Your favorite NYT critic rants!

How to Kill Orchestras By BERNARD HOLLAND

'I wish I could interest the Environmental Protection Agency in looking into the symphony managers and conductors

Perhaps Mr Holland has just listened to the wrong performances or couldn't be bothered to wait for performance No 53 of the Brahms Fourth which might have been better than the preceding 52.

He should stop listening to 'recordings' and get out more! What has been a great amusement to an Old Chap over the years is that there have been many occasions when we played terribly but got wonderful praise from a 'critic' and, conversely, any number of occasions when we thought we played 'well' but got a bad critique.

I would stop reading the 'critique' but someone has to keep the score! My favourite remains a review from a newspaper in Brno which wrote (from memory): 'The orchestra were in masterly form and brought forth sonorities hitherto unappreciated by this listener........' This was in a concert which was a living disaster in which several wind players came in two bars early and (I think) the horn section fluffed virtually every entry.

This might possibly account for the sonorities 'hitherto unappreciated by this listener' as various sharps and flats collided happily in gay abandon.

Similarly, the Prague Post reported on the opening night of Swan Lake on 'the magical qualities of Tchaikovsky's score.' This was a performance in which a wind player miscounted and came in a bar early. Unfortunately this entry is the score 'cue' for the brass section who duly took their cue from that and came in a bar early as well.

At the end of the pit was an Old Chap with no hair who was methodically counting his way through every bar He took an executive decision to come in on the right counting (not a bar early) and the brass suddenly woke up and thought: 'Yes, that's where we are.'

you, Mr timpani.'

Magical, indeed, except that between the one bar early entry and the one bar on cue timpanist entry we unfortunately jointly managed to annihilate the very talented lady harpist.

But it was a very good review.

Kind regards, Alan M. Watkins

One could pick on many examples of inept music criticism - but two of my favorite examples were in 1989 in Europe, on a tour of the Chicago Symphony with Solti conducting. Two German critics, in two different cities (one was Munich, and I now forget the other one) compliment quite specifically the clarinet playing in the Schubert Fifth Symphony. Only one problem

What a depressing profession this is sometimes

Just be grateful you don't have the abysmally awful John von Rhein at the Chicago Tribune. He can't string two sentences together that make any sense at all or that do not engage in some vendetta he has against some member of the Chicago arts community.

Terry Ellsworth

<< One could pick on many examples of inept music criticism - but two of my favorite examples were in 1989 in Europe, on a tour of the Chicago Symphony with Solti conducting. Two German critics, in two different cities (one was Munich, and I now forget the other one) compliment quite specifically the clarinet playing in the Schubert Fifth Symphony. Only one problem

I believe there is a wonderful Kna story of a recording of one of the bread-and-butter symphonies, and apparently instructions had been unclear, so that at the end of the exposition half the orchestra went on to the development and the rest did a da capo. After a few measures of pandemonium, everything came to a stop, and the engineer said something like, 'We'll have to do that again, Maestro.' And Kna responded, 'Do you think anyone will notice?'

Makes one nostalgic for Claudia Cassidy.

That John von Rhein keeps his position at the Trib shows how unimportant music criticism is to the Tribune Company.

Like no previous Chicago journalist has EVER had a vendetta against a CSO music director?

And how about the Boston Globe's Richard Dyer, who appears to have bought into the mockera singers and other phony performers?

His vendetta has not been against the CSO music director but someone else. And I have no problem if the problem is musically-based but his is a personal problem that borders on the sociopathic. He jealousy and venom wrings from every word.

He is pathetic.

Terry Ellsworth

I was actually thinking of Claudia Cassidy....