Class(ical) Traitors of the Month: Archive 2010
Click on a Traitor to read the indictment. (For technical reasons there was no award for May 2010.)
December: Alex Ross
October Anne Akiko Meyers
September Igor Toronyi-Lalic
August Lorin Maazel
July Anne Midgette
June Renée Fleming
April BBC Radio 3
March Philip Clark
February Composer of the Week (BBC Radio 3)
January Classic FM magazine
December 2010 Class.Traitor Author Alex Ross
Indictment
Class.Traitor of the Month for December is Alex Ross, for having just published a follow-up book to his teeth-grittingly ingratiating The Rest is Noise which is even more nauseatingly populist, and has even more fawning references to that pretentious pop caterwauler, Björk. Title: Listen to This; musoc.org Advisory: Don't Read This.
November 2010 Class.Traitor
October 2010 Class.Traitor American violinist Anne Akiko Meyers
Indictment
Class.Traitor of the Month for October is American violinist Anne Akiko Meyers, for spending a record-busting $3.6 million on a violin (even if it is a Stradivarius) - an obscene amount of money for an instrument at any time, but all the more outrageously ostentatious at a time when so many arts institutions are facing impecunity.
September 2010 Class.Traitor critic Igor Toronyi-Lalic
Indictment
Class.Traitor of the Month for September is 'classical' critic of The Arts Desk Igor Toronyi-Lalic, for one of the most knuckleheaded, pathetically-desperate-to-say-something-outrageous descriptions of an art music work ever written. Here's what he wrote: "I struggle with Shostakovich when he is in this unrelentingly suffocating mood [the First Cello Concerto]. I fail to understand why we must be put through it. It reminds me of those horrid, exploitative Gaspar Noé films that force you to sit through every last detail of, for example, a grisly rape. It's miserablist torture porn in my view: self-indulgent, teenage, the Nirvana of classical music."
August 2010 Class.Traitor Lorin Maazel
Indictment
Class.Traitor of the Month for August is mercenary maestro Lorin Maazel, who, last year, when his New York Philharmonic orchestra filed a record deficit of $4.6 million, greedily pocketed a leaving package of $3.3 million (up from a mere $2.8 million the previous year). "Outrageous", rightly says the American Guild of Musical Artists.
July 2010 Class.Traitor US critic Anne Midgette
Indictment
Class.Traitor of the Month for July is 'classical music critic' for the Washington Times, Anne Midgette, for her utterly ludicrous praise for the defunct dancing deviant, quote - "Michael Jackson, the King of Pop, was certainly one of the greatest singers and songwriters of all time."
Her regurgitation of this tripe is only partly explained by her Trendy Badge-winning words a few days later: "I've found myself saying a few times this week how much I regret the sharp division, in many print publications, between the pop critic and the classical one". (What decade did she last check how many publications have anything but pop critics?)
June 2010 Class.Traitor US soprano Renée Fleming
Indictment
Class.Traitor of the Month for June is American soprano and self-styled 'people's diva' Renée Fleming, for her egotistical and avaricious decision to record a CD of pop pap - and the cringe-making result (available in various takes on YouTube.com *). For his fawning interview about the album, The Observer's Peter Conrad is incarcerated with her in the Hall of Shame (though many others ought to share the same fate for their equally sycophantic reviews), where he will be able made to listen to it all day every day for the next six months.
April 2010 Class.Traitor BBC Radio 3
Indictment
Class.Traitor of the Month for April is BBC Radio 3 for pandering even further to populism and kowtowing to commercialism by introducing the fairly ridiculous Specialist Classical Charts into its programming.
Ironically - or fittingly, depending on how you look at it - Number 1 in the chart the week Radio 3 made its announcement was André Rieu, he of the hair and the huge bank balance, the epitome of everything art music shouldn't be, whose self-promoting showmanship relies heavily on 'charts' and other hype tools of the global media.
In a press release, Radio 3 Controller Roger 'Wrong Again' Wright said, chillingly: "The Specialist Classical Chart will be a new and significant part of our Radio 3 programming, providing our listeners with more insights into the classical music recording market."
Presenter and critic Rob Cowan bubbled: "[this new initiative] should prove thoroughly entertaining and enlightening and I'm sure it'll scupper some crusty old preconceptions!" Such as the belief that Cowan and his giddy colleagues genuinely care about the future of art music?
March 2010 Class.Traitor Philip Clark, Gramophone magazine critic
Indictment
Critic Philip Clark is starting to make regular appearances on this site, in both the Hip Pains and Donkey Gongs sections. (Not to mention the Letters page.) This recognition stems from Gramophone's willingness to publish his particular brand of postmodern flatulence, beautifully encapsulated in his article in the April 2010 issue (published early March), entitled 'Classical music will eat itself'.
