Distinct styles, panned or praised, are vital

This is an argument that New York Times critic John Rockwell advanced recently. "Better a personal voice than an earnest student of convention," he wrote. "And if you make some people mad, and you will, all the better."

His illustrations for this argument were two pianists -- one he admires, Helene Grimaud, and one whose work he finds mannered and eccentric, Gianluca Cascioli. We should value both of them, he says, because they are strongly individual artists with the power to divide opinion.

Then this old and valued colleague and friendly adversary enjoyed some critic-vs.-critic fun by pointing out that I have applauded Cascioli and come down pretty hard on Grimaud. At least in Cascioli's case, the two of us heard the same qualities and characteristics at work but arrived at different assessments of their intent or consequence.

All you have to do is read through a few day's postings in the opera chat rooms on the Internet to realize that most disagreements boil down to: "The performers I like are better than the ones you like." Rockwell is smarter than that, and he tells us exactly why he admires Grimaud and why Cascioli sends him up the wall.

I don't see the point in arguing the relative merits of these particular pianists until we have heard each of them on the same occasion, or are talking about the same recording. Rockwell believes Grimaud excels in German and Russian romantic music, but I have only heard her play concertos by Ravel and Mozart, in 1997 and 2000; I heard and praised Cascioli playing Mozart in 1999 and Bernstein in 2001, while Rockwell took particular aim at a very recent performance of a Beethoven concerto by the young Italian pianist.

Of course Rockwell is substantially right in his general point. Many of the greatest artists overturn convention and provoke controversy; most of us would rather hear a risk-taker than someone who's playing it safe.

Peter Gelb, who runs Sony Classical, ruefully pointed out not long ago that three of the best-selling artists in the classical record business are Glenn Gould, Vladimir Horowitz, and Maria Callas, all of them safely dead. Callas has been a goddess for so long that it's easy to forget she was one of the most reviled singers of her time; people hated her because she challenged the norms. They also pointed out the increasingly severe vocal problems she exhibited, and they weren't wrong about that; the question was how much those problems mattered.

Gould ("he plays everything staccato," people complained) and Horowitz ("eccentric, willful, unmusical") also had vocal and intelligent detractors who weren't wrong to notice the limitations they heard -- although critics of both artists may have failed to place the real limitations within the perspective of the overwhelming achievements.

Of course there are also artists who seem to be universally loved and admired. Pianist Arthur Rubinstein, in the last several decades of his career, was one of them; singer Janet Baker was another; cellist Yo-Yo Ma is an example today. I don't recall ever seeing a strongly negative reaction to Ma's playing. If there has ever been one, the cellist probably remembers it and can quote it verbatim, long after he has forgotten all the praise. Ma has maintained his popularity by consistently pushing the envelope, moving into many aspects and areas of music; not all of Ma's fans are equally interested in everything he does, but no one dislikes him. Some might question his taste, but no one can deny his consistent artistry.

There is one point of Rockwell's that I think needs some refinement. I don't think it is particularly useful to "love" or "hate" artists, as opposed to liking or disliking particular performances by artists, at least for the purposes of critical discussion.

You can't fool the public for long, but sometimes audience members do applaud reputