No one loves a critic

Christmas Eve isn’t proof against performance defects. Starting with our Messiah: Colin Davies conducting, Harper, Watts, Shirley-Quirk singing, a smaller (but highly professional) choir than was then traditional.

Marvellous, but the singers were asked to improvise curlicues at the ends of their lines. A skill beyond them.

King’s College carols/readings. A lovely building which slightly blurs the choir, greatly blurs the congregation. The organist cannot, as in most public performances, adjust his tempo to the slower speed of the congregation since he must consider the choir and the soloists. Also, the congregation cannot beat physics: sound, at ground level, travels at 600 mph and what comes out of some mouths is way behind (in distance and therefore time) what comes out of others. A thrillingly descanted carol at the end, with the congregation joining in, turned into an aural plum pudding.

Such problems can be resolved but only for commercial recordings. Definitive large scale choral performances do not emerge from places like Kings College chapel but (typically and very often) Walthamstow Town Hall.

Salzburg Festival DVD. Magic Flute. Vivacious VPO under James Levine. The best Queen of the Night (Gruberova) we’ve ever heard. A Papageno (Christian Boesch – whatever happened to him?) who reconciled the comic with the poignant – the key to Flute. Defects? Not many – easily the best Flute we’ve seen. Except that Peter Schreier, whose version of Schubert’s An Die Musik is an LdP musical keystone, is slightly too harsh for Tamino’s great love-song Dies Bildnis.

Should I have shut my ears to, or at least not publicised, these failings? Am I a frost on everyone’s frolic? Might I be showing off? Answers: Tone Deaf tries to do its best. Perhaps. Not this time.

Here’s a definitive Dies Bildnis. (But not perfect - one tiny defect near the end. Sorry.)

Luckily I've found one real joke

Music of the classical (straight, formal, posh, Mozart) variety is not a terribly fruitful field for humour. Often, only musicians understand the jokes.

In historical re-enactments of Haydn’s Symphony 45 each musician in turn stops playing during the final adagio, snuffs out the candle on his music stand and departs the stage, leaving just two muted violins at the end. You can Wiki it if you want to find out why. I have never seen such a performance but a musical friend has and was mildly diverted. The audience usually laughs and those listening on the radio are baffled if they are not in on the joke.

In a much more cruel – but comic – musical event I played a central role. During a very boozy pre-Christmas dinner for the editorial staff of the newspaper I worked on I foolishly elected to play several carols on my trumpet. Afterwards I went into the next room for a pint and found a sub-editor I greatly admired propping up the bar. “Who was that awful bastard in there playing carols?” he asked, his atheism offended.

G. B. Shaw used to write musical criticism under the name Corno di Bassetto. He was halfway through a recital by a rather miniaturised Scandinavian women pianist “when the coughing started”. From then on he heard nothing. His recommendation: that the coughers be taken out into adjacent Trafalgar Square, laid in the roadway, “where a warm steam-roller should be passed over their chests”.

Finally the link below – which is genuinely funny – arrived from HHB and was sent to her by her Dad, Avus. What makes this so good (sustained throughout) is the way board movement reflects the music. CLICK