David Hurwitz

[Karl Henning]

Over time I find there are certain reviewers who I have found whose 'taste' chimes relatively closely with mine so if they are enthused by a performance/recording or piece I might well check it out in a way I otherwise would not.  If all you need is knowledge of a disc's existance visit company's "new releases" pages!  This presupposes that everyone has the same level of prior knowledge.  The value of Hurwitz is the way in which he can engage and enthuse his regular audience and introduce them to aspects of CM that otherwise they might not encounter.  CM needs ALL the enthusiasm and support it can get and if that includes a liberal dose of Hurwitz's 'character' along the way I think it is a price worth paying.

Happily concede the highlight.

[Karl Henning]

Anyone who thinks their opinion of a musical performance is valuable to another person is a fool, Hurwitz included. Unless I know the person well, the most valuable information in any review is the fact that the recording exists.

I both see your point, and that it does not preclude your finding some opinion valuable.

[Spotted Horses]

This is objectively incorrect.  What works for you specifically is basically irrelevant for most other people, if not everyone.  The existence of multiple classical review publications, some of which have been around for decades, obviously refutes your statement.

My statement may be incorrect, but the fact that people have been selling reviews for decades does not prove that. Various vendors have been selling things of no value for decades, including snake oil, managed stock funds that perform worse than index funds, homeopathic medicines, tarot card readings, etc. Music reviews are entertainment, in my view.

[Spotted Horses]

What are you doing on the forum, then?

Because a very large percentage of this forum consists of people not just reporting the existence of recordings, but speaking about what they thought of them, including whether they thought it was better or worse than other recordings of the same music.

The fact that people don't describe their posts as "reviews" and don't put them in places where you might be charged money to read doesn't alter this. So why are you here?

I would note that it isn't hard to find examples in your own posts of your opinion of a musical performance.

I'm here to socialize and gossip about classical music, since I don't know anyone in real life that care about classical music at all.

My little reviews on the listening thread mainly serve to point out that the recording exists and that someone (me) thinks it is worth listening to, and perhaps give some useful objective-ish information (tempo is fast/slow, recording is dry/reverberant, presentation is flamboyant/understated, etc). I will normally mention whether I liked it, but that seems like an almost irrelevant detail. Basically it is the listening notes I keep in my little journal, modified slightly for an external audience.

I do read people's "reviews" here, but as I said, what I mainly get out of it is that the recording exists and someone found it worth listening to. Whether it is claimed to be bad, good, the worst, the best it not of interest. A claim that a recording is awful is probably just as likely as anything to spur me to purchase or listen.  There are a few contributors here whose taste I respect highly whose positive mention I will take seriously. But people who seem compelled to announce that recording A is better than recording B do not make much of an impression.

[Spotted Horses]

I believe in the (theoretical/general) value of critics, but then again, this is because my salary depends on maintaining that belief. 

The important thing is to build a long-time sense of trust and understanding of a critic and their point of view. The best critics are able to clue you in right away, or to describe a thing to you such that you'll know whether you'll like it regardless of whether they did. It's something that I try to keep in mind in my own work. "Too spicy" is like "too fast": not helpful to the reader at all, because everyone has different definitions of when food becomes too spicy or a tempo becomes too fast.

This is why I think Roger Ebert remains the ideal of the critic. He loved great film, sure. But he also gave high marks to horror movies if they scared him, and romantic comedies if they made him a little bit weepy. And you can read just one article of his and immediately understand both his frame of reference and whether or not you agree with it.

I have almost no use for critics I don't know familiarly (like other cities' newspapers' writers, or everyone on Yelp) but find it tremendously useful to follow certain knowledgeable, observant, insightful people over the longterm once I have gotten to learn how their views might differ from my own (like Ebert, Pete Wells, Dwight Garner, Helen Rosner, Wesley Morris, Soleil Ho, A.S. Hamrah, Alex Ross, and, yes, David Hurwitz).

