Post your worst reviewed music

andybob · October 8, 2018, 9:37am

I shifted the broader Missa Solemnis discussion into its own thread.

tripleCrotchet · October 8, 2018, 10:08am

Done.

AndersVinberg · October 8, 2018, 10:33pm

Yeah!
Claptrap, balderdash and flapdoodle, bitches!

tripleCrotchet · October 9, 2018, 1:59am

… and your point exactly is?

Geoff_Coupe · October 9, 2018, 5:47am

I think Anders is merely tying threads together…

tripleCrotchet · October 9, 2018, 9:30am

Ok. Understood. Has anyone collected these James Leonard threads together? I was pointed to another one recently.

I don’t think I’d noticed the pattern before because roon seems to anonymize the reviews? Now I’m aware of this nonsense it’s the positive ones slipping through unnoticed that are really bugging me. Difficult to ignore those.

Geoff_Coupe · October 9, 2018, 9:35am

I suspect this is how Roon receives some (but not all) reviews from Allmusic - so Allmusic is doing it for some reason. Perhaps they too are embarrassed by Mr. Leonard.

Edit: OTOH, it may be a bug in the Roon code:

joel · October 9, 2018, 9:59am

We don’t anonymize reviews. If we’ve been told there’s an author, we will display who it is.

tripleCrotchet · October 9, 2018, 10:18am

I haven’t done a systematic test but I’ve got a quite varied “travel” roon library with me. My experience is the same as the poster above. Pop/Rock/Jazz have authors but Classical doesn’t.

I don’t know if it is significant but where there is an author it seems to be a tag line in the body of the text at the bottom of the review rather than a unique piece of data that could be treated seperately like an artist or a composer. But maybe that’s just the way the display works.

Any reason the Classical reviews seem to be coming through differently? The authors are there on allmusic so they must be dropped somewhere in the chain.

Geoff_Coupe · October 9, 2018, 1:29pm

So, have you had a chance to check out the code path for Classical albums yet, as you mentioned in the thread I quoted? Because it certainly is the case that for all the classical albums that have no author listed in Roon that I’ve checked, there is always an author named in Allmusic… Thanks.

tripleCrotchet · October 11, 2018, 4:26pm

Of course it’s going to be difficult to top Beethoven’s Missa solemnis. The only way really is Bach’s Mass in B minor. Mr. Leonard rises to the occasion and not only eviscerates Gardiner’s 1985 version (another Grammophone Magazine Top 100 Recordings of All Time) but does a pretty good back handed hatchet job on the great man Johann Sebastian himself whilst he’s at it.

A more typical review of this outstanding set can be found here: