A review by Andrew Clements of James Macmillan's trumpet concerto in this morning's Graun has put my back up.
Clements wrote "(The soloist's) virtuosity was unfailingly impressive, MacMillan's mix of bombastic posturing and sanctimonious kitsch as depressing as ever".
It's worth pausing for a moment to savour the use of language here. Note that Clements doesn't say, "MacMillan's mix of bombastic posturing and sanctimonious kitsch was as depressing as ever". No. The was is in the previous clause praising the soloist, and we the readers carry it by inference into the criticism which follows.
Why so shy Andrew? Surely you don't lack the cojones to come right out with it?
Note also that MacMillan's bombastic posturing and sanctimonious kitsch are taken as a given. Clements has no room to persuade us that MacMillan's music features such qualities, preferring to record his own reaction at finding those things.
As ever with criticism, this is opinion masquerading as objectivity. After all, one person's bombast is another's grandeur, and my kitsch may well be your expressiveness.
But these are run of the mill objections to art criticism, I hear you say. Fair enough. Yet what irked me about Clements's snide little put-down was not the inherent weaknesses of the shabby trade it reveals, but the sheer lack of manners and class. Whatever else you can say about MacMillan, it seems pretty certain that he is ten times the musician Andrew Clements is. Does the critic not feel even moderately embarrassed to find himself excoriating in print someone who has forgotten more about the composer's trade then he himself will ever know?
Sibelius once said, "Ignore the critics. No statue was ever erected to a critic."
If only it were so easy.
