Sounds & Fury

Classical Music & Opera Forum Update (Administrative Note)

Consequent upon the server crash noted in this post wherein we only by chance escaped the utter and irretrievable loss of the forum's database (the database contains the forum's entire content: posts, member records, settings, etc.), we've moved the forum intact to a professional hosting service with an admirable record of server uptime of 99.9%, and the capability of the forum's administrator to make as frequent backups of the database as he deems necessary to protect the forum's content even in the event of a catastrophic server crash. In its brief three-week life, the forum has grown prodigiously, much of its content of fairly high quality indeed, and that's worth taking steps to protect. The link to the Classical Music & Opera Forum can be found on our left sidebar, and on the sidebar of our About & Contact page. Do stop over and join in the rather higher-than-typical-forum-level fun.

Server Down (Administrative Note)

[Note: This post has been updated (1) as of 1:42 PM Eastern on 28 Aug. See below.]

The server that hosts the newly formed Classical Music & Opera Forum (link in Site Navigation on the left sidebar) has been down since Sunday night around 9:00 PM Eastern. We're told the server will be back online (hopefully with the forum's message database fully intact) sometime this (Monday) afternoon.

Stay tuned.

---

Update (1:42 PM Eastern on 28 Aug): Server's back online, and the message database seems to be intact.

Featured Past Post #10 (Administrative Note)

A new Featured Past Post is up on the right sidebar.

A Difficult Question (Not Mine)

Why is it I experience such an inordinate degree of pleasure when jack-of-all-arts, culture journalist and blogger Terry Teachout of About Last Night, writes that rare blog post I can consider link-worthy (with apologies to Seinfeld)?

The question is largely rhetorical, but I suspect part of the answer is because the man writes so bloody engagingly.

Witnesseth:

[I]s there any act so absolutely heinous that the works of a great artist who commits it should be permanently banned from circulation? Asked in that way, the question admits of a wide and interesting range of possible answers, but what I find even more interesting is the fact that it’s impossible to come up with a real-life case that fills the bill.

It’s not that artists are an especially well-behaved class of people. (Two words: Stan Getz.) But their misbehavior tends as a rule to fall into two broad categories, which for the sake of brevity I’ll refer to as statement-signing and wife-beating. Artists dearly love to shoot their mouths off about politics, perhaps as a way of compensating for the spectacularly single-minded selfishness with which so many of them habitually treat their loved ones, friends, colleagues, and creditors.

While neither type of behavior is edifying, it’s highly unusual for a major artist to go further than that. To be sure, I wouldn’t recommend marrying a great artist, much less loaning him money, but when it comes to the actual commission of capital crimes, such folk are woefully underrepresented. So far as I know, the only classical composer ever to have committed murder was Gesualdo, who killed his first wife and her lover. Though Richard Wagner was by all accounts a first-class bastard, he didn’t send letter bombs to music critics, and his anti-Semitism, gross and despicable though it was, never led him to advocate the use of Zyklon B on European Jewry, or anything remotely approaching it.

As for their political crimes, I’m not inclined to be forgiving of anyone who plays pattycake with totalitarianism, but if there’s been a truly great creative artist whose sins against humanity amounted to much more than first-degree talk, I'm unaware of it.

RTWT here.

An Assuredly Loathsome Horror

Conjure in your mind, if you will, the most vicious, obscene, and profane expletives you're capable of imagining. Trust me, they pale by comparison with the expletives that issued forth from the very depths of my being on reading this Claremont Institute review of The Norton Anthology of Children's Literature: The Traditions in English.

Here's an excerpt from what the Institute's first-rate review had to say about this assuredly loathsome horror:

The editors of the anthology acknowledge in passing their debt to Locke and Rousseau — who in a sense created our modern understanding of childhood, permanently influencing all subsequent children's literature. The editors, however, wish to promote a revolution of their own: a new, more candid, and frankly, more nihilistic corpus. Despite heralding children's literature as "life-enhancing" and "life-changing," the Norton editors aim in fact to dampen children's enchantment with the world, forcing them to acquiesce to the grim realities and multicultural obsessions of contemporary adults.