Of course, as you can see from the length of that list, I am at the far end of the bell curve from Spotted Horses on this subject, as extreme in one direction as he is in the other. Criticism is a pretty hefty chunk of my reading diet, because in the hands of good critics it can teach you something even when you don't engage with the material being criticized, and when you do (as in, say, Marjorie Garber's essays on Shakespeare), it can teach you a lot. My life pretty much revolves around subject matter with established critical traditions (books, film, music, food).

Incidentally, I just did a search and found that we had this exact discussion in this same thread in 2016. Karl noted his problem with Hurwitz is that the guy is a "blunt instrument" - surely true. DH is at his most interesting when you get him off his pet topics (vibrato, Mahler) and onto something where he is forced to convert his deep knowledge into a new idea (like a recent video where he argued that music cannot express the emotion of hatred, only the thing being hated on).

I beg pardon for seeming to contemn your profession as useless. Far from it. It is entertainment. Evidently there are people who like food so much they are not satisfied just to eat it, but want to read about it too. But, of course, you also bring attention to restaurants that you find worth the effort to patronize, and this is the main value I find in classical music reviews.

There are other professions that are far worse than useless. I have a cousin who was highly paid marketing professional, and for a long time her specialty was Kool-Aid. Her job was to convince people to drink a nutrient free, mildly toxic solution of chemicals instead of clean water. That's worse than useless.

[Todd]

My statement may be incorrect, but the fact that people have been selling reviews for decades does not prove that.

It really kind of does.  One needn't look too hard for online references to Gramophone or BBC Music or some other publication as evidence for the value that some people place on professional reviews in magazines or online.  You may not place any value on professional reviews, which is perfectly fine, but that doesn't mean anything.  I also think of reviews mostly as a form of entertainment and typically pay close attention only if a review praises something as the greatest ever, or, more interestingly, the worst ever, or at least bad and eccentric.  I do not think that my view on reviews has any objective meaning for anyone else.

[Spotted Horses]

Over time I find there are certain reviewers who I have found whose 'taste' chimes relatively closely with mine so if they are enthused by a performance/recording or piece I might well check it out in a way I otherwise would not.  If all you need is knowledge of a disc's existance visit company's "new releases" pages!  This presupposes that everyone has the same level of prior knowledge.  The value of Hurwitz is the way in which he can engage and enthuse his regular audience and introduce them to aspects of CM that otherwise they might not encounter.  CM needs ALL the enthusiasm and support it can get and if that includes a liberal dose of Hurwitz's 'character' along the way I think it is a price worth paying.

Well, yes, I would concede that reviews are valuable to a novice, as they were to me when I was trying to decide whether to get Karajan or Solti's recording of Beethoven's 9th. (When I started collecting the new releases section was crowded with Karajan and Solti.)

And it is true that there are a few posters here whose taste I have come to recording very highly, and whose positive mention would be enough to send me scurrying to my favorite internet vendors. There is no rule so firm that it doesn't admit some exceptions.

[Brian]

I beg pardon for seeming to contemn your profession as useless. Far from it. It is entertainment. Evidently there are people who like food so much they are not satisfied just to eat it, but want to read about it too. But, of course, you also bring attention to restaurants that you find worth the effort to patronize, and this is the main value I find in classical music reviews.

There are other professions that are far worse than useless. I have a cousin who was highly paid marketing professional, and for a long time her specialty was Kool-Aid. Her job was to convince people to drink a nutrient free, mildly toxic solution of chemicals instead of clean water. That's worse than useless.

The funny thing is that despite our apparent disagreement here, I think our philosophy about reviewing is pretty similar. Last month, I ran a review of a restaurant where I chose to keep my own view out of it and present both positive and negative facts. Fans of the restaurant told me they loved the positive review, and the ownership was thrilled with the description. People who hated the restaurant were also thrilled with what they saw as a savage attack, and whenever one of them met me in person they detailed all their horror show-type experiences there.

That made me feel very good about the integrity of the description in the review, which proceeded mostly along your lines (i.e. objective description: the food is these things, it's extremely expensive, famous people are treated differently). Then a friend pointed out that this shows that people only take away the information they want to take away, and nothing else. Ah, well...

[Karl Henning]

The funny thing is that despite our apparent disagreement here, I think our philosophy about reviewing is pretty similar. Last month, I ran a review of a restaurant where I chose to keep my own view out of it and present both positive and negative facts. Fans of the restaurant told me they loved the positive review, and the ownership was thrilled with the description. People who hated the restaurant were also thrilled with what they saw as a savage attack, and whenever one of them met me in person they detailed all their horror show-type experiences there.

That made me feel very good about the integrity of the description in the review, which proceeded mostly along your lines (i.e. objective description: the food is these things, it's extremely expensive, famous people are treated differently). Then a friend pointed out that this shows that people only take away the information they want to take away, and nothing else. Ah, well...

A kind of Rorschach experience....

[Madiel]

I'm here to socialize and gossip about classical music, since I don't know anyone in real life that care about classical music at all.

My little reviews on the listening thread mainly serve to point out that the recording exists and that someone (me) thinks it is worth listening to, and perhaps give some useful objective-ish information (tempo is fast/slow, recording is dry/reverberant, presentation is flamboyant/understated, etc). I will normally mention whether I liked it, but that seems like an almost irrelevant detail. Basically it is the listening notes I keep in my little journal, modified slightly for an external audience.

I do read people's "reviews" here, but as I said, what I mainly get out of it is that the recording exists and someone found it worth listening to. Whether it is claimed to be bad, good, the worst, the best it not of interest. A claim that a recording is awful is probably just as likely as anything to spur me to purchase or listen.  There are a few contributors here whose taste I respect highly whose positive mention I will take seriously. But people who seem compelled to announce that recording A is better than recording B do not make much of an impression.

Right, you've said at least twice in this response that people's opinions on performances have value.

I'm honestly getting sick of people converting a dislike of Hurwitz and his style into some kind of universal rule that reviews and opinions have no value.

We get the same kind of thing said here when people disagree with a single specific review (by Hurwitz or anyone else): not just a statement that the writer disagrees with the review, but a declaration that all reviews are valueless.

It's hyperbole and it's nonsense. It flies in the face of how people CONSTANTLY share opinions, here or in other contexts like conversing with friends about TV shows or movies that might be worth watching. We all do it, and we do it because there simply isn't enough time to listen to/watch everything. We exchange information about what might be worth people's time and effort.

All I get out of declarations that reviews are of no value (and usually this means professional reviews, specifically) is that people either resent that someone might get money for expressing opinions, thinking that those opinions aren't any better or more knowledgeable than the person's own free ones, and/or some kind of insecurity about one's own different opinion that is covered by lashing out.

It's tiresome, and I wish people around here would stop doing it. By all means if people have specific and meaningful criticisms of reviews or reviewers let's hear them, but the opinion that opinions have no value needs to disappear into the logical black hole I just pointed out in half a dozen words.

[Brian]

I'm honestly getting sick of people converting a dislike of Hurwitz and his style into some kind of universal rule that reviews and opinions have no value.

To be fair, he may not have meant that at all, and I don't think he implied it. It could be like my attitude toward Marvel movies: they're all unpleasant to me, but the first Thor was especially so. 

There is a GMG tendency towards the attitude "a review that agrees with me is wise and smart, but a review that disagrees with me is dumb and bad." Mirror Image was a better example of that. But it is human nature. My opinion of the New York Times opinion section changes on a similar basis.

[Madiel]

To the extent that it is human nature, I strive not to be human.

For one thing it is preferable to pay attention to a collective set of reviews rather than a single review. But that won't be possible if we spend our time shooting down reviewers. One of the main reasons we spend all this time talking about Hurwitz and ClassicsToday is that there is already a scarcity of people giving the same kind of attention to classical music, and almost certainly no-one else as ACCESSIBLE when they're doing it. Hurwitz gives away a lot of reviews at zero cost.

