"AN unpleasant critic is an impossible one, and a bore to his readers, ever accurate his judgments."
So said Charles Act on, senior music critic of this newspaper from 1955 to 1986, in a talk on the subject of "The Critic's Creed" which he gave at the Gate Theatre in 1971. On the evidence of this attractive volume of selected criticism, edited by Gareth Cox of the University of Limerick, Charles Act on passed his own test with flying colours; in these pieces he is excited, irritated, angered and moved almost to tears, but he is never unpleasant or boring.
On the contrary, there are delightful surprises in store for the reader who, like myself, associates Charles Acton primarily with classical music. Here we find Charles reviewing Bill Haley and the Comets ("Rock'n'roll quite obviously is not music, but it is a new style rhythm which cannot be ignored and should stay with us a little while longer ), Liberace ("One cannot object to his combining Gounod's Ave Maria with Schubert's into a cloying mass of notes - it is what each of these maudlin pieces has been asking for a century"), and Marlene Diet rich ("she kept me spellbound"), and all with a good heart, which, as Bill Haley fans will know only too well, is hard to find especially in a music critic, who is not expected to have a heart at all.
The greatest hits of the classical era are present too, of course, and they are names to conjure with Stravinsky, Rostropovich, De Los Angeles, Van Cliburn. There are glittering occasions galore - a Berlioz Requiem at Croke Park; a performance of Messiaen's Tzirangalila symphony at the St Francis Xavier Hall; the opening concert of the long awaited National Concert Hall, for which, as Gareth Cox points out in his introduction, Charles Acton campaigned tirelessly for many years.
Bouts of sternness break out now and again, for Charles Acton had a reputation as a critic who demanded the best not just of the performers at music events but also of the organisers and the audience: if you are paying for a programme, then you should be entitled to one without misprints, was his argument, which led to an amusing exchange with a reader who was moved to complain about the number of misprints in one of his reviews. Nothing enraged him more than what he called "the inconsequential cough" - which, alas, unlike many of the practices prevalent at the time when these pieces were written, such as the eating of popcorn and chocolates during concerts, is still alive and well and in our musical midst.
That such a modest little volume should contain so much of interest to music lovers is a tribute both to its editor and to the author; that the pieces should, in the main, despite the horrendously early deadlines of the days of hot metal, be beautifully written, is a wonderful bonus. I have left a lot out; let me just squeeze in a paragraph from a piece Charles Acton filed from the 1959 Bayreuth Festival after attending Wolfgang Wagner's production of his grandfather's opera Tristan und Isolde:
"Gradually (and so slowly that one wonders if it is really changing, of whether one's eyes are playing tricks), as Tristan and Isolde take their places down left, they become the centre of five concentric circles of light and shadow, a hazy nimbus of moon develops on the cyclorama and all else is invisible. The whole thing is almost monochrome; the process takes 10 or 15 minutes. The quintessential lovers are isolated from all the rest of the world. They and the audience are utterly absorbed in a beauty not of this world and Wagner's music affects one beyond tears."