Of course, this could be because the book was never meant to be read by or to children. The editors, all scholars of some sort, with backgrounds in literature, education, and history, describe their handiwork as a "more scholarly" anthology, one that incorporates "profound changes" from earlier collections, and is intended mainly for the college student. Whereas editors of previous anthologies "favored classic authors" and "canonical texts," with a minimum of reader notes and introductions, the Norton edition aims to be more inclusive of "emergent" literature. As the editors state, "Our critical perspectives, like those of scholars in other literary fields, have been greatly influenced by the research and criticism rooted in the feminist and multicultural movements." Their real hope is "to revolutionize the undergraduate curriculum."

[...]

The editors included some genuine classics, to be sure, some excerpted and some in full, like The New England Primer, A Child's Garden of Verses, Peter Pan, Ramona and her Father, chapbook versions of Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress and Defoe's Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, and the poetry of Charles Causley and Robert Graves, to name just a few. One could certainly quibble with the editors about omitted texts. Why no poetry from Emily Dickinson, for instance, or any meaningful mention of Shakespeare, whose plays were re-written into children's story form by Charles and Mary Lamb? But such quibbling is to miss the larger problem with this volume. It is not so much an anthology as a postmodernist manifesto.

As the editors declare in the preface, "In our choice of texts and in our introductions, we have paid close attention to…perceptions of race, class, and gender, among other topics, in shaping children's literature and childhood itself." Practically every text and every author (save for the "emergent") is subjected to a wicked scolding from the editors for its racism, sexism, and elitism. Forget about ogres, witches, monsters, and evil stepmoms; today's villains are gender stereotypes, white males, the middle class, and the traditional family. Retrograde literature must therefore be replaced by a new one, one that is, as it were, beyond good and evil: "In our postmodern age, in which absolute judgments of 'good' and 'evil' are no longer easily made, the distinction between heroes and villains is often blurred."

Time to load and lock the Uzi again.

RTWT here — if you can stomach it.

(Our thanks to the always indispensable Arts & Letters Daily for the link.)

Featured Past Post #9 (Administrative Note)

A new Featured Past Post is up on the right sidebar.

The Issue That Refuses To Go Gentle Into That Good Night

[Note: This post has been updated (2) as of 6:48 AM Eastern on 2 May 2008. See below.]

And for good reason, too: it needs to stay alive until it's resolved properly, and can finally Rest In Peace.

Joel Flegler, editor of Fanfare, "The Magazine for Serious Record Collectors" as the subtitle proclaims, has been under fire since this report by music critic for The Orange County Register, Tim Mangan, on his blog, Classical Life, made public the, um, questionable review policy in place at Fanfare. We first made reference to this business here, and now point you to the latest skirmish in the ongoing back-and-forth. As in previous attempts, our comments on this latest attempt by Mr. Flegler to rationalize his magazine's questionable review policy are contained in the comments section of the linked post, and require no further elaboration here.

---

Update (4:19 PM Eastern on 21 Aug): Things are heating up in the comments section. Read it here.

Update 2 (6:48 AM Eastern on 2 May 2008): We today had occasion to revisit the above linked OC Register blog post, and noticed with surprise that two of our comments referred to above were severely truncated, the only comments in that long comments thread to be so handled. We don't know why that was done, but have our suspicions. In any case, we reprint in full the original texts of those truncated comments below, just for the record.

Comment #1:

Joel Flegler wrote: When the other classical CD review magazines begin providing their readers with honest stat[e]ments about their editorial/advertising policies, then I'll be glad to go on record in Fanfare about mine. Until then, please spare me your lessons about ethics.

It's quite remarkable, actually. The more you attempt rationalizing your ethically compromised review policy, the deeper the ethically compromised hole you dig for yourself.

