How did such an incompetent slouch ever manage to have the likes of
Julian Bream and John Williams singing his praises and traveling half
way around the world to sit at his arrogant feet?
Gary
On 2013-12-15 10:31, howard posner wrote:
On Dec 15, 2013, at 9:26 AM, Tobiah <[email protected]> wrote:
I find his tone anemic, his rhythm unmusically erratic,
I certainly agree about his rhythm (and unless you've heard his
recordings from around 1930 you don't know the half of it), but he
pulled a lot of sound out of the guitar. In 1977, I heard him in the
3,200-seat Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, a cavernous and not particularly
resonant space where the LA Philharmonic played until 2003. He was
84, and obviously having memory or concentration problems, so what he
played often bore only a passing resemblance to what the composer
wrote. But he was quite audible, for better or worse. Mostly worse.
I had never heard him live before -- though I was warned what to
expect -- and as someone with pretensions, however small, of being a
guitarist, I was embarrassed for my instrument.
Apparently Segovia read my review of that concert in the Los Angeles
Times a couple days later, and threatened (I don't know to whom) never
to return to Los Angeles. "You made a lot of people very happy,"
someone at the Times told me. "He's a hateful old man."
The Times music critic, Martin Bernheimer, was not among those I made
happy. He'd reviewed Segovia's LA concert the previous year, and
wrote what most critics were writing about Segovia: the guitar's a
joke and there's no good music for it, but Segovia's definitely the
greatest. Bernheimer was understandably miffed about being made to
look foolish by his newest and youngest stringer (I was 20 at the
time). That review eventually finished me as a Times stringer, a
career in which I could have earned hundreds of dollars a year.
The subject of how much Segovia helped create the classical guitar's
popularity and how much he caught the wave at the right time can be
discussed endlessly, but we should not forget 1) that the classical
music establishment looked at Segovia, and the guitar, with much
condescension, and 2) that he brought some disrepute on the instrument
by atrocious performances in his later years, when someone less
egotistical would have realized it was time to retire. Of course, his
concerts in the 1930's or 1950's could have been embarrassments as
well; I wouldn't know.
But Segovia was helped a lot by talking dog effect: he was hailed as
the greatest classical guitarist by lots of people who had no idea
there were any others.
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