Von Kopf bis Fuss
La Cieca is delighted to begin a new series on parterre.com dedicated to the fretting, brooding and dithering of the Wazier of the Worriers, Anthony Tommasini. Our first examples (of many) follow the jump.
Rachel Willis-Sorensen, 25, a soprano from the Tri Cities area in Washington State, also earned a winner’s spot. While very gifted, she may have a period of self-examination ahead of her. With her gleaming voice, capped with big top notes, she was impressive in “Elsa’s Dream” from Wagner’s “Lohengrin” and “Come scoglio” from Mozart’s “Così Fan Tutte.” Straddling the Wagner-Mozart vocal divide is not easy, and Ms. Crocetto may have decisions to make. [NYT]
So, here’s the thing. La Cieca thinks a critic is free to like what he hears or not like what he hears. A critic can say, “We’ve found our new Lohengrin!” or he can say “Someone needs to tell that girl she is not ready to sing Adalgisa.” He can even get a little weasely and hedge, “Well, yes, she obviously ran out of steam in the coda, but that can be chalked up to nerves, bronchitis and a nasty bout of that dysmenorrhea that’s been going around.”
But La Cieca insists that it’s presumptuous and schoolmarmish for a critic to tsk-tsk and sigh and murmur “festina lente.” You’re not their mother, Tony. Isn’t it bad enough when you act like their creepy uncle?
I will say from having spoken at length with TT in the past, he knows his voices. He may not be a voice teacher, but he knows a lot about the voice and about certain philosophies that he personally subscribes to.
On a lighter fare, can I move the criticism of critics to the positive with my undying love for Anne Midgete’s blog?
http://voices.washingtonpost.com/the-classical-beat/2010/03/the_excellence_of_bad_opera.html
I do love where she’s coming from in this, as in all her posts.
About the Midgette posting Valmont cites: I think she has a nice point in there about technical polish not being all-important. But she gets it all wrong when she claims that’s because “a lot of the operas now in the repertory were written to please the public and not to be taken too seriously”–as if entertainment value had nothing to do with technical polish. Please. Just because it’s fluff doesn’t mean you don’t prepare it with the utmost seriousness; you might just as well try to prepare a Dobostorte in the half-hour before your dinner guests arrive. If anything, it’s the supreme masterpieces that we take seriously that in practice don’t need technical polish to move and entertain us; there’s enough there to appreciate in itself that can overcome the most rough-and-ready circumstances. A routine Aida still has a lot to offer; a routine Fedora–perhaps not so much.
Mmmm. Dobostorte looks good!
Talking of Austro-Hungarian fluff of the highest calibre — just think how difficult it is to get Die Fledermaus or Die lustige Witwe right!
Re: Tommasini & voices, this will not excuse or explain away much of what he writes, but I wonder if Times music critics are still under orders to eschew “technical” vocabulary, thus encouraging the preponderance of “dusky-voiced” and the like.
As for Midgette’s piece, I don’t know anything about Gergiev’s DC season (I’ll check out the reviews), but must say that’s the first time I’ve seen his conducting of Nose referred to as “flabby,” and as for “rough-hewn” (!) performances at Carnegie Hall, the Troyens a Carthage last week was thrilling!
I don’t see anything wrong with AT giving advice to young singers. Some of them probably need it. Do I detect some professional jealousy?
What I do not like abot AT is his bland writing style, bland opinions, and overuse of words like “dusky,” “Still,” “revelatory,” and many more. When you compare his writing style and opinions to Ben Brantley, The Times’s drama critic, AT looks even worse.
valmont, that therapist wannabe who writes for the times knows nothing about voice. his musings on voice are always off.
I often wonder whether practicing daily music criticism isn’t inherently an intellectually-corrosive exercise. Having constantly to make snap judgements about performers and compositions, express them in condensed form, submit to the stylistic demands of editors and please the public – I think all these conditions could hamstring even strong intellects. And when one does this sort of thing for years – with no forum to receive intellectual criticism or to be forced to be debate one’s point of view and with the added temptations of being a “kingmaker” or “dragon slayer” – I strongly suspect that the rigors of the job turn the brains to mush.
Of course, some writers handle the constraints and the temptations better than others. But I wonder whether we’d probably be better off if we had more people writing fewer reviews. I guess the internet is taking care of that for us already.
m. croche. Nope, no mushy brains here. Nope. Nosiree bob.
OT. I’m listening to Jochen Schmeckenbacher as Biterolf from Turin, and some guy named Botha keeps trying to sing Tannhauser at the same time, which leads to the question, “Has anyone EVER heard the Hymn to Venus sung as written?”
with no forum to receive intellectual criticism or to be forced to be debate one’s point of view and with the added temptations of being a “kingmaker” or “dragon slayer”
It was fascinating to see how utterly *terrified* both the Los Angeles Philharmonic (during the Mehta > Giulini > Previn days) and the Los Angeles Opera were of Martin Bernheimer. Now, I love MB’s stuff, I think he’s cruel but fair–if performers were phoning it in, as they do, he’d say so, if they blew the roof off, he was properly effusive.
Contrast that with the inane twit that replaced him, Mark Swed, who will spend 6 paragraphs telling us about the composer and the history of the piece and spend 2 sentences on the actual performance. For Swed, like Alex Ross, if John Adams has anything to do with something, then that = GOD ON EARTH. It’d be hilarious if it weren’t so pathetic.
The dangers of “debating one’s point of view” is that, to be polite, you get some real assholes wanting nothing more than to tee off on you. Case in point: the Orange County Register’s Tim Mangan, an excellent critic with very broad tastes, who is being pilloried by a few commenters at his website for daring to say that the pitiful Moscow State Radio Symphony Orchestra, they of the “let’s not pay our touring musicians any money to buy food” (the NYT had an article about them recently), were awful, that they couldn’t even tune up properly. Apparently, the idea that they sucked is OK, just that a critic shouldn’t point that out.
And I’d sleep with Anthony Tommasini, he’s not bad looking at all.