The only freely accessible alternative that comes close is MusicWeb International, and in my opinion the writing there is frequently bad. Not the opinions, the writing. I lack confidence in the opinions not because I disagree with them, but because I frequently can't discern what they are.

Also... it should be fairly obvious but around here it needs to be said: the purpose of reviews is not supposed to be to compare another opinion to your own, but to give you some information when you don't already have an opinion of your own. If I've already seen a movie, then sure it's interesting to find out what other people thought of it, but the true function of reviews was to help me pick which movie to go see in the first place.

[Spotted Horses]

Right, you've said at least twice in this response that people's opinions on performances have value.

I'm honestly getting sick of people converting a dislike of Hurwitz and his style into some kind of universal rule that reviews and opinions have no value.

We get the same kind of thing said here when people disagree with a single specific review (by Hurwitz or anyone else): not just a statement that the writer disagrees with the review, but a declaration that all reviews are valueless.

It's hyperbole and it's nonsense. It flies in the face of how people CONSTANTLY share opinions, here or in other contexts like conversing with friends about TV shows or movies that might be worth watching. We all do it, and we do it because there simply isn't enough time to listen to/watch everything. We exchange information about what might be worth people's time and effort.

All I get out of declarations that reviews are of no value (and usually this means professional reviews, specifically) is that people either resent that someone might get money for expressing opinions, thinking that those opinions aren't any better or more knowledgeable than the person's own free ones, and/or some kind of insecurity about one's own different opinion that is covered by lashing out.

It's tiresome, and I wish people around here would stop doing it. By all means if people have specific and meaningful criticisms of reviews or reviewers let's hear them, but the opinion that opinions have no value needs to disappear into the logical black hole I just pointed out in half a dozen words.

I have nothing against Hurwitz. I don't recall reading any of his reviews. I watched part of one of his videos in response to comments about him here and although I expected him to be a nasty character, based on what people say about him, I found him quirky and mildly amusing. Not amusing enough too seek out any more of his videos, though. My comments are only based on the experience that beyond very limited objective-ish information (do they take the repeats, do they use period instruments, is the tempo brisk or slow, etc) I find the contents of reviews subjective and of no use in predicting whether I will enjoy a recording. I recall there is someone here with a page reviewing hundreds of recordings of Holst' The Planets. I was was curious and found my favorite recording almost at the bottom in his list. Thank god I didn't consult that list before I got the recording.

And just because opinions of music are almost entirely subjective (assuming the performer can play the notes) doesn't mean it isn't fun to gossip about music.

[Madiel]

To which my response is one I've already made: I don't place huge amounts of weight on a single review. I do place more weight on the collective consensus when I can get it. If 90% of reviews of something all go much the same way and make similar points then there's a decent chance my own responses would be in line with that 90%. Guaranteed? No. More likely than not? Yes.

And that is why I say drawing any conclusion from a particular anecdote about a particular instance where your view on a single recording was completely opposite from a single reviewer is going to get you exactly the wrong conclusion. We don't need fewer reviewers because each individual review doesn't hold much value. We need MORE reviewers precisely because each individual review doesn't hold much value.

It's only from having a wealth of reviews that you get a probability cloud that is far more useful than each individual data point. This is precisely why sites like Metacritic and Rotten Tomatoes have flourished.

And this also why checking out reviews after you already have your own opinion, and your own favourite recording, might be fun but is pretty much against the actual function of reviews.

As to the idea that reviews are almost entirely subjective: no, because if that were true reviews of everything would show the same bell curve distribution. They don't. Things get a high score on Metacritic because a lot more reviewers said it was great. Things get a low score because a lot more reviewers said it was terrible. The claim that it's all subjective is the claim that someone with a low score makes rather than engage with, and learn from, the reasons why the great majority of people thought their magnificent work of art sucked.