What matter what other review periodicals do or don't do in respect of making public to their readers their review policies? It's either the ethical thing to do — most particularly when the ethics of one's own publication's review policy has been called into legitimate question — or it's not. If it's the ethical thing to do — and in the case of your publication's questionable review policy it's manifestly the only ethical thing to do, and there's not so much as a shadow of a legitimate argument that can be mounted against that assertion — then you, as an ethical editor, do it, regardless of what other review periodicals do or don't do in respect of such disclosure.

Period. Full stop.

One doesn't have to be a Solomon to understand that.

ACD

Comment #2:

John Mclaughlin Williams wrote: You all really need to let this go. Fanfare is an absolutely great publication and a one-of-a-kind resource. If you are so excercised by their employment of an industry standard policy, then just don't buy the magazine! Those of us back here on planet earth that care to will continue to support it.

Non sequitur, John (fancy meeting you here! [g]). Your above misses the point, not to speak of your error in calling Fanfare's review policy "an industry standard policy" (it's not).

The central question at issue here is one of publishing ethics (or lack of same) and its possible effect on editorial content. As editor of Fanfare — a magazine whose very raison d'être is as a journal of CD reviews — Mr. Flegler can ethically employ any review policy he feels best benefits or meets the needs of his magazine, provided only that he makes full public disclosure of that review policy within the pages of every issue of that magazine. In fact, the very thing — the only thing — that makes Fanfare's present review policy ethically questionable is the lack of such public disclosure.

To make my point, I offer an example absurd in the extreme.

Let's say Mr. Flegler unwisely, even mindlessly, determines that the best review policy for Fanfare is, in a nutshell, the following: You want your CD reviewed? Make a bid for the set-aside review space in issue #n. Whomever comes in with the highest dollar amount gets the review space. Losing bidders are simply S.O.L.

Unethical for a publication whose total editorial content is reviews of CDs? On its face, nothing could be more unethical, excepting only an additional promise of a favorable review to fill that bid-for space.

However, the instant Mr. Flegler makes that grossly unethical policy public within the pages of every issue of his magazine, all possible ethical objections to that policy are rendered null and void. By the very fact of the policy's regular public disclosure within the pages of the magazine itself, it ceases to be unethical, and its practice ethically unimpeachable. That it's an imbecile policy that once made public will in very short order force the magazine into bankruptcy is a different matter entirely, and entirely beside the point.

Get it now?

ACD

New Navigation Link Added (Administrative Note)

We've added a link to our Site Navigation menu on the left sidebar, and to the sidebar on our About & Contact Page to the newly-opened Classical Music & Opera Forum of which Yours Truly is administrator.

Do stop in and set a spell. Registration is granted immediately when applied for (for the time being, at any rate), and free to all.

Two Takes On Tankred Dorst's Konzept of Wagner's Ring

Tankred Dorst's 2006 Bayreuther Festspiele production of Wagner's Der Ring des Nibelungen received mixed reactions from those critics who actually attended this year's Festspiele, none of whom were excited to offer much more than lukewarm praise or condemnation, which all by itself is a kind of critical commentary. Here are two commentaries on the production's Konzept (as opposed to the production itself) from two bloggers who were not in attendance at the Festspiele, but which commentaries are of interest nevertheless.

First, we have this from Terry of The Contrapuntal:

Perhaps Dorst has seen The Golden Ring [a BBC documentary account of the making of Decca's historic Solti Ring]. In one scene, the narrator of the BBC crew walks out into the street, and comments upon the mundane stillness of the outside world. He wants to walk up to the people, and shake them, asking, "Don't [you] see what's happening? Don't you know there is a great drama going on."

And so, it would seem Herr Dorst believes there is. Of course, at the same time, one can't help but notice the Jungian / Campbellian aspect to the staging. The characters are archetypes of our collective unconscious (i.e. two worlds cohabitating, unseen), forever enacting the Eternal Return. Kupfer's Ring at Bayreuth also suggested this, in his own weird sci-fi mythic way. For Dorst, placing the action (seemingly) in the subconscious human world does the same.

