Taste Test

Laurence Shames

MUSIC

I saw the light in a liquor store not long ago. I'd gone in for a bottle of my favorite single-malt whiskey. The clerk, however, seemed intent on having me try a bottle of his favorite singlemalt whiskey. "No thanks," I said, "I'll take the Laphroaig." "The Macallan is better," he insisted. I offered a mollifying shrug. "De gustibus non est disputandum." The clerk would have none of it. "De gustibus my eye," he said. "Taste is absolute."

I bought the beverage I'd come for, but over time the clerk seems to have won the larger argument. I've become convinced that people of passion make definitive judgments—especially on those topics that the conventional wisdom, fainthearted to the point of fibrillation, holds to be most subjective.

Take music. The conventional wisdom will tell you that different ears hear the same thing differently. Nonsense. The fact is that most people don't use their ears. If they did, the muddle surrounding musical reputations couldn't possibly exist.

In the matter of pianists, there are exactly two wholly satisfactory players before the public today, and their names are Vladimir Ashkenazy and Maurizio Pollini. Conveniently enough, they fall at the poles of the Nietzschean schema of the Dionysian and Apollonian, with Pollini making the most elegant case possible for order and restraint and Ashkenazy, his Russian soul defecting all over the auditorium, making one realize that before there was Coltrane there was Rachmaninoff. Murray Perahia, when not wafting off the piano bench by dint of his slightly nerdy spirituality, can be heartbreakingly good, and Andras Schiff's Goldberg Variations belongs on the shelf next to Glenn Gould's immortal reading. Among the up-andcomers, a fellow named Orrett Rhoden is being hyped as the next Ivo Pogorelich. I didn't know we needed another one, since the last one, once he'd slithered out of the ermine coat, proved to be not much more than a skinny Slav whose eyes rolled back in his head as he illustrated the wisdom of Rubinstein's dictum that a man should not play Chopin before the age of forty. And speaking of eyes, Andre Watts is the perfect pianist for deaf people with twentytwenty vision. If he were less handsome, he'd be playing Bar Mitzvahs in the suburbs; if Emanuel Ax were more handsome, he'd be Andrd Watts.

Among violinists, if you've got to listen to anyone other than Itzhak Perlman, it should be Gidon Kremer. Kremer is an awful snob, and plays like one; in his Bach partitas, you can almost hear him murmuring, "Drop dead if you don't like it, you miserable peon." Fortunately, you do like it. What you don't like is not knowing whether Pinchas Zukerman is a fiddler or a conductor, whether he does or doesn't have a beard, and whether the strings on his violin are made of catgut or space-age titanium. But at least Zukerman hits the notes. Isaac Stem had to go all the way to China to find listeners who didn't elbow each other in the ribs about all the ones he missed. Nonetheless, Stern has a stage presence, though not as much as Kyung-Wha Chung, the violin's most riveting choreographer. Chung begins a performance by placing her feet about two cubits apart, then holds herself utterly still except for a trancelike swooping sway. The pose would seem a sex sell were it not that the playing is every bit as concentrated as the pose.

Finally, a word must be said about the aesthetic turpitude afflicting today's brand-name tenors. Long on voice, short on taste, they are setting a disastrous example for brilliant young singers like David Gordon, who has, thank God, so far held the line against schmaltz and crossover. Luciano Pavarotti, the Judy Garland of opera, has an incomparable knack for making the most sublime aria sound like a Neapolitan organgrinder's break song. And Placido Domingo has offered himself as a willing shill for everything from John Denver sing-alongs to Andrew Lloyd Webber's Tin Pan Alley Requiem. Don't these primo dons realize that opera is quite vulgar enough without resorting to checked-tablecloth folk ditties and matinee-idol lullabies? For a while, it seemed that Jose Carreras—who has, by the way, the most elegant voice of the three— was the sole holdout. But no, he was just waiting for someone to make him an offer. Now he does pap called Romantico and sings Tony in rerecordings of West Side Story. Which needn't have been so bad, except he's a Jet, a Jet all the way, and the guys with the Spanish accents are supposed to be on the other team. Et tu, Jose?