musoc.org donkeys

Donkey Gongs

An occasional series of awards to music snobs, those self-important asses who bray publicly at composers, musicians and music they (and their club) deem unworthy of critical or listener attention. If you spot any donkeys, please email gro.cosum@ofni.

Gongs awarded:

John Allison (Daily Telegraph reviewer)

For: "Curiosity of the year? Undoubtedly, Havergal Brian's Gothic Symphony at the opening Proms weekend. The first of this maverick's 32 symphonies, the work calls for 1,000 performers, making its first full outing in the UK since 1980 a collector's item. Only masochists would want to hear it again, but the Hyperion label is catering for them".

Igor Toronyi-Lalic (editor of The Arts Desk) ** 3rd Award **

For: "Honegger's gaudy 1935 meditation on the life of Joan of Arc [...] is an untidy flea market of meretricious musical ideas. The work's only value lies in it being able to make one understand why the likes of Pierre Boulez felt forced to make their postwar musical revolutions so sweeping and so violent. The sort of musical slime that the interwar French Neo-Classicists like Honegger left behind [...] required an industrial-strength response. [...] Paul Claudel's words mostly stumble around in a pompous poetic fog. Every now and again they snatch at something solid and tacky, to which Honegger never fails to respond with bitty, foursquare trash of deadening literalness. [...] Death at the stake would have remained preferable to any more Honegger."

Igor Toronyi-Lalic (editor of The Arts Desk) ** 2nd Award **

For: "Colin Matthews's Violin Concerto was anaemic and parochial in a way that only an Englishman's music can be."

Ivan Hewett (Daily Telegraph critic)

For: "To see pianist Denis Matsuev's impressive virtuosity lavished on such threadbare material [Shchedrin's Fifth Piano Concerto] was painful."

Kyle Gann (self-styled "composer (since I was 13), a music critic (since I was 27), a musicologist (since I was 32), and a music professor (since I was 39)")

For: "Face it: Arnold Schoenberg is O. V. E. R. R. A. T. E. D. He deserves maybe two, three paragraphs in a comprehensive music history text. [...] We all agreed that the Op.25 and Op.33 piano pieces are a mess, and that the Violin Phantasy is really ugly. We had all once loved the First Chamber Symphony and grown to dislike it. Altogether, we couldn't come up with much 12-tone Schoenberg that any of us ever wanted to hear again."

John Eliot Gardiner (ought-to-know-better conductor)

For: (before a BBC Radio 3 audience) "Why Vivaldi is hugely popular always slightly baffles me because I think he's a rather boring composer compared with Bach".

David Nice (critic, writing for The Arts Desk)

For: "Mind you, I admit I was in a bit of a torpor after having to sit through the Korngold Violin Concerto for the second time this year, and dreading that utterly superfluous second movement when the first has said it all - and again, and again - in terms of romantic lyricism."

Igor Toronyi-Lalic (editor of The Arts Desk)

For: "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." [Review, September 2010]

Alex Ross (writer for The New Yorker)

For: "Wilhelm Furtwängler's Piano Quintet [...] is an immensely earnest mishmash of Brahms, Franck, Bruckner, and Reger, full of unmemorable ideas developed at unrelenting length." [Blog entry, August 2010]

Andrew Clements (critic/reviewer for The Guardian)

For: "it [the music of Joachim Raff's 11 symphonies] has a kind of bland anonymity, which provides very little to take away except the sense of tremendous if unfocused musical facility." [CD Review, July 2010]

Edward Seckerson (chief music and opera critic for The Independent)

For: "Myaskovsky's 6th Symphony [...] - it's a big and discursive piece to fully grasp at one hearing and its significant flaws make the likelihood of a second [hearing] pretty remote." [Blog entry, April 2010]

Richard Morrison (chief music critic of The Times) ** 2nd Award **

For: "When Steve Reich and Terry Riley brought the hypnotic cross-rhythms of African music and the exuberance of Californian pop into the concert hall, they invented a genre - minimalism - that rescued classical music from the cul-de-sac of deadly atonality." [The Times, April 2010]

Jeremy Nicholas (critic for Gramophone)

For: "Some of us might find Bach too academic or Beethoven too strident, Liszt vulgar, Tchaikovsky neurotic, Wagner long-winded or Prokofiev acerbic." [Gramophone, April 2010]

Philip Clark (critic for Gramophone)

For: "The Ruders, sad to say, I find tepid. [...] Ruders is probably mentioned too much in this magazine." [Gramophone, March 2010]

("...one of Denmark's finest living composers, Poul Ruders" - James Jolly, Gramophone (editor-in-chief), April 2010 edition)

Rick Jones (critic for Classic FM magazine)

For: "...four concertos, each equally bland, by obscure 18th-century Italians Dall'Oglio, Stratico, Nardini & Lolli. They are Vivaldi without the inventive genius." [Classic FM, February 2010 edition]

David Threasher (critic for Gramophone)

For: "Will we find there's more to [Samuel] Barber than a mawkish Adagio and a couple of concertos?" [Gramophone, January 2010, re composer anniversaries]

Norman Lebrecht (critic & broadcaster):

For: "Few scores are more odious than the 'Triumphslied' [sic] of Brahms." [Bloomberg News, September 2009]

Richard Morrison (chief music critic of The Times)

For: "To think that he [Antonio Salieri] wasted all that jealousy on a composer [Mozart] who [at the age of 7 or 8] could write music almost as awful as his." [BBC Music Magazine, October 2009]