Then we have this from Patrick J. Smith of The Penitent Wagnerite commenting on Terry's commentary:

The point with archetypes is that they don't need a frame-of-reference. The characters are so universal and recognizable that they are entities sui generis. The universal drama of the Ring, such as it is, must — necessarily — be beyond the vagaries of humanity and human life. The action happens on the mythological scale, which can involve humans, but has to be bigger than humans. That's the point....

Now, as to the Eternal Return, where is it in Wagner's text? Kupfer introduced it, Everding (in Chicago) made it obvious, but I don't think Wagner wrote it in to the score. The sacrifice of the Immolation Scene works — it is drama as Wagner intended — only if it really does purify everything. [...] [A]ssuming the Ring makes dramatic sense, there can be no Eternal Return. The end has to be the end. The sin has to be cleansed in a Messianic act of self-sacrifice. The archetype has to fulfill its duty.

Interesting reading, and worth your time.

God Appears To Be Making A Bang-up Job Of It

[Note: This post has been updated (1) as of 7:54 PM Eastern on 13 Aug. See below.]

Protecting 14-year-old composer Jay Greenberg, that is. In our article of 28 November 2004, we wrote, in part:

God (or Whatever), Greenberg's gift, and his own confidence in that gift, protect him from falling into the clutches of "New Music" academics and his less gifted (or no-talent) New Music peers, or, rather, near-peers (in respect of age), who absent that protection might succeed in persuading him he's writing his music in a dead language (i.e., the "dead language" of tonality), and ought to instead compose in a language more this-century. If Greenberg resists, perhaps this century will find in him a composer of genius the likes of which has not been seen since Mozart or Mendelssohn.

Today, in an article written for The New York Times, Matthew Gurewitsch reports:

On Tuesday, Sony Classical will release [Jay Greenberg's] 34-minute Symphony No. 5, recorded by the London Symphony Orchestra under José Serebrier. Rounding out the disc is the 18-minute Quintet for Strings, played by the Juilliard String Quartet and Darrett Adkins, cellist.

Both the symphony and the quintet display a gift for drama and for lyricism, expressed in sophisticated colors and textures. There’s verve in the rhythms and invention in the harmonies; the tunes catch the ear. Movement by movement and start to finish, the architecture has a sturdy logic that does not preclude surprise. It’s an impressive debut. And Mr. Greenberg is just 14.

One curious touch is the occasional flourish of Baroque counterpoint, and while you will not discover a fugue in the strict sense, there are definite fugato passages, in which, somewhat more vaguely, one voice chases another. The young Mr. Greenberg has no objection to the term fugato.

“It’s O.K.,” he said one morning in July. “I wouldn’t sue you for defamation of character.” Then came a little play-acting: “I write pure fugues or nothing at all.”

Way t'go, God (and you, too, Mr. Greenberg)!

---

Update (7:54 PM Eastern on 13 Aug): This afternoon we heard a portion (end of the third, and full fourth movements if we have the total structure of the full piece right) of the new Sony recording of Jay Greenberg's Symphony No. 5 (it was broadcast by WQXR), completed when Greenberg was 13-years-old, and it's nothing short of astonishing. It seemed heavily influenced by Shostakovich, and perhaps evidence of that composer's "voice" is somewhat too much present. But even Mozart himself was a bit (sometimes more than a bit) imitative in his formative years. Hardly cause for criticism in a composer so young, even a composer of manifest genius.

Featured Past Post #8 (Administrative Note)

A new Featured Past Post is up on the right sidebar.

And Now For Something Really Completely Different

You all know Pittsburgh, PA, right? Steel Town. An industrialized city crawling with legions of ironworkers and other red-necked industrial types.

Think again.

