Class reading suggestions: medill, June 2025

Below are a few links to pieces that have reference to things we will discuss in class, or that you can peruse later if you're interested. 

A critical difference (June 2002, reprinted 2019): this is a first-person piece I wrote about being the first woman to review classical music for The New York Times. 

Pieces fit for the likes of a young, curious audience (The New York Times, 2002)

A world-famous conductor performed in a DC public school. The result? Mixed marks (The Washington Post, 2019)

Go to that opera again; singers are only human (The New York Times, 2006)

Lang Lang's unique style, good and bad, offers originality (The Washington Post, 2014)

Evgeny Kissin plays forgotten composers and declaims poetry in stunning performance (The Washington Post, 2014)

Domingo, Bocelli can't find their way out of this "Messe" (The Washington Post, 2008)

Serviceable 'Tosca' signals business as usual at the Washington National Opera (The Washington Post, 2011)

Sabotage Puccini's Tosca? Hardly (The Washington Post, 2011)

The reviewer that pushed Placido Domingo over the edge (The Atlantic, 2011)

Plácido Domingo and questions of bias (The Washington Post, 2011)

Pianist asks The Washington Post to remove a review under the EU's Right to be Forgotten ruling, The Washington Post, 2014

All four of these pieces from the Washington Post are about concerts, and about US/Russian cultural exchange: two about the National Symphony Orchestra playing in Russia, and two about the Mariinsky Orchestra playing in D.C. But each piece had a different mandate and a very different genesis. The first was designed to appear on Page One, and went through many rounds of editing and cutting; the second was for the Style section and included lots of detail and local color; the third was a straightforward concert review, and the fourth was an unplanned opinion piece or news story. Taken together, they illustrate some of the many different things that can come up when you're faced with what seems the simple task of writing about a performance. 

'There’s still high culture in America': Why the NSO went to Moscow. March 2017 

Inside the NSO's grand return to Russia. March 2017

Maddeningly uneven orchestra excites range of reactions. November 2017

The concert was about unity: the message was all Russian. November 2017

Years ago, I compiled a collection of New York Times reviews of 300 words or less for a criticism class, and I find I refer to it often. It's probably not something you'd want to read all at once, but dipping into it can be a good reminder that when you're writing a review, you don't necessarily need to say as much as you may think you do, and, that what seems short to a writer may not seem short to a reader. I include it here for reference.

"I discouraged emotional reactions and opinion-mongering on the grounds that they were a waste of space. ‘Feelings,’ I would say, ‘will come through automatically in your choice of words. Description is the valid part of reviewing; spontaneous reactions, if courteously phrased, have some validity; opinions are mostly worthless.'"  -- Virgil Thomson, composer and music critic of the New York Herald Tribune from 1940 to 1954

“My literary method, then as now, was to seek out the precise adjective. Nouns are names and can be libelous; the verbs, though sometimes picturesque, are few in number and tend toward alleging motivations. It is the specific adjectives that really describe and that do so neither in sorrow nor in anger. And to describe what one has heard is the whole art of reviewing. To analyze and compare are stimulating; to admit prejudices can be helpful; to lead one’s reader stop by step from the familiar to the surprising is proof of polemical skill. And certainly musical polemics were my intent, not aiding careers or teaching Appreciation.” -- Virgil Thomson