Reviewing A Reviewer by A Reviewer

by David M. Greene

At an age at which most of my contemporaries have retired to Florida or some other lotusland, I have begun a new career: I have become a music critic. Not, you understand, a promoter of phonograph records, as in these pages, where I shamelessly indulged my compulsion to babble for more than a decade. I go to concerts not of my own choosing, formulate an impression of the proceedings, and dash off to a word processor by means of which, in 30 minutes or so, I must feed 12 inches of reasonably coherent review into the morning edition.

It is one thing to write around the subject as I too often do here: it is quite another to talk about it directly. There is also a vast difference between listening to a phonograph record (occasionally, I confess, with one ear, while wallowing on the couch) and having to concentrate one’s ears and eyes on a performer on a stage. I find myself often approaching the task with terror and humility.

l felt an excess of both emotions the first time l was called on to review a solo piano recital. Faced with the concert, I told myself that I could not tell one pianist from another, much less judge his effectiveness. The performer for the evening in question teaches at one of the great conservatories and has recorded (in the modern repertoire). He began with some steely fingered Bach that brought out all the fugal voices and such, but somehow loosened the fillings in my teeth (I speak figuratively). Then came the Beethoven “Tempest" Sonata (the same one that is on the record I may get around to talking about). The performance was obviously the work of much thought and practice. That was the trouble with it: each phrase had been polished to a fare-thee-well, but the pianist had neglected to make a unity of them again.

With that recent experience in mind, I approached this record with increased weighted confidence. I’ve probably written up Mr. Goldsmith's other MHS records which include some Beethoven (MHS 4005K), but remembered only that I had liked them, A product of the Manhattan School of Music, where he studied with Verna Brown and Robert Goldsand, he has been before the concert public for more than 20 years, He is also a musicologist of repute. But the musical layman is apt to know him best as a record reviewer who has written for many leading journals. (His notes for this record are models of lucidity that are worth the price of the disc.)

Musicians are a breed usually credited with instinct rather than intelligence, a quality that, in my opinion, has something to do with verbal articulateness. In Mr. Goldsmith's instance I think that gift is precisely what he carries over to his music. His readings are statements that make an ideal blend of intelligence and feeling. Each phrase is designed to express something, and that something is a part of a carefully organized and shaped whole.

The Sonata, completed in 1802, is not supposed to represent a storm, but takes its name from Beethoven’s off hand brusque statement to a friend that if the latter wanted to understand the music he should read Shakespeare's The Tempest. Mr. Goldsmith subscribes to this notion only in that the Sonata probably reflects the “magic" theme of the play. But if he injects magic into that work, it is nothing to what he does with the op. 126 Bagatelles ("trivialities) from Beethoven's last years that, however graceful, have a depth that his contemporaries must have yearned to achieve. And, if you have no idea what l am saying about Goldsmith, listen to what he does with that earlier trifle, known from its scrawled dedication as “For Elise” but probably meant for Therese (Malfatti) piece known to every second-year piano student.