How records get chosen for review

That Shostakovich disc does sound interesting. I too was not aware of this cadenza situation. But I am a bit confused, it isn’t like there is a nice relaxing break (or most challenging of all, an opportunity to re-tune) between that cadenza and the mad-cap final movement.

It must be nice to belong to a record reviewer’s country club and get to pick and choose. Speaking from a (blessedly) FORMER reviewer’s perspective, there were no choices in what to review. A box about the size of a shoe box would arrive from Joel Flegler at Fanfare crammed with CDs (and almost all of the plastic boxes were shattered and broken in the process of mailing; Joel had no budget for bubblewrap). There were almost bound to be between one and a half dozen (groan) Bruch Concerto No. 1s in the box. Quite possibly a colleague at Fanfare got some of the same discs to review because Joel Flegler liked the contrasting views (or if the views agreed, the contrasting writing styles).

How you felt about the artists or the repertoire or the record label or whether they were advertisers or not was utterly irrelevant. You had a remarkably brief period of time to listen and pen your reviews because before too long another shoe box of CDs would arrive, sometimes bumping right up against the deadline. There were weekends when I would spent 10 or more straight hours listening, listening, listening, dozing off…. Worst of all, 65 or 70 minutes of listening is over and you look down at the page before you and see that all you’d written was something like “measure 3 2nd mvt not at mp [mezzo piano]. Nice staccato.” Crap, I’m supposed to pen a page and a half out of that? So you’d cue it up again.

Joel Flegler had something of a bias against reissues which I did not necessarily share. But I was on the staff long enough to get the very same recording three times on three different labels (Schubert for violin and orchestra, and not bad at all. Hopefully I had the same general reaction each time!).

On the other hand right from the start (years before I joined the staff) Fanfare was willing to review what were then called “vanity press” releases, things that High Fidelity and Gramophone and Stereo Review and, for the most part, American Record Guide would not touch, and I sure got my share of them. These days almost every release is in some way a vanity/subsidized/sponsored release! But for a long while that made Fanfare unique. If there was pay-for-play, that is, if Fanfare wanted advertising before a disc would be reviewed, we reviewers had no way of knowing. It was just one more “jewel box” CD in the shoe box stuffed full of them. If it was a stinker than the advertising bought them a bad review. And there were some stinkers. It is not easy to write an entirely negative yet fair and thorough review, in my experience, but it was something you needed to learn how to do.

Now and then your box would have some CDs marked “don’t bother to review,” but whether that meant Joel didn’t want it reviewed for whatever reasons of his own, or that he was sending you a duplicate and someone else was reviewing it, or it was a reissue that someone else had reviewed in a past issue, you had no idea. We reviewers rarely ever talked to each other, and I certainly never met any of them in person. And don’t tell Joel but now and then I’d review it anyway (and it would get published).

Sometimes a CD would arrive marked “review if exceptional.” Whatever that means. Often I’d review it regardless since I had to listen to it to make that judgment. Those tended to come nearer the deadline when the editor already sensed the issue was full (and each issue of Fanfare was an inch or more thick in those days).

I can only recall one review that was not published – a multi-CD set of Wolfgang Schneiderhan recordings and broadcasts, including some really nice chamber music, and things recorded with his wife, Irmgard Seefried, so it was a rare chance for me to review vocal recordings and I labored hard on that review. At the last minute the importer decided nobody in the US would be interested in it. I think they were dead wrong but they told Joel Flegler not to bother with it.

Only once that I can recall was I made aware that an advertiser had used that fact to specifically ask for a review. A well-respected violinist had just recorded two major concertos and it received (from another reviewer) a shockingly negative review, I mean it was brutal, and I was surprised reading it because everything prior that I had heard from that artist was really fine, and the label itself was small but quality. The label felt the review had to have been biased and asked for a second review so I was asked to be the fresh pair of ears. And my reaction was just about as negative. And I was paid the usual shocking pittance by Fanfare. I name no names.

So if that is pay-to-play, then paying got them two negative reviews rather than one.

At one time Fanfare was known as the magazine that reviewed everything, which was nearly but not literally true but must have seemed that way given what was not being reviewed by the others but was reviewed in Fanfare. But if the record labels were going to bombard Fanfare with product, and from what I got in the mail every few weeks they surely did, then the money to pay for all that has to come from somewhere. If Company A objects to paying to have Company A’s records reviewed, then on what basis should they expect Company B (and C and D and so on) to pay to have Company A’s records reviewed? No advertising, no magazine. No magazine, no reviews. But you want a review?