Looper's Delight Archive Top (Search)
Date Index
Thread Index
Author Index
Looper's Delight Home
Mailing List Info

[Date Prev][Date Next]   [Thread Prev][Thread Next]   [Date Index][Thread Index][Author Index]

Re: [looper's] RE: my first bad review



Title: Re: [looper's] RE: my first bad review


One of the greatest live concerts I have ever seen was Meredith Monk's opera "Atlas" presented at the Brooklyn Academy of Music several years ago.  To me, this opera was inspired and original and beautifully executed on every level -- I can't say enough about how it affected me.
The New York Times review was a total pan -- not just an even-handed criticism, but an almost vicious, insulting putdown of everything Meredith Monk was about.
I always felt that reviewer should have excused himself from reviewing Monk's opera because  he obviously had no feeling for her style -- his aesthetic prefereces were just too far away from Monk's for there to be any common ground.  
It's funny because I've participated in concerts reviewed by the Times that I didn't think were very good, and got treated with velvet gloves -- perhaps something that fits in with a critic's ideas of what's interesting or "good" stylistically or even fashionably is much more likely to be well reviewed, even if not so well realized, than something outside of their preconceived areas of acceptance.