John Smyth ([log in to unmask]) wrote:

>Steve Schwartz in a recent review of Mahler's 7th:
>
>>...almost every performance of the Seventh I heard seemed to miss the
>>point, although I had no idea what that point was.
>
>This is what I'm kind of talking about.
>
>Have we led the uninitiated to believe that art has to have a point to be
>"fine?"

Although I'm sure Steve is well able to leap to his own defence, I shall
weigh in to say that I think you're doing him an injustice, for I know
exactly what he means.  (At least I think I do).

He certainly didn't emply the word "fine", so your two sentences above
really constitue, I submit, a non-sequitur.  If we admit that there is a
possiblity of even a well-executed performance of a piece of music being
bad, the surely even somebody unversed in the composer's idiom could get
the felling that there was something "wrong" and yet - precisely because of
being unversed (and Mahler's 7th can be a hard nut to crack) - not be able
to say exactly what it was that was wrong, or how it should have been.

Or do I misunderstand one or other of you?

deryk barker
([log in to unmask], http://www.camosun.bc.ca/~dbarker)