Mimi asks:

>...what do you look for in an excellent review, and who are some of
>your favorite reviewers(aside from those writing for the MCML?)

Well, I do have a favorite reviewer on MCML (other than me), but according
to the rules of the game, I won't name him.

I tend to like reviewers who tell me what they think and why they think it.
If they write well, so much the better.  If they tell me something I didn't
know, I'm extremely grateful.  My first big crush was on Klaus George Roy,
who began in Boston and then became the chief program annotator for the
Cleveland Orchestra during the Szell years.  Szell himself hired him, so
you can bet Roy knew his musical onions.  His essays on the Beethoven
symphonies are among the best I've read.  He composed very well himself,
and his music should be better known.  At any rate, modern and contemporary
music held no terrors for him, and he made it comprehensible to listeners.

A really fine reviewer (and composer as well), Herbert Elwell, worked
for the main Cleveland paper for many years, but I was too young to notice
at the time.  The Cleveland critic I noticed was a man named Robert Finn,
who was my bete noir.  His tone, more than anything else, put me off --
snobbish.  I prefered the second reviewer, Wilma Salisbury.  She conveyed
her interest in what she reviewed and she wrote to the point.  Bain Murray
(another fine composer) reviewed for the Cleveland Jewish paper.  I liked
his stuff too.

I discovered Shaw in high school.  Shaw continually wanted to tell me
things I didn't know, and his writing bubbled and fizzed.  I consider
him one of the greatest music critics and working reviewers ever.

In college, I hooked up with Schumann and Debussy, who were interesting
and even deep, but I admit if I hadn't been hooked on their music, I
probably wouldn't have been all that interested in their criticism.  Andrew
Porter taught me a great deal about contemporary music.  He wasn't afraid
to say what he liked/disliked and his why was always interesting.  Winthrop
Sargent wrote beautifully, but I distrusted his judgment, mainly because he
dismissed contemporary music.  His only reason was that he disliked it.
Merely saying the emperor has no clothes is insufficient to me, who wants
to find a way in.  To his credit, he realized this, and stepped aside for
someone who understood not only what living composers were doing, but why
they wanted to do it.

Virgil Thomson's prose is a glory of American literature, his judgment --
within the limits of his taste -- incredibly acute.

Steinberg and Tim Page I came to very late (within the last twenty years),
but I immediately thought them very high quality indeed.

Boston, I've noticed, nurtured three very fine reviewers -- Roy, Steinberg,
and Page.  Something healthful in the River Charles?

Steve Schwartz