Donald's Blog

  This old house was only a few blocks from the state Capitol in Madison, Wisconsin. All the neighborhood cats lived in the basement during the winter. The house has long since been torn down, but in 1972 there were AR2ax speakers in the front room, and a lot of good music was heard there.

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In the 21st century I am just as opinionated as ever, and I now have an outlet. I shall pontificate here about anything that catches my fancy; I hope I will not make too great a fool of myself. You may comment yea or nay about anything on the site; I may quote you here, or I may not. Send brickbats etc. to: dmclarke78@icloud.com.

 

August 5, 2014

Well, it allows me to feel superior.

Anyone can find a lot of bad writing on the Internet, but you'd think that somebody who reviews lots of classical CDs on his blog could do a little better than this:

There’s no need to spill much ink on lambasting this performance’s utterly appalling qualities. The orchestra delivers beautiful playing in the more meditative sections, as it well should be, but whenever dramatic moments come orchestral balance and precision is thrown out of the window. The sheer amount of staggered entrances and imprecise ensemble is astonishing...  

The orchestra "well should be" what? Delivering, I suppose, but this is one of those sentences you have to read twice before giving up. A performance cannot own anything; it should have been "the appalling qualities of this performance." And it should have been "the sheer number of staggered entrances and instances of imprecise ensemble are astonishing"... Then he goes on:

But the worst thing about this performance is, without a doubt, [the conductor's] incompetent direction.

I thought that's what we were already talking about. Do these people read their stuff over before they hit send?

You expect better stuff in a print magazine, but here's some advertising copy from the current BBC Music Magazine:

harmonia mundi presents a Limited Edition boxset of benchmark Rameau recordings by Les Arts Florissants and founding director William Christie, on the 250th anniversary of his death.

I gather that the orchestra is so well trained that all they had to do was prop up the 250-year-old corpse of Mr. Christie, and the first violinist did the rest. Or in the case of the irrepressible Rameau, maybe it was the first bassoonist.