Music to Your Eyes

...Except for a few columns I did most recently, everything I have written about music here and occasionally in other publications is reprinted in John Simon on Music (Applause, 2005...

...James was eminently sensible in reprehending the hi-fi fiends in 1959: "Do you regard a record as a technical toy or as a means of preserving, and reproducing at will, a particular performance in which the music and the performance are of first importance...

...This is particularly unfortunate because the good will always prevail in the end, whereas the bad may take far too long to be exposed...

...Heifetz is the opposite: "His old performance of a Wieniawski concerto was so good...

...Concerning the Samuel Barber-Gian Carlo Menotti opera Vanessa, he felt a lack of "the conflict of raw passion so essential to opera in the grand style...

...Much safer...

...And, no less perceptively: "It has always seemed to me that the famous Toscanini clarity sometimes actually detracts from the beauty of the music...

...There were, after him, brief tenures by John Yohalem and Hal Goodman...

...An interesting theory, but not one to settle a century-old debate, if indeed there was one...

...He gave us a lively account of music at the Aspen Festival, and persuasive opinions about what Quadrophony does for the listener...

...But the NL's editor kept after me, and, not being tied to a mast or having wax in my ears, I finally yielded to his siren song...

...Oistrakh has taken the violinist out of violin playing...

...Yet I even like his "cringle," despite not being able to find it in any dictionary...

...Schönberg, Béla Bartók, and Alban Berg were her gods (not a bad theology), but she also applauded the Anton Bruckner revival...

...Reviewing the opera's premiere recording, he found it better, but deplored the "blowzy bleating" of Eleanor Steber, the lead...

...Geraint Evans' Beckmesser was good, "yet the sounds he emits were not invariably those of the German language...

...For a while I was resistant...

...One of them contrasted the violinists David Oistrakh and Jascha Heifetz: "Oistrakh has restored to the violin its natural voice...

...It has been my firm belief that many genuine and potential music lovers are lost or turned off by routine conventional programming...

...As for one's posthumous critical reputation, who reads collections of criticism anyway...

...I tried to arouse the reader's interest in them, and also report on and evaluate CDs of their music currently available, or possible to track down with effort and luck...

...Only his first couple of columns were about classical music...

...My one qualification was a great love of "modern" classical music—that is, from the mid-19th century onward...

...However, casually dropped sporadic remarks suggest that he could have addressed classical music as effectively, had he chosen to do so...

...HIBBARD James, I discovered to my surprise, was the NL music critic in the late 1950s...

...He praised Placido Domingo for spreading his "sunlike talent over the universe of the tenor repertoire," and found several others in the cast functioning acceptably "though in barbarous French...

...All this approvingly from Gurewitsch, if not so from me...

...And, more judiciously, about Michael Tippett, "[He] seems to have an almost pathological fear of either melody or emotion...

...The next reviewer was M. Anatole Gurewitsch, better known since as the ubiquitous critic, editor and musical journalist Matthew Gurewitsch...

...He did, though, correctly find Herbert von Karajan a better conductor than stage director, and wrote appreciatively of Pierre Boulez while daringly downgrading Olivier Messiaen...

...Similarly pointed was his observation that Richard Addinsell's beloved Warsaw Concerto for the film Dangerous Moonlight "may not have had much originality, but as fake Rachmaninoff it was superb...

...by overemphasizing the architectural detail...

...Eventually, Gurewitsch switched from music to dance, and wrote about ballet with comparable acumen...

...And he wrote judiciously about the pluses and minuses of Paul Rosenfeld's and Henry Pleasants' music criticism...

...I doubt he got the idea from Mark N. Grant's Maestros of the Pen: A Historv of Classical Music Criticism in America...

...Consequently, the preference now is to delve into the past or to try to explain the present...

...I have personally scant use for Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, and the rest of the classical roster, but would not wish to exclude them from performance...

...There is something to this, but by now the critic must have heard the recordings of these songs by Sena Jurinac and Gundula Janowitz, who hardly qualify as pipsqueaks...

...One of the great masterpieces of the modern school—' What can it have been like...

...She was better when she excoriated Milton Babbitt ("nowhere even a vestige of communication of an idea—not to mention an emotion"), Leon Kirchner, Morton Feldman, and John Cage ("a negation of life itself...

...The egg is pretty much buried with one's face...

...As my final NL assignment, I have been looking at what has been written in these pages about music over roughly the last half century...

