A few days ago a friend sent me an attachment in the mail, which turned out to be his review of the Lorin Maazel concert. It was peppered with terms like 'agonising', 'excessive rubato', 'awkward braying' and '(the) opening's work's deflation'.
I know that musical appreciation is ultimately subjective - some people may like something, others may positively hate it, but I don't think we can or should just dismiss someone's interpretation, (or to put it in his words 'question (his) interpretative fidelity to the score' ) just because it's different from previous recordings we've heard before. We can't, and shouldn't talk about 'interpretative fidelity' unless we've spent as much time as the conductor did studying the work. And even if you do question his interpretation, just because it was 'agonising' for you doesn't mean it was to the rest of the audience.
I didn't go for the concert. I don't understand why I'm so riled by the review. But I think critics who don't moderate their reviews to achieve (even vaguely) some form of 'objectivity' may have self-esteem issues. Dismissing alternative interpretations as 'eccentric' and accentuating nouns with a string of contradictory adjectives, and adopting a generally condescending tone (even though you might end off with a reluctant acknowledgement of the conductor's ability) does not increase the credibility of a review.
It's not just the overly embellished words that frustrates. It's the 'it was horrible but, well, at least you tried' tone that he used. It isn't easy to make music. It isn't something you can just put together in a week and expect it to rise to the occasion during the performance. It takes hours of practice for players, and for conductors, a lot of thinking, research, listening, and experience (and that's an understatement still). It isn't fair to negate all that effort just to prove one's worth as a 'credible' critic.
But it's also not just the condescension in the piece that frustrates. I felt the review was an in-your-face reminder of conformist society. Ironic that you find it in a world where there's supposed to be 'freedom' to deviate, but hey, we're in Singapore, we can't really expect less. The reviewer expected the Tchaikovsky to be like the recordings he heard, and was disappointed. Yet since when has greatness been built on churning out replicas/safe variations of what has been done before? And with critics who see no value in mincing their words, I don't see how we expect to encourage creativity, innovation, imagination, and all the nice sounding words we see with regard to education policy.
(Again, judgementalism rears it's ugly head.)
