BOOSTER CLUB

posted by James Reel

    Only a British critic could assert, as does the otherwise perceptive Jessica Duchen, that Elgar’s Violin Concerto “is indisputably one of the greatest violin concertos in the repertoire.” Well, I dispute that. If you are not English, you are more likely to perceive the Elgar concerto as a thematically amorphous, bloated corpse of Romanticism. Sorry, Limeys: Elgar was not a great composer. He wrote a lot of lovely, endearing miniatures (and remember that the "Enigma" Variations are a series of miniatures), but only one large-scale work, the Cello Concerto, of truly international stature. Otherwise, Elgar, like Bruckner, is a provincial composer of severely flawed scores that fervent little fan clubs have bullied us into accepting as masterpieces.
    Never, ever trust British critics writing about British music, for they are boosters all. Every blip and squeak of music from their quaint little island is promoted as a work of utmost profundity and heightened expression. This is quite a claim from a nation that has in 350 years produced only three and a half composers equal to any in the world: Henry Purcell, Ralph Vaughan Williams, Benjamin Britten and, when he’s “on,” Peter Maxwell Davies. (Handel, remember, was an import.) Britain has generated many perfectly solid if not particularly exportable composers, but they are not nearly the masters the Brits announce them to be, and exaggerated claims for their ability set me against them (Elgar above all, but also the likes of Parry, Birtwistle and Adès).
    Brit critics are unreliable in other ways. Every British performer, for them, is necessarily a Great Artist no matter how dull, as are those honorary Brits who worked extensively in London (Herbert von Karajan above all). British-born but American-based critic Bernard Jacobson is unusually honest and perceptive among his fellows, but even he remained deaf to the prominent intonation problems of England’s hallowed Lindsay Quartet. (And he loves Elgar.) Brit-crit twits have a horror of any performance that displays the faintest trace of emotion or individuality, unless that performance is by a Brit (Simon Rattle, John Barbirolli). They abhor the fiery modern Mediterranean style of Baroque performance, insisting that early-music musicians remain locked in the cold, dry, metronomic 1970s/’80s English and German manner.
    What I object to is not a simple difference in taste; it’s the monolithic conformity of British critical opinion. With the decline of American magazine and newspaper coverage of classical music, and the infiltration of Brits even into Fanfare, to which I contribute, and the unlikelihood that monolingual Americans are going to delve into Continental publications like Diapason, Brits dominate English-language music criticism.
    So here’s what you can do about it: stop reading, keep listening, and think for yourself.