...Depending on whatever criticism I was writing for bread and butter at other publications, I could always write another type of criticism for the NL...

...she was correctly favorable in principle, although I wonder about her specific praise for Avery Claflin, Henry Cowell, Irwin Heilner, and the team of Otto Luening and Vladimir Ussachevsky, the first and third of whom have faded out of the picture, while the others barely maintain a shadowy presence...

...Albert Goldman, his successor, wrote almost exclusively about jazz and pop, which do not interest me and I am not competent to discuss...

...His sound is nothing more than the true character of the instrument raised to ideal perfection— no false glitter, no forced richness...

...I cannot evaluate, and must not even quote, the final critic, who happened to be I—or, if you prefer, me—beginning in October 1997.1 leave this to others if they should see fit...

...In a column about the new record label CRI (Composers' Recordings, Inc...

...At different times since 1961 I was its film, theater or culture critic, and I frequently reviewed books, some of them on musical figures...

...I had known him at Harvard as a wry, amusing aesthete who sported a mustache...

...He praised Boulez' way with Claude Debussy, offered a nice tribute to Charles Ives, and often wrote cogently about recorded sound...

...So during these last eight years of the magazine I had a music column...

...About a Met production of Jules Massenet's Le Cid, he wrote that "the mind was not invited to this feast for the senses...

...His criticism promptly caught my interest with this sentence (regarding Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, who reorchestrated Boris Godunov): "It is one of the ironies of musical history that Mussorgsky suffered more at the hands of his friends than most other composers suffered at the hands of their enemies...

...I was persuaded the music was good...

...He therefore has some kind words for the long-ago Boston critic Arthur Elson, who "albeit too rarely prescient, nonetheless has the virtue of being winningly foolhardy...

...And, alluding to Anton Chekhov's alleged remark that a gun seen in Act One must be used by Act Three, "Everyone in Vanessa is much too genteel to fire a shotgun, except at a pheasant...

...Still, I do believe that if some of the more modern composers I have written about—say, a Joseph Jongen, Frank Martin or Camargo Guarnieri—were performed with deserved frequency (which not even a Berg or Bartok enjoy), more seats in our concert halls and opera houses would be filled...

...Do we, in the theater, perform only Shakespeare, Molière and Ibsen...

...To hear Abbado present a work is to hear it fresh...

...The public," he wrote, "seems to hear much more of Schubert's cycle when they hear it in excerpt and pounced on the end of each song with almost vindictive fits of coughing...

...She was usefully informative about what goes on at places like the MacDowell Colony and Yaddo, and about music at Columbia University and at various festivals...

...When appropriate, they were good haters, of the kind our politically correct era no longer fosters...

...To speak of him in any terms short of hushed reverence almost calls for a Congressional investigation...

...I particularly regret not getting around to lengthy discussions of such composers as Alan Rawsthorne, William Walton, Karl-Birger Blomdahl, Henri Sauguet, Henri Dutilleux, Einojuhani Rautavaara, and Ellen Taaffe Zwilich among others, but am glad to have brought a good many lesser known masters or mistresses to the readers' attention...

...He observed that "Strauss wrote his Four Last Songs for Kirsten Flagstad...

...Gurewitsch dared cavil with the persistent gloom of Schubert's song cycle Die Winterreise, even as performed by his justly venerated Dietrich FischerDieskau...

...What struck me especially was the tough-mindedness, even pugnacity, of the various reviewers...

...His tribute to Frederica von Stade was impressive, as was this about Karajan's second recording of Die Meistersinger...

...The century-old debate over Wagner's music would cease tomorrow," Goldman declared, "if people would only stop judging this music as if it were a kind of orchestral composition, and learn to appreciate it correctly as theatrical scenepainting and sound effects...

...We did some acting together there, but I had no idea of his musical proclivities...

...Berg's Wozzeck was repeatedly held up as a touchstone, certainly admirable, yet perhaps raising the bar too high when it excluded the likes of Richard Strauss' Elektra...

...About Dmitri Shostakovich's Second Piano Concerto, James wrote: "Musically it is little more than Chopsticks with a conservatory education...

...The majority of my pieces concerned single composers, many of whom were little known...

...Or consider this: "The young pianist Van Cliburn seems to have been catapulted into a position coequal with motherhood and the flag...

...But the bright spots could not "dispel the impression that a single hearing of this archaic score is perhaps one too many...

...Noted also for honesty, he declared, "I am debarred by temperament from the agonies and raptures of the perfect Mahlerite or Brucknerite...

