Ok. I'm a bit late with this, but have just discovered the most entertaining classical CD reviews of all time, ever (with the honourable exceptions, naturally, of those that Andrew Clements and Tim Ashley write every week for these pages). I'm talking, of course, about Vice magazine's survey of releases this August.
Try this for size on Havergal Brian from Janitt Klamston (yes, that could be a pseudonym): "Ever see a fat kid jiggling down the sidewalk in a WHY BE NORMAL shirt and feel an overwhelming urge to pity-hug? Same deal here. Composer Havergal Brian cuts loose with a very-late-career 'Comedy Overture'. There are pippy flute motifs, and a silly salute to Strauss's Don Quixote. Symphony No 11 undercuts its own adagio with some zany sleigh bells. Ease up, Patch Adams – my funny bone can only take so much."
Or this from Sheppard Shanks, on Timothy Andres's album Shy and Mighty: "Timothy Andres can tickle the fuck out of the ivories, but here he feels a little too love-struck by a certain virtuoso 19th-century French-Polish composer. Check out track 2, The Night Jaunt. Chopin nocturne much? Then there's The Tunnel, intended as 'an interstitial movement which leads nowhere'. Hmm. 'Nowhere.' Is that some new slang for 'so far up Chopin's dickhole that you might as well be a UTI?'"
That's one of the most succinct analyses I've read of why postmodern, quasi-tonal pasticherie is such a bad thing. It's not all negative, either. Shanks again on the Chicago Symphony Orchestra's new Strauss disc: "Back when Richard Strauss thumbed his nose at tradition and set out with a bindle and a nickel in search of tone poems, I was one of those who predicted his career had flown the coop. Well, the egg is running down my face now. Our little man's all grown up."
Check out the rest of the reviews for more laugh-out-loud genius and irreverence.
There's a serious point here, I think. One of the reasons Vice's reviews are so refreshing is that they dare to suggest that some classical releases don't have a lot going for them. As one comment on Vice's site puts it: "I've never seen someone who was willing to stand up for good classical music have the balls to publicly trash recordings they didn't like and tell it like it is. You guys fucking rock."
One of the huge problems with classical CD reviews, in my view, is that if you read the BBC Music Magazine or Gramophone regularly, you're left with the impression that, with certain extreme exceptions, the vast majority of everything that's released under the banner of serious classical recordings is jolly spiffing marvellous. Take any recent edition of the BBC Music Mag, where handfuls of reviews are given the ultimate imprimatur of five red stars for "performance" and five more for "sound". You think that these recordings ought, therefore, to be world-shattering, life-altering artefacts of transformative sonic brilliance, only to discover they're talking about Marin Alsop conducting Dvorák, or another release of undiscovered Granville Bantock orchestral music. Nothing against Marin or Dvorák (or even Bantock), but for me, if a CD is going to receive an accolade of transcendent perfection, there's just no way there should be more than two or three a year, and certainly not dozens a month.
It's a problem all over the shop with classical record reviews: just think of the Penguin Guide to Recorded Classical Music, which now gives rosettes and other supposedly hard-to-achieve accolades to hundreds, if not thousands, of discs, making a mockery of a system of recommended recordings. That's why Vice is such an entertaining corrective to the isn't-everything-terrific school of classical CD criticism. Dismissing John Eliot Gardiner's 23 CD set of Bach Cantatas on Deutsche Grammophon as "a fucking brick" probably means the reviewer hadn't actually listened to everything, I grant you. But Gardiner can take it, and so can the classical CD industry. So as an essential accompaniment to the monthly trawl through Gramophone and the BBC Music Magazine, I hope Vice renews its flirtation with classical reviewing, and soon.
