure who certainly pushed the classical music envelope and in the process created a new sound world that is ripe for rediscovery. Claude Vivier, was born to unknown parents in Montreal in 1948. After adoption his education prepare him for the priesthood until he was expelled from his seminary for "immature behaviour". But his religious training had awakened another vocation and he went on to study music, first in Montreal and then in Europe where his teachers included Karlheinz Stockhausen . In 1976 Vivier visited Japan, Bali and other Eastern countries and their musical traditions influenc...
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No such thing as an unknown Venezuelan conductor

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The Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra is playing at the BBC Proms tonight (5th August 2005) with a programme including Mahler ( Ruckert-Lieder with Anne Sophie von Otter), Tubin and Sibelius. Their superstar Principal Conductor Neemi Jarvi is ill, so stepping into the breach is 24 year old Venezuelan Gustavo Dudamel (right) who becomes the third youngest conductor to appear at the Proms. As the two younger talents were Simon Rattle and Daniel Harding there is a lot for Gustavo Dudamel to live up to. Several famous conductors got their fairytale big break by taking over at short notice from an indisposed superstar. Probably the most famous was Leonard Bernstein who took over from Bruno Walter to conduct the New York Philharmonic in November 1943 at just a few hours notice. The media are having a field day in the UK with the 'unknown Venezuelan' story, and Charlotte Higgins in the Guardian seems to have swallowed it hook line and sinker with a screaming headline... Conducting pr...
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Philippa Schuyler - genius or genetic experiment?

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A child prodigy fêted by Leonard Bernstein and Virgil Thomson, performed by five leading American orchestras while still a teenager, accompanied by the New York Philharmonic at age 16, ranked alongside Aaron Copland and Marc Blitzstein, mourned with a Pontifical Requiem Mass in St Patrick's Cathedral, New York, and the rumoured subject of a Hollywood biopic. That is the executive summary of an American musical legend who was born eighty years ago tomorrow. Child prodigies, anniversaries and even executive summaries are the common currency of classical music today. But there are several reasons why the story that is going to be told On An Overgrown Path over the next two days is important. The first is that the legendary figure was a woman who had a black father and white mother. The second is that she experienced the barriers to musicians of colour that still linger on today. And thirdly, despite her legendary status, until the second part of this feature appears tomorrow h...
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Also sprach the composer

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I see from the autumn publishing schedules that Paul Griffiths has a new novella being published titled Let Me Tell You . It is written in the Oulipo tradition of constrained writing, and uses only the vocabulary allotted to Ophelia in Hamlet . I know that Paul is not a composer, but he is, among other things, an authority on Stockhausen , scholar of Messiaen and librettist for Tan Dun . So, in the style of my composer as painter thread , it started me thinking about composers as authors of literary works, as opposed to music theory books and memoirs. Here for starters are two composers as authors. The most obvious one is in the photo above. Paul Bowles studied with Aaron Copland, composed a considerable amount of music most of which was for the theatre, and wrote five very successful novels and a number of short stories. My second composer as author is slightly more arcane. The Minimal Piano Collection which was featured here last year includes on CD 4, among contributions from ...
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