Starting Monday, [Pittsburgh's] WQED-FM's (89.3) program schedule will look and sound a little different, but it's still designed to be the destination on the dial for classical music listeners. The changes are mostly in the evening and weekend schedules.

WQED-FM executive director Susan Lyons describes it as "going back to the basics" in terms of music and hosts. "It's about more music and less talk. Listeners tune in a classical music station 'to escape talk.'"

Lyons describes the new schedule as programming for both "the classical music liker and the classical music lover." For casual and newer listeners, that means accessible programming. "You just need a set of ears and a heart," she says. The devoted listener will find an expanded playlist of lesser known and newer music.

"We've recommitted to the classical music format -- and to make sure every show we offer is speaking in a contemporary, welcoming, down-to-earth voice," Lyons says. Part of that recommitment includes dropping some syndicated programs that play other genres of music, like "Hearts of Space" and "Schickele Mix."

Talk about having the balls and real commitment to buck the nationwide, prole-pandering trend.

Hats off to Ms. Lyons and WQED-FM.

RTWT here.

Boris And Me

In 1976, when the minds of most devoted Americans were turned in anticipation to the celebration that summer of the bicentennial anniversary of America's independence from Britain, my mind turned to the celebration that same summer of an anniversary of a rather different sort: the centennial anniversary of the first complete performance of Wagner's epic tetralogy, Der Ring des Nibelungen, in The House That Richard Built in Bayreuth, Germany: the very first Bayreuther Festspiele.

At that time I was a fairly recent devotee of Wagner's mature operas, and word had reached me that NPR had in the works a celebration of that same centennial anniversary which was to include the broadcast of a complete performance of the Ring. In a flash of inspiration it came to me that a series of four programs along the lines of the popular Metropolitan Opera radio broadcast intermission features would not be out of place as companion pieces to the Ring broadcast, one each preceding the presentation of each of the four operas.

And so, without so much as an initial query of the powers that be at NPR, I set to work writing the four scripts, each complete with illustrative musical examples drawn from the London / Decca Solti recording of the Ring, and a month and a half later completed the project. I now faced the task of pitching my idea, and selling my magnum opus, to NPR, and for the very first time it occurred to me that I was, well, a man without credentials. In short, and not to put too fine a point on it, a nobody.

What to do?

The answer struck me almost immediately: secure an endorsement from Boris Goldovsky — opera expert par excellence, and mostly famous for his frequent contributions to the Metropolitan Opera radio broadcast intermission features — for both my idea and my scripts.

And just how did I expect to go about securing that endorsement? I hadn't a clue. But time was running short as producing entities such as NPR require scripts for projects such as this months ahead of airtime, and even now I suspected I was running up against the wire, and my immediate problem was, first, how to contact Goldovsky. I felt certain he, at very least, had to maintain an answering-machine-attended telephone in Manhattan, and so I simply called AT&T Information, and asked for the number, which number took me less than ten seconds to obtain.

With all the impetuosity of youth, I quickly prepared a brief speech to leave on the machine, dialed the number, and waited for the pick-up, recorded greeting, and start-your-message beep.

Bebopping Down The Yellow Brick Road

Yes, that yellow brick road.

And just who bebopped down that road? Why, Scarecrow, Tinman, Dorothy, and a certain Cowardly Lion.

Honest.

Don't believe me? Take a look (and listen) for yourselves.

And You Wonder Why Classical Music Is In Trouble IV

One wonders whether there's a trend in the making here, or whether it's in fact a fait accompli from which there's no turning back.

