Critical Mass

I admit to being a bit anal about recorded versions of classical music.  My first action when looking for new versions of recordings to buy is to look at reviews. I’m obsessed with making sure I have a ‘recommended’ version - one that has received critical acclaim or is listed in one of the published guides. I sit like nerd-like, spending far too much time reading about the disc rather than actually listening, visually chomping my way through some review or other like it was a rare breeds pork pie. But how do I really know whether the disc I’m thinking of buying is really any good? Am I prepared to take the word of someone else so readily? I mean, who the hell are these critics anyway and what do they know?

Let me give you an example of what I’m talking about. Browsing through reviews of Paul Lewis’s cycle of Beethoven piano sonatas I came across these little gems:

Lewis has a marvelous gift for sweet lucidity and joy, and above all for melody: the most demanding passages quite simply sing (which is actually no simple thing since it is so rare) and are never merely notes achieved, no matter how brilliantly. I feel as though Lewis has given us a glimpse into Beethoven’s heart and we find something hitherto hidden but which he reveals with such grace. I wish I could do Paul Lewis as much justice in my description as he has done the composer by his playing.

And there followed further generous outpourings of adulation and veneration. Then came this…

This is a disappointment, especially in the light of its enthusiastic critical reception on both sides of the pond. It is cautious, careful, circumspect, earnest, responsible and dull. There is no sign here that Beethoven is dealing out bold strokes. Instead the composer comes off as plain and palatable. And that we know he was not. Fine sound of an exceptional instrument: wasted.

So who do you believe and what should I do? The latter reviewer dismisses the recordings as aphoristic and featureless yet to the first it seems the sun shines out of Mr Lewis’s piano lid. Do I use my Gramophone Classical Guide as my vade-mecum or use it in place of lavatory paper when the soft stuff runs out? Because a conclusion is impossible to reach, I become irritable, snap at my wife and torment the cat. (I am ashamed to say that in a fit of sudden irascibility that stemmed from reading reviews I once attempted to superglue milk bottle tops to the bottoms of its paws.) But is my first mistake to consult anyone else at all? If you subscribe to Spotify your problems are solved; just spend a few blissful hours listening to the relevant versions of the works you’re planning to buy and Robert, as they say, is your proverbial parents’ brother. If you haven’t got the aforementioned software, it really doesn’t matter that much does it?

What is a bad recording? These days there are very few of them. I mean, of course, a recording that is badly balanced or sounds as though it was recorded in a sports hall, or underwater, or your downstairs toilet. The rest is down to taste and I’m not sure that we should let the critics have the monopoly on that. Because a pianist is a little too light with his sforzando chords or the tempo of an orchestral tutti isn’t fast enough should we dismiss the work entirely? And some critics do. By all means dust off your metronomes and follow the score if you want to check precision but almost all of the classical music buffs I know are collectors of recorded music and very few of them also have a library of sheet music to rival their CDs. I doubt also whether many of us, unless we are professional musicians, have the time to scrutinise a work in that much detail, fascinating though it is to do. If you know what you like then it’s worth searching for, I suppose. Spotify comes into its own here; being able to listen to different versions of a work is a boon, although they don’t have them all.

Too often in the past I have discarded CDs of works I know well because they don’t compare with the one I’m used to regardless of whether it’s ‘good’ or not. I have always used my 1975 LSO/Previn version of Orff’s Carmina Burana as a benchmark by which to judge all other versions of that monastic romp. Recently my son played me some of the version he has (by someone forgettable on the budget label Naxos). There was absolutely nothing wrong with it, except that it was different to mine. The emphases and tempi were different but the playing was decent and the recording was okay. What the music was attempting to get past was my own prejudice: that the Previn version was, in my opinion, the best and therefore anything else should be dismissed.

Are we, dear reader, too attached to readings of works that are, say, similar to those we have grown up with? Are we wary of holding out the olive branch to versions that are a little bit different? An advertising campaign for a well-known UK supermarket chain uses the phrase ‘try something different today’. I going to swallow my own prejudice, along with that rare breeds pork pie, and do just that.