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)