Our so-called "National Newspaper Of Record", The New York Times, employs as its chief classical music critic Anthony Tommasini, a man who, on the evidence of his critical writings alone, is eminently incompetent to write reviews of opera for any major periodical pretending to authority. And now we note that The Guardian, Britain's premier newspaper in terms of its coverage of the arts, employs as its chief classical music critic one, Tom Service, a man who could, in all seriousness and without a hint of irony, write in an article headlined, "Elderly crowds booing innovation? Bayreuth isn't celebrating Wagner - it's killing him off" this benighted bit of utter, unmitigated rubbish:

The boos that followed Tankred Dorst's [production of Der Ring des Nibelungen] this year [at the Bayreuther Festspiele] were understandable: this was a theatrically impoverished if orchestrally magnificent cycle. But the gale of abuse that greeted radical German director Christoph Schlingensief's excitingly inventive Parsifal gave the audience's game away.

Bayreuth needs more directors like Schlingensief, who dare to dispel the sacred aura that surrounds Wagner's works and the Festspielhaus. But it also needs an audience that belongs to today, rather than hangers-on to a perniciously nostalgic dream of Wagneriana. If the culture of Bayreuth doesn't change, the festival (and the significance of Wagner's works) risks, like Wotan's Valhalla at the end of the Ring, passing into oblivion.

Any classical music critic who can in all earnestness declare Eurotrash vandal Christoph Schlingensief's grotesque production of Wagner's Parsifal "excitingly inventive," and that what the Bayreuther Festspiele needs is "more directors like Schlingensief," and who in addition can characterize those justifiably outraged and repulsed by such manifestly bizarre distortions of Wagner's transcendent work as "hangers-on to a perniciously nostalgic dream of Wagneriana," is a man who clearly hasn't so much as a clue as to what Parsifal is about musically, dramatically, or philosophically, and even less of a clue as to the historic and historical importance of the Bayreuther Festspiele and what it's about as an institution artistically. Such a man is clueless as well of the Festspiele's raison d'être, not to mention appallingly and egregiously clueless concerning the responsibilities and obligations of an opera director due an acknowledged masterpiece of the art form.

That there are myriad criticisms that could and should be leveled against the administration of and artistic direction taken by the Bayreuther Festspiele over the past several decades is unquestionable, chief among them the Festspiele administration's abject betrayal of the aesthetics and aesthetic principles of its founding genius, and of the Festspiele's very raison d'être. But lauding the work of self-involved, self-important aesthetic vandals such as Christoph Schlingensief, and vilifying those in attendance who are justly outraged by such blatantly grotesque and mindless politically tendentious vandalism is, on one hand, to laud what is emblematic of that which can and will, if permitted to go unchecked, ultimately destroy the Bayreuther Festspiele, and on the other, to vilify precisely that which will serve ultimately to preserve its integrity.

Tom Service's academic credentials may be impressive, but they will not protect him from nor prevent him making an arrant fool of himself in print, nor justify nor excuse The Guardian's employing him as its chief classical music critic.

Featured Past Post #7 (Administrative Note)

A new Featured Past Post is up on the right sidebar.

Goldovsky, Mozart, and Wagner: A Moment Briefly Revisited

I once, in the mid-'70s, had occasion to lunch with the great Boris Goldovsky — famous for his Metropolitan Opera broadcast intermission features, and general manager, dramaturge, director, and music director of his own opera company — at his New York City studio (a half-gruesome, half-comic tale in its own right which I'll relate in a subsequent entry on this blog*), and over lunch opera was, of course, the subject of conversation. Goldovsky loved all opera, needless to say, but had a bit of a monomania concerning Mozart whom he insisted on referring to as He Who Was Not Of Woman Born. In short, Goldovsky was a near-worshipper of Mozart.

Eventually, we got around to discussing Wagner, and at just the mention of the name, Goldovsky turned his face toward the ceiling, threw his arms up in a sort of helpless gesture (Goldovsky was a native Russian, and, well, you know just how emotional Russians can get, especially after tucking away three or four shot glasses filled with lethal-strength vodka), and declared passionately in a vodka-thickened Russian accent which I here won't even attempt to mimic, "Wagner!, Wagner! He consumes me!"

I at first thought he was merely engaging in a bit of stage business to create a dramatic moment to precede some point he wanted to make. But it was no stage business. The man looked positively stricken.

