Patty,

Don't let it bother you. The author sounds like an insufferable bore. He certainly wouldn't be invited to my dinner parties not on account of his opinions, which are his own and are likely to be well-informed, but on account of his personality which comes across as gross and priggish.

When something falls short, a review is easy because you just have to describe what a performance is not to get a partial picture to the reader. It is vastly more difficult to describe the parts that don't fall short than the parts that do, especially when you have a ten dollar vocabulary and some musical training, because it's just so easy to fall back on those words and completely avoid thinking. What happens to a reviewer in this situation when nothing is lacking in a performance? Realizing that you write better pans than praises, you wrack your brain in order to find something that could possibly be construed as going wrong (favorite second-rate music critic target: programming; second favorite target: atmosphere) because you know that if you don't, your review will fall flat.

This is why most of the words of praise that has are really left-handed compliments that I'm sure he finds quite clever. He is incapable of describing the essence of what a given performance is, so he shoehorns the evening into something he can write about without thinking.

My review of his livejournal oeuvre? Fine writer. Can't review worth s*it.