[Brian]

I feel like you guys are arguing over entirely different things, to the point where I can't imagine it's productive.

[Spotted Horses]

I feel like you guys are arguing over entirely different things, to the point where I can't imagine it's productive.

Agreed.

Reviews aren't very interesting or helpful to me. I wouldn't argue that they are not useful to other people differently inclined.

I'll just say that the idea of using a consensus of reviews to pick a recording is antithetical to what I enjoy about listening to music. I often find it very rewarding to seek out recordings that are 'bad' by general consensus because they are something different, sometimes in a striking way.

[Madiel]

Oh for crying out loud. It's not "to pick a recording". It's to provide a starting point amongst the morass of recordings.

If you want to start with whichever conductor's name starts with A and go down the list in alphabetical order all the way down to Z and listen to every single bloody recording until you're completely satisfied that you have found the one(s) you like the best, with zero input from anyone else beyond what you could get from scouring a database of releases, then go ahead.

But in most cases most people simply do not have the time. Time is a finite resource. So is money. People use reviews to get SOME kind of steer on where to spend their time and money. If you happen to live in some kind of pocket dimension where you don't have such constraints (and honestly, the way people behave on GMG sometimes raises this as a real possibility) then you're right: reviews are not useful for you. Congratulations.

[Madiel]

Agreed.

Reviews aren't very interesting or helpful to me. I wouldn't argue that they are not useful to other people differently inclined.

You did argue that. That's the whole problem. We are not having this argument because you said reviews weren't of value to you personally. We are having this argument precisely because you declared that a reviewer would be foolish to think their review was useful to another person. Not to "me, Spotted Horses". Another person. Generally.

If all that you meant was that a reviewer would be foolish to think that a review would be useful to YOU PERSONALLY, then I hate to break it to you, but a reviewer is not thinking about you personally when writing a review. So good news, we are safe from that particular kind of foolishness and the warning was wholly unnecessary.

[Brian]

Madiel, those two posts have a remarkable amount of bitterness and sarcasm and I really don't understand the need for that tone. (Feel safe telling you this because I like and enjoy your contributions and we get along.)

[Spotted Horses]

Oh for crying out loud. It's not "to pick a recording". It's to provide a starting point amongst the morass of recordings.

If you want to start with whichever conductor's name starts with A and go down the list in alphabetical order all the way down to Z and listen to every single bloody recording until you're completely satisfied that you have found the one(s) you like the best, with zero input from anyone else beyond what you could get from scouring a database of releases, then go ahead.

But in most cases most people simply do not have the time. Time is a finite resource. So is money. People use reviews to get SOME kind of steer on where to spend their time and money. If you happen to live in some kind of pocket dimension where you don't have such constraints (and honestly, the way people behave on GMG sometimes raises this as a real possibility) then you're right: reviews are not useful for you. Congratulations.

That's my point, I don't want to find the one (or ones) that I like best. I like experiencing the diversity. And I don't go through the alphabet (usually). I am guided by conductors and performers I have stumbled upon over the years that I am attracted to, although sometimes I pick things randomly. I think, "I wonder what Maazel would do with Debussy's Nocturnes, I wonder what Karajan would do with a Suppe overture, I wonder what Ansermet would do with a Haydn symphony, I wonder what Armin Jordan would do with Schumann symphonies. I wonder what Hogwood would do with Martinu, I wonder what Hewitt would do with Liszt." The reviews would tell me to stay away, and look at how much I would miss! This is why, lately, I've been attracted to the complete recordings of so-and-so. I get access to all the recordings that never got released because everyone knows they are terrible!

Perhaps statistical convergence of reviews distills out some information. Quite possibly, but it doesn't interest me, for the reasons above. Individual reviews, in my personal experience, have a similar information content to tarot card readings. Maybe you can accept that that is what I think. I have no trouble with the fact that you find reviews, individually or statically, worthwhile.