I, of course, was stunned speechless, and my astonishment must have shown on my face because he quickly caught hold of himself and, poised and quietly, explained, "Every time I conduct Wagner the world disappears, and for days after, all other opera seems nothing but shit. Verdi is shit. Puccini is shit. Tchaikovsky is shit. Even Beethoven is shit. And...," and here he paused, leaned his face close to mine, lowered his voice conspiratorially, and with genuine distress written over all his features, he, in a hoarse, shamefaced whisper declared," and, Mozart...even Mozart is shit."

I then understood him perfectly.

Indeed I did — and still do.

---

* That half-gruesome, half-comic tale can now be read here.

Schmuck

Christoph Schlingensief, the Eurotrash vandal responsible for the current Bayreuther Festspiele Eurotrash production of Wagner's Parsifal which was given its third-season premiere yesterday (the production premiered at the Festspiele in 2004), had this to say concerning his underlying "vision" for the production in an interview with a German news agency:

It may be a lot to expect of the people in the expensive seats, but I have reconciled Nietzsche with Wagner by negating Wagner's silly Buddhist dream.

Self-involved, self-important schmuck.

RTWT here.

Ave Atque Vale, Elisabeth

[Note: This post has been updated (1) as of 2:08 AM Eastern on 4 Aug. See below.]

Stellar German soprano Elisabeth Schwarzkopf died at her home in western Austria early this morning at the age of 90.

Ave atque vale, Elisabeth. Atque in perpetuum.

AP obituary can be read here.

---

Update (2:08 AM Eastern on 4 Aug): A splendid obituary in The [London] Times.

What Could This Man Have Been Thinking?

What could this man have been thinking — or drinking?

In a review of the 40th anniversary opening-night concert at Lincoln Center of New York's venerable Mostly Mozart festival, New York Times classical music critic Allan Kozinn writes of piano soloist Garrick Ohlsson who performed Mozart's Piano Concerto No. 26:

Surely a musician of Mr. Ohlsson’s depth and experience could have written cadenzas worth hearing. Mostly Mozart should require soloists to supply their own cadenzas, or better yet, to improvise them on the spot. There was a time when that would have been expected, and it’s a tradition worth resurrecting.

"Surely a musician of Mr. Ohlsson’s depth and experience could have written cadenzas worth hearing"(!)? Excuse me? Surely Mr. Kozinn was either dreaming, joking, or gone a bit blotto when he wrote that sentence. Since when in this 21st century, or even the preceding one, is it considered a given that instrumental soloists, by mere virtue of their general musicianship and knowledge of their instrument, are ipso facto competent to compose — or more absurdly, improvise — music that could stand placement within a composition written by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart — Mozart, no less! — without its sounding, at best, slightly lame, or, at worst, thoroughly preposterous?

Give me a break.

It's quite true, as Mr. Kozinn points out, that instrumentalists of the 18th and even 19th centuries were expected to do just that, but those times are long past, and the from-early-childhood musical training that was fairly routine during those times that prepared budding instrumentalists to undertake just such tasks no longer exists. Moreover — and more to the point — when an 18th-century pianist composed or improvised cadenzas for Mozart's piano concertos he was writing or improvising cadenzas for music whose idiom was contemporary to himself, and therefore native, so to speak, and perfectly natural. And even early-to-mid-19th-century pianists were not that far removed from that idiom. The same, however, cannot be said for 21st-century pianists. There's a vast cultural and aesthetic gulf that separates music written then from music written today, not to speak of critical standards that today are far less forgiving of non-specialist efforts of that sort. Any pianist reckless — or foolish — enough to attempt composing or improvising cadenzas for Mozart's piano concertos today could expect, at very best, to come up only with a contrived simulacrum of that 18th-century idiom no matter what his training or gift, and that surely won't — or ought not to — do at all. Mozart deserves better, as do we as audiences.