...my record collection of LPs and, later, CDs has steadily grown...

...Bruce Cook, a noted authority on jazz and pop, followed...

...There was from Goodman a tribute to Beethoven at 200, and shrewd assessment of writings about him, as well as praise for Leonard Bernstein's conducting of Fidelio...

...She raved about Deryck Cooke's completion of Mahler's Tenth Symphony, whose premiere she enthusiastically witnessed, but which most musicologists tend to question...

...He was persuasive in discussing how even such fine critics as Pleasants, B.H...

...I do not think the occasional Ravel or Martinü opera suffices, any more than the sporadic Szymanowski or Blacher orchestral work...

...I like Gurewitsch's description of Messiaen's soundscape: "The loud sections thunder, whir, whoosh, whiffle, bleep, zing, and cringle...

...She was less persuasive in individual judgments, praising the likes of Barbara Pentland, Douglas Allanbrook, Alvin Etler, and Wynn York, names already buried in the dust of history...

...In his Modern Composers of Europe, Yohalem continues, Elson rightly appreciated Mahler, "but his praise for Mahler is preceded by six pages on Siegmund von Hausegger, whose Barbarossa every present-day reader can surely hum...

...the trumpets blare, the piano splashes, the strings beam, and the electronic Ondes Martenot coo and glide...

...They liked what they liked quite eloquently, but there was no pussyfooting about what they disliked...

...Easily the best of these was Elisabeth Schwarzkopf, who with her mincing 'exquisite' performances set standards that singers of this music are still judged by...

...Only Igor Stravinsky has more or less made it, but even he mostly because he lived his latter years in this country, and because of the inspired advocacy of such men as George Balanchine and Robert Craft...

...Her reviews were full of quotes from all kinds of other people, to the extent that her own opinions tended to disappear...

...Unfortunately, they were quickly appropriated by comparative pipsqueaks...

...I enjoyed the former's comment, "Music critics have come to fear that a single mistake will make them look silly, no matter how frequently they may be proven right...

...Consequently, Wagner's ideal singer is not a singer at all but an instrumentalist and an actor...

...We all know that the history of music (and any other) criticism is littered with the corpses of practitioners who made asses of themselves through incomprehension of innovation...

...And he concludes: "Every critic ought to be willing to state his views as confidently as Elson, whatever the risk...

...His evocation of the Blair Quartet's performance of Alberto Ginastera's First Quartet is excellent, as is his tribute to the conductor Claudio Abbado: "He is an interpreter of the most lavish gifts: an unrivaled technician who never lapses into empty displays of technique, a musician as alive to fleeting nuance as to overall architecture, an artist whose restless and captivating intelligence places itself without the vanities of mannerism and eccentricity at the service of the composer...

...He liked Terry Riley, Iannis Xenakis and Krzysztof Penderecki, less so John Cage and Lukas Foss, which testifies to fine distinctions...

...The glare of his cerebral perfections blanches the music, and under his baton the Dresden State Orchestra is flawless but spectral—refined almost out of corporeal existence...

...He is often deliciously garish in his acclaim of duds...

...The polyglot Gurewitsch is that rare critic who pays attention to the singers' handling of language...

...Then came Dika Newlin, a student of Roger Sessions and a rabid admirer of Arnold Schönberg...

...Had The New Leader not, regrettably, ceased publication, I would have soldiered on, assured at least of the virtue of being winningly foolhardy...

...Grant bemoaned the absence of regular, or even irregular, serious music criticism in most magazines...

...But how did I get to be its music critic—or, more appropriately, music columnist—since I cannot read music, do not play an instrument, and have never studied music theory, presumed prerequisites for the job...

...Somewhere along the line fear of such faux pas started gripping the critics...

...So then we must give people the chance to hear and become accustomed to the musical equivalent of our modern playwrights, and hope that the very real danger of classical music lapsing into oblivion can thus be averted...

...Popular music was—is—another matter...

...That was enough for Mike Kolatch, who propelled me into the "On Music" chair...

...John Goodman, who held forth in the '70s, was mostly interested in jazz and rock too...

...I was impressed by his comments on the inability of Hollywood stars to sing in movie musicals, while savvily singling out Janis Paige as "an actress who could actually sing...

...Haggin and Robert Craft had difficulties in dealing with the quiddity of music, and adduced Bob Greene's Billion Dollar Baby as evidence of "the lengths people are willing to go just to avoid it...