Writing for Norman Lebrecht’s Slipped Disc blog, the veteran music critic Lawrence Vittes reviews “The Music Critic,” a play with music by Aleksey Igudesman, violinist of the classical comedy duo Igudesman and Joo. The show stars John Malkovich as a “lean and angry critic” experiencing “the transfiguring torments and ecstasies that come with the job.”
Not unlike the Schadenfreude summoned by reading Nicolas Slonimsky’s classic “Lectionary of Musical Invective,” a compendium of negative critiques of music subsequently recognized as great, “[t]here’s a peculiar satisfaction in witnessing the redemption of public humiliation at the expense of another’s perpetual shame, particularly when that person is a music critic,” Vittes writes.
He advises: “[I]f you fancy reading the critics who are most likely to miss the mark on masterpieces of the future, simply follow the publications that publish my work.”
Taking down the music critic
Reviewing a performance of “The Music Critic” at the Orpheum Theatre in Los Angeles, Vittes notes that the audience was “was rich in the kind of hip, young demographics orchestras aspire to engage; their comfort level with classical music was accompanied by an unbridled desire to revel in the fun.”
The crowd’s comfort level might have been enhanced by exposure to classical-music criticism in the major California newspapers. In much of the rest of the US, you won’t find classical reviews in the papers; so the hip and young – or the aging and average, for that matter – might not get the joke.
(Thinking back on the torments and ecstasies of my career as a critic, what comes first to mind was the time I had to review a production of Puccini’s “Madame Butterfly” in six column inches on a 15-minute deadline. To which the hip and young would say, “What’s a column inch?”)
Letter V 