Louisville Magazine is Louisville's city magazine, covering Louisville people, lifestyles, politics, sports, restaurants, entertainment and homes. Includes a monthly calendar of events.
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Smillie's PICKS "What Child Is Tis?" Te next day will be "Good Tidings of Great Joy" at Immaculate Conception in La Grange. Finally, on Saturday, Dec. 14, the chorus will pop up again with a repeat of "Good Tidings," this time at St. Brigid in the Highlands. Te acoustics are gorgeous for choral music at all three venues. Call 968-6300 for tickets, which top out at a reasonable $20. Oh, and by the way: Firmly mark your new 2014 calendar for 4 p.m. Sunday, May 18. At St. Boniface, the chorus will perform Brahms' "German Requiem," one of the titans of the choral repertoire, a big-scale work that runs 80 minutes and calls for baritone and soprano soloists, a chorus and a full symphony orchestra. Critical thinking By Thomson Smillie Illustration by Bart Galloway Jingle balls As the dead hand of the holiday season reaches out to silence creativity, the only sparks of musical life come from, as in former years, Louisville Master Chorale, Voces Novae and the Louisville Chorus, among which I counted 14 concerts in December alone. Pride of place this season goes to the Louisville Chorus for sheer endurance as it celebrates its 75th anniversary with its 2013-'14 program. Over the course of just one week, it will demonstrate its geographical and musical diversity with three concerts. Up frst on Saturday, Dec. 7: "Christmas Wonderland: Family Holiday Pops" at St. Mary's Catholic Church in New Albany, Ind. New to this season's performance will be "Te Cat and Mouse Carol" and a new recorder/fute arrangement of Our city's daily newspaper has been without an arts critic since Andrew Adler pushed of to New Orleans three years ago, and, as is common with many cities of Louisville's size, the Courier-Journal no longer carries that morning-after report that for some once served as the seal of approval (or a sour condemnation) of a performance. Are we the poorer for lack of a so-called expert opinion? In the early '80s, when I had just arrived to be artistic director of the Kentucky Opera, I visited a friend the morning after an Actors Teatre opening and asked, eagerly, "How was the show?" Came the reply: "I don't know; I haven't seen the paper yet." Along the same line, as a producer, I experienced many good opening-night roaring ovations (and that great Louisville cliché, a standing ovation) and, on the following Monday, a lousy review by either Bill Mootz or Adler. It was always the frst thing I looked at the moment the paper arrived. (In a small city like Louisville, one ran into critics in passing, but one knew better than to argue back!) Te great Barry Bingham Sr., the late publisher of the Courier-Journal, was an arts buf and appointed as frst C-J arts critic Dean Anderson, head of the University of Louisville's music school. Eventually a full-time job emerged, and Mootz held it for decades. In parallel, Te Louisville Times (the C-J's afternoon sister paper) had F.W. Woolsey. Adler spent almost 30 years on the job, and though he was the most knowledgeable and well-educated of the bunch, he seemed the most capricious, choosing to dismiss popular fare while hailing any discordant drivel from U of L faculty. But he had style, wrote well and coped with the tedium of reviewing. Of course, most artists disdain critics. All art is to some degree a confdence trick, and artists dislike critics the way fraudsters fear the FBI. Performing a complex piece requires great skill and decades of training, and to have a performance dismissed by someone who can't approach your level of achievement is galling. Tere is truth in the adage that "those who can, do; those who can't, teach; and those who can't either do it or teach it, review it." In a response to a bad review, composer Max Reger once wrote: "I am sitting in the smallest room in my house. I have your review before me. In a moment, it will be behind me." Te days are gone when a single critic decided whether a show would have a second night. Clive Barnes, a round, scrufy Brit of my acquaintance who physically resembled an explosion in a mattress factory, held power of "work" or "don't work" over New York theater as chief critic at the New York Post and, the apogee of infuence, at the New York Times. Routinely, cast members would stay at a party until dawn, read his review and learn if they needed to show up for work. Now the decision on who eats next week is made by suburban bus-party organizers who buy out highly hyped shows months and years in advance. Te big change is that instead of decision-making residing in the hands of a few "experts," it is now a democratized process. Word of mouth and social chitchat count for more. Final thought I have never been a professional critic and have only once been mistaken for one. During my time as general manager of Boston Opera, I made an evening trip to Tanglewood, summer home of the Boston Symphony. Eager to cut a sartorial dash and look my smartest, I popped down to the dry cleaner and, because there was no time for a full cleaning, asked to have my light beige cotton suit, in the phrase of the day, "sponged and pressed." At a performance, during a break in the music, I turned around to answer a friend's greeting. Clearly something about the jacket caught his eye. "For whom are you reviewing the concert?" he asked. "What makes you think I should stoop to doing such a thing?" I replied, indignantly. "Tere's a label on your jacket that says PRESS ONLY." 12.13 LOUISVILLE MAGAZINE 99