South African John Allison is the editor of the renowned OPERA magazine and music critic for the ‘Sunday Telegraph’ in London. Between deadlines we managed to catch up with him for a peek behind the front page.

You completed music studies in performance, musicology and composition in Cape Town, but ended up as an editor and music critic in Europe. Please give us an overview of how your career developed after your studies, to becoming a journalist.

JA: There’s no real career structure in music criticism, but success usually depends on a mixture of luck and persistence. Even while doing my PhD at UCT, I realized that I liked writing about music as much as—if not more than—performing it, and I started writing programme notes for my own and others’ performances.

That visibility led to me writing reviews for The Argus, but when I came over to London (to avoid conscription in the late ‘80s) I didn’t realistically expect to get to make my living this way. It took time and I did some teaching and performing for the first 18 months in the UK, but an early lucky break led to me writing occasional reviews for OPERA magazine, which after soon took me onto its staff.

Thanks to its supportive editors, I also got introductions to such newspapers as the Financial Times and Observer, where I did some freelance work before getting a contract on Times, and after ten years there moved to the Sunday Telegraph. One thing usually leads to another … Though my life often seems to be one big deadline, I enjoy being about to write about non-operatic music for the newspaper, while specializing in opera for the magazine. And I enjoy the travel and experiencing music around the world.

Being a reviewer and editor requires a different kind of creativity to being a musician. Do you find it equally satisfying?

JA: Differently satisfying, yet I admit that writing seems to satisfy my creative needs, and it saves on hours of practising an instrument … Both activities can produce an adrenalin rush, but the literary one is more manageable!

Though, when I set out to study music first, I’m sure I wanted to be a performer. Now I’m relieved not to be one. I don’t envy any musician their lifestyle, not even the greatest performers.

What is the most challenging aspect of your job as editor?

JA: Finding time to think.

In a world where the printed media is in crises, how hard is it to keep a magazine like Opera going in printed version?

JA: Thankfully, at the moment, demand for ‘old-fashioned’ print remains as high as ever. In those rare moments when I do have time to think, however, I do wonder about how things will look in the future, with the media changing so rapidly and in ways that are always hard to predict by more than a few years. However much we can rely on people still enjoying the physical product of a magazine now, it would be foolish not to make some plans for the future and establish a digital presence, as we have done.

How important is the internet presence of a magazine like yours and what percentage of e-subcribers do you have?

JA: Only around 10% of our readers worldwide are e-subscribers, but the number is growing.

Do you think that music critics have too much power in terms of “making” or “breaking” a production/performance with positive or negative reviews?

JA: No, I don’t think critics have this power, and nor should they—criticism, whether negative or positive, should be about a dialogue between the art form and the public. And in a city such as London, where there are so many papers, no single critic has that make-or-break power, as there are so many different opinions that the potential damage of any one review is cancelled out by a contrasting opinion.

Of course, this lack of agreement is sometimes taken up by the ‘Why-do-we-need-critics?’ brigade, as if being in agreement was important! As I say, it’s about stimulating discussion, and in any case you would find the same divergence of opinion if you did a straw poll of an audience (or indeed any group of musicians or music professionals). In cities where there is one very big paper, for example The New York Times, it’s possible that a reviewer can wield more power, but even that is changing.

In a world where social media (Facebook/Twitter, etc) is very strong, do you think the influence/opinion of critics is still equally important as 10 years ago?

JA: Yes and no! In an age of blogging, everyone’s an authority … And sometimes, one discovers good, new and well-informed writers out there. But generally it’s easy to tell who’s to be trusted and who isn’t. I don’t feel threatened by all this activity around the fringes.

What do you think makes a good critic?

JA: Knowledge and lively, interesting judgements are essential, as is an ability to communicate clearly.

Luckily, there are few rights or wrongs in this business, it’s mostly very subjective. But an ability to conjure up a sense of what it was like to have been at the performance helps, and one of the hardest aspects - since music exists to say things that words cannot - is to put sounds into words. The critics I admire most all do that.

I think it helps to have been a performer, too, so as to understand the process of performance and to remember that there is a human being on the other side of the footlights - though that can also give rise to the ‘failed musician syndrome’. We’ve all seen frustrated performers take it out on successful ones …

How does one write a “good” review (in terms of quality of the review, not the performance on is reviewing)?

JA: A good review should be clear and engaging, even witty — but the wit should never be at the expense of the content. One of the reasons I feel that too many performances are either talked up or damned is because it’s easier to write excitingly about good or bad performances. But the honest truth is that most performances sit somewhere in between outstanding and awful, and there is an art to writing interestingly about a performance that is not in itself especially remarkable.

What is the most difficult performance you have had to review and why?

JA: I’m not sure I can answer this. Perhaps I’ve blocked out some bad experiences in the past. Some are always going to be easier to write about than others, but there’s always something to say …

Is there a genre of music that you prefer reviewing?

JA: I’m interested in most things, but particularly enjoy writing about piano music and pianists. Writing every day for a Polish publication during the last Chopin Competition in Warsaw (2010) was very enjoyable—a reflection of listening to nothing but Chopin every day, and also interviewing some legendary pianists on the jury.

Obviously I have made a speciality of opera, and am happy about that, but I wouldn’t like to miss out on any genre, and I cover them all. Contemporary music can be rewarding, especially as one is frequently reviewing something that has never been written about before. This is where putting sounds into words can get challenging.

Who was the most interesting person you have ever interviewed?

JA: The majority of the most interesting figures have been conductors or composers—they are the ones who spend the most time actually thinking about music.

Pavarotti surprised me, being a famously non-intellectual tenor, with his insights into the differences between singing Verdi and Puccini. Even among many interesting conductors, Riccardo Muti is one of the most articulate on music.

Generally it’s most interesting to meet the older figures, with links to lost traditions and history—people like the composer Elliott Carter, with his memories of Charles Ives, or Galina Vishnevskaya, for her life as Moscow’s most celebrated diva.

I’ve been lucky to have met and interviewed almost everyone I would want to—and then there have been those encounters I would not have expected, such as talking about Dowland’s music with Sting.

Published 04.05.2012.
Interview by Christien Coetzee Klingler.