Jonathan asked:[G]iven your desire for each audience member to have an authentic, individual experience, who are you writing for when you review concerts, and what do you hope your readers' relationship to your writing is?Being a critic is weird. All you can really do is write what your own individual reaction is, and hope it has a little bit of resonance with a reader or two. I think if you try to anticipate the reader's response--by either deliberately going with the flow, or going against it--you turn into either the worst kind of shill, or … [Read more...]

The critic side of me wonders if I'm part of the problem or the solution here--probably a little of both. But since I started off as a musician, and still try to keep at least a couple of toes in that pond, my starting point is the same as Jonathan's: classical music in performance is special in and of itself.The marketing worry, of course, is that one runs out of ways to say that. But I sometimes think that presenters and marketers underestimate the power of using institutional clout to simply assert specialness. The Boston Symphony Orchestra … [Read more...]