As everyone knows, times are tough for the newspaper industry. Most of their traditional revenue streams are drying up fast thanks to the online world's profit-confounding "information wants to be free" meme; their subscriber rolls are dropping sharply because a new generation of readers (myself included) doesn't see the point of having a paper version of stories we read online twelve hours earlier dropped on the front steps every morning; and corporate owners seem unwilling to sustain the high overhead costs of maintaining a massive newsroom staff if the huge profit margins the industry is used to continue to erode.
That having been said, it's somewhat remarkable that the Twin Cities have continued to sustain not one, but two major dailies. Yeah, go ahead and insert your own joke about the current quality of whichever paper you think is too thin, or too liberal, or too whatever, but the fact remains, we have two comparatively huge print newsrooms that continue to be the primary drivers of what gets reported on in Minnesota.
Not only that, both of our dailies continue to cover the arts, and specifically, classical music, at a time when far too many American papers have decided that the culture crowd just isn't big or spendy enough to be worth their time. Now, true, neither the Star Tribune nor the Pioneer Press employs a full-time classical music critic anymore - those positions were victims of seemingly endless budget cuts that reach into every corner of the newsroom, save sports - but it's notable that the arts editors at both papers have made a point of not missing many beats in actual coverage. Yes, they now use freelance writers to review our concerts, but both papers make a point of consistently using the same writers week to week, which from a reader's standpoint, is nearly the same as still having a full-time critic.
The upshot for us is that there is, on any given week, a diversity of opinion available on whether one of our concerts is worth the cost of a ticket. And that's not something to be taken lightly - I grew up in and around two big East Coast cities where a single critic and paper dominated the classical music scene, and too often, that critic's opinions were read as the final word on any issue.
That's a far cry from what a Minnesotan could read about our concerts this week: the
Pioneer Press hailed our guest conductor as an exciting new talent, while the
Star Tribune, reviewing the same concert on the same day, pretty much hated her. Which is the kind of thing that gets some musicians' (and concertgoers') blood boiling, but when you think about it, it's exactly what's supposed to happen with arts criticism. Musical taste is a highly personal thing, and on most weeks, you can find a wide diversity of opinion on the conductor's approach just within the orchestra, let alone in the audience, so why should critics be any different?
Any artist, musician, conductor, etc who chooses to take chances in front of an audience is running the risk that some people might not like the results. Even Osmo, coming off that string of
incredible reviews in New York, ran into
a critic with a stack of Eugene Ormandy recordings in his head last week, and got taken to task for (as nearly as I could make out) daring to take different tempos than Ormandy did. Personally, you couldn't pay me enough to play a Sibelius symphony the way Ormandy liked them, but that's just me.
And whether or not we like the stuff that gets written about our performances on a weekly basis, it's the sign of a vibrant and healthy arts scene when intelligent people can disagree on something as basic as whether a conductor was "
a leader of charisma, confidence and imaginative interpretive ideas," or "seemed interested in achieving an almost metronomic precision; the result was
dry and bloodless." I'll take impassioned debate over groupthink any day...
Labels: conductors and conducting, state of the art, the media