In a way, Clark can't really be a Traitor, because he gives every indication of despising art music. In the first paragraph of his article he writes (inelegantly, and somewhat ungrammatically): "But I'm reckoning what we now, as a label of pure convenience to ourselves, call "classical music" will, at best, have died a dignified death, and not wanting to mince words, but: good riddance."
Clark's prose is almost spectacularly poorly written, full of convoluted sentences, clichés and affectations, non sequiturs, Googled-seeming soundbites and vacuous statements (e.g. "Debussy's prime innovation - twinning harmony and timbre, so that one deepens the impact of the other"). Yet it's regularly-expressed sentiments like the following that seal Clark's fate in the Hall of Shame, and must surely cause music-lovers to question Gramophone's motivation and/or sanity:
"But in 2010 the motor of progressive tradition that powered composers forwards over centuries has shattered, leaving the component parts of sound (call it music if you must) flying round in spectacular flux."
February 2010 Class.Traitor Composer of the Week (BBC Radio 3)
Indictment
By popular demand*, Class.Traitor of the Month for February is BBC Radio 3's programme Composer of the Week and its studied presenter Donald MacLeod, for the ten hours devotionally devoted mid-month to the tedious refrains of bebop.
Bebop is clearly not a composer; nor is it 'classical'. If jazz has a place on Radio 3 - and unlike the Friends of Radio 3, musoc.org does not think so, regardless of historical precedence - then it should stick firmly to its 'graveyard' slots. This is, unfortunately, not the first time that this programme, always presented in the same dreary, artificial fashion by MacLeod, has focused on jazz, but blighting the daytime schedules with such musical banality is not only an offence against discerning ears, but will surely drive away more listeners than it could possibly attract.
Far better to move it all to another station, along with Donald MacLeod, leaving Composer of the Week to concentrate on composers of art music. There remain literally thousands that the programme, for all its long history, has never featured.
* After a fashion: according to Friends of Radio 3's new blog, popular opinion - that of the liberal-reactionary majority on the Radio 3 messageboards ('discussion forums' would be a ludicrous misnomer) - supports such mindless initiatives, or, as the blog puts it in best BBCese, "the investigation of diverse genres".
January 2010 Class.Traitor Classic FM magazine (UK)
Indictment
2010's first Hall of Shame investiture goes to the Classic FM magazine, for its particularly awful February issue (published absurdly early in January).
As with its radio station sister, the endless adverts are there at every turn, and those for Caribbean cruises, upmarket supermarkets, laundry liquids and cinema releases all have their usual prominence beside the more musical ones in this issue. But what makes the magazine more nauseating than usual this month are, firstly, the lists - yet more lists: not only the headline publication of the "The 50 Greatest Composers" (determined to no small degree by the availability of recordings on the Naxos label, who selflessly provide all the excerpts on the cover CDs), but also "the 25 classical composers without whom our heroes [the 50] could not have achieved greatness", the "Classical album chart" (a more misleading title is barely conceivable), this month's instalment of "The 100 classical recordings no listener should be without" and "50 works that changed classical music", "Five of the best: conductors", and the yearly appeal to readers to vote in Classic FM's notorious "Hall of Fame". The mindlessness of this list mania is discussed in B Listers.
"The battle [...] for the Hall of Fame 2010" ("with NS&I") is actually "Top Story" in the magazine's "News" section - a good indication of the rest of the contents. Readers and listeners must send in their votes by the end of the month; one bovine reader has written to the Letters page helpfully suggesting "we should vote for a favourite section of a work, rather than consider a piece in its entirety"! Last year's Classic FM Countdown to the Hall of Shame covers the stupidity and cynicism of the whole exercise in considerable detail.
Another appalling feature in this issue is the "Download Site of the Month": Universal's Classics And Jazz.co.uk, which "dominates the crossover market". Here, Classic FM magazine's "reviews editor", Andrew Mellor - who by his own admission on page 46 first heard Bohuslav Martinů's music two years ago on Classic FM's Full Works programme; incidentally enough qualification in Classic FM circles for him to award a Martinů CD "Disc of the Month"! - excitedly reveals that you can get access to the "catalogues of those popular crossover artists, instantly accessible from the source that created them". "Extra features [...] include and sheet music download facilities". Mellor is elsewhere listed as "expert panellist".
Finally (for now), and on the subject of the big four money-grubbing music/media multinationals: typifying the magazine's glossy photo culture is its rather shameful description (with large glossy photo) of young female violinist Vilde Frang as "the violin world's hottest property". It should come as no surprise to learn that the company selling Frang as a commodity is EMI; and that her playing of Sibelius's Violin Concerto on her debut CD is both unsensitively engineered and musically undeserving of the hype.
Classic FM magazine thus fully merits its place of dishonour beside its sister in the Hall of Shame. But given the appaling quality of this shiny industry brochure, this certainly won't be its only nomination; already, next month's issue promises readers they'll "meet the stars of the TV show [ITV's double misnomer, "From Popstar to Operastar"] that teaches pop stars to sing classical".