Searching--nay, hunting--for classical music reviews

I don't know why the local papers make it utterly impossible to find classical music reviews but this is one of my major grievances with some of these papers.

Sure, I can Google it, but then sometimes, I end up finding out more information than I really want to know, such as the disposition of a certain critic's undergarments (read the comments), when all I wanted to do was read about Wang's performance.

But then again, I wouldn't have discovered this site or have met this 686-year old chess prodigy who has a predilection for palindromes or his 1006-year old brother who doesn't dig palindromes, but prefers lysol. It's fascinating the kind of people you meet online, b/c I'm fairly certain that I'd never meet a 686-year old chess prodigy or someone whose hobby is lysol in real life. But I digress.

We were talking about newspapers that make it really hard for one to find music reviews.

Take the S.F. Chronicle. I read the Chron for two things--its food section in actual print paper format, and when I can find it, Joshua Kosman's reviews. I occasionally read other reviews and click on some of the most popular articles if any strike my fancy, but by and large, I don't like the Chron, except for those two sections.

But they make it nearly impossible to find these classical music reveiws, which is one reason I don't like them. For example, today, I was looking for a review for SF Opera's "Das Rheingold". Except that I couldn't spell Rheingold correctly, so a search for this on the SF Gate website yielded nada.

Then I tried to find the review the way I normally find articles, which is to navigate the subject tabs starting with the front page. 1. I start at SFgate.com. I don't see "art" or "music", so I click on "entertainment", which is my first objection. That takes me to this horrible page, with bad design--lots of distracting graphics, headings in microscopic font, and nary a music category to be seen. 2. I scroll down if I can see an obvious opera or classical music category. no. 3. On the top section, there is a "performances" tab, so I click on that. It takes me to this page. On the top menu, there is a link for opera. Aha. Easier than I thought. 4. I click on it. It takes me to a search page with no content. Alas. 5. I hit the back button to go back to the performances page.

Grievance number two is that none of the articles listed on this page have authors listed. 6. But I see a review for lyric opera listed under "reviews>theatre", (grievance number three is that this review for Lyric Opera is listed under theatre instead of opera.) so I click on the "more" button, thinking there might be more opera reviews. No again. 7.I hit the back button and return to the performances page. 8. Now I click on "Lyric Opera" article, thinking maybe if Kosman wrote it, I can click on his name and more articles by him will appear. Because in most other news publications (WSJ, NYT, Merc, heck, even the Examiner), if I click on an author's name, that is what happens.

I arrive at an opera review that is indeed written by Kosman, but is not "Das Rheingold". 8. I click on his name, expecting to find more reviews written by him. I get his email address instead. (grievance number four: instead of directing me to his email address, if I click on an author's name, I would like to see a list of more articles written by that person. ) At this point, I'm tempted to email him and ask him why the S.F. Chron makes it ridiculously impossible for those of us with very short attention spans to find his reviews, but decide that this wouldn't be a productive email, since he didn't design the page. Besides which, I'm sure he'd just ignore me.

9. So now I hit the back button again and I'm back to the performances page. Several clicks later, I give up and go to Google to do the search, since I know that it will correct my spelling errors and still understand what I want.

So about 12 clicks later, and via Google, I finally found it. If I had actually spelled "Das Rheingold" correctly, grievance number five would've been something about the irony of being able to find things on the SF Chron website better via Google than via their own search function, but since I was a spelling idot, I don't exactly have the right to voice that grievance.

It's true that I could've just done a search on "Joshua Kosman" on their website. But what if the Chron one day decided to hire another music critic? If I kept finding music reviews just by doing searches under "Kosman", I would never find music critic #2, were that to happen. Besides, I like the idea of "browsing" other similar articles that might appear via clicking on category tabs.

Now to compare/contrast, I searched for a random opera review by Anthony Tommasini on the NYT website. The NYT is like the inverse of the Chron, because I read almost everything (or at least skim the headlines) but the arts section. However, if I wanted to, I can go directly from the front page to the music section, by clicking on "music" under "Arts" in the left-hand column. Once I get to the music section, I can often find what I want. I wish classical music got its own category, but classical music reviews were 35 out of the 68 reviews on the music page tonight, which isn't bad representation.

Just two clicks later, I arrived at this review for “Il Matrimonio Segreto”.

Notwithstanding the downsizing of Holland and NYT's annoying penchant (at times) for being modern music-phobic (or maybe this ended with Holland's tenure?), it's clear which publication wants readers to actually find classical music reviews.

I don't understand why a publication that has a reasonable classical music critic would go and hide his reviews in some cardboard box in the back corner of an attic and make it annoyingly difficult for us to find his reviews.