Critic: Heal thyself

 A review in yesteerday's  Pittsburgh Post-Gazette begins with a promising premise and then oddly loses its way. Critic Jeremy Reynolds opens by invoking Brahms’ collaborative revisions as a way to frame criticism of the world premiere of Jacob Bancks’ The Greatest Show on Earth, suggesting the new work might have benefited from stronger editorial discipline. The observation is reasonable and initially well argued.

But the review itself soon displays the same lack of structural focus it criticizes. After several paragraphs devoted to the premiere, the article digresses into a brief meditation on nineteenth-century criticism before abruptly compressing the rest of the program. Beethoven’s Symphony No. 2 — the central orchestral work of the evening — is never even named outright, appearing only by implication as “this early Beethoven work.” The Brahms Piano Concerto No. 1 with Emanuel Ax, described as the concert’s high point, receives only a short closing paragraph.

The irony becomes clear in the review’s final criticism of the orchestra: that the Pittsburgh Symphony should bring the same energy and commitment to every work on the program. It is difficult not to notice that the review itself is a target for the same criticism. Faced with a program of Bancks, Beethoven, and Brahms, the critic lavishes attention on the premiere while treating the core repertoire almost as an afterthought. The result reads less like a considered evaluation of the concert than a piece that never quite finished its own editorial process.