From Friday's Newsday, a review by vilaine fille alter ego Marion Lignana Rosenberg of New York City Opera's Candide:
Irony of fate: Two music-dramas involving Grand Inquisitors and public executions are playing at Lincoln Center. In the Met's "Don Carlos," Verdi thunders and weeps, blessing the Inquisition's victims with a heavenly voice. In New York City Opera's "Candide," Leonard Bernstein spins a giddy, sardonic chorus: "Oh what a day / for an auto-da-fé!" Hooded, abused prisoners stagger across the stage in both shows. Is someone trying to tell us something?
Also from Friday's Newsday, a review (with one ham-fisted edit—read "undimmed by a haze of harmonics") of Jonathan Biss's wondrous Zankel Hall recital:
At 24, Jonathan Biss is one of the world's most sought-after pianists, boasting a clutch of prestigious awards, an impressive EMI debut CD of Beethoven and Robert Schumann, and the kind of awestruck word of mouth that no puffery can generate. Tuesday's recital at Zankel Hall showed that the fuss is fully warranted, with Biss offering poised, wise-beyond-his-years readings of challenging works.
Also, our farouche Wagnerian friend over at sounds & fury said some extremely kind things about us. Mille mercis ! Near as I can tell, there are *many* talented scribes around. (Don't take my word for it: Check out the lists of vilaines filles and mauvais garçons on the right side of this page.) If it can be hard to find writing that is "revealingly detailed at appropriate length, and expressed in graceful, evocative prose that does both the subject and the critic proud," maybe it's because high-on-the-food-chain editors (not the ones that we critics work with) almost never give us the space that such writing requires.
Here's a sad but true example: my "Re-visioning Callas" essay, which went on to win an award, but which none of my bigger-time markets would touch.
So what's a gal or a guy to do? I walked away from a career in college publishing because it was all about dumbing down and ass-backwards thinking: "Students today know little about grammar. Therefore, we musn't teach them about grammar." From my marginal vantage point, I see the same kind of obtuseness, condescension, and confusion of cause and effect at work in the newspaper and magazine business, too.
Are we all just suckers for a lost cause?
I really enjoyed the Callas piece. I'm not an expert on operatic singing, but when I listen to her recordings I hear a 'human' voice, which makes some of the inhumane treatment she has received from the press, both in her lifetime and after, seem all the more inappropriate - if that's the word.
Posted by: alan | 17 March 2005 at 02:08