'Heavy-handed'

The wonderful Clive O'Connell! It's good to see that he continues to live up to my low expectations of him. Tim Young and I performed the Boulez Sonatine for flute and piano in the Edge of Sunset Series at the Melbourne Festival last Wednesday night, and for a sort of 'provisional' performance it went pretty spectacularly well: we were together almost all the way through, and felt like we had gone all out for the extremes demanded in the score. So it was a shock to read Clive's review in Friday's Age newspaper - here is the section dealing with my performance:

The difficult Sonatine of 1946 by Boulez ended the night, performed by the National Academy's Timothy Munro on flute with Timothy Young negotiating the piano part. This turned into a heavy-handed affair, with plenty of pedal washes from the keyboard, a reticent wind line and little of the anticipated exhilaration and glittering brilliance. Those pages where the instruments play as partners moved close to being bland, jog-trotting carefully when the music requires abrupt disjunctions and dynamic surprises.

I am determined to use some quotes from this for a future concert poster, for example

'heavy-handed ... reticent ... little of the anticipated exhilaration ... bland, jog-trotting' Clive O'Connell, The Age

As soon as Melbournites see Clive's name attached, they will automatically believe the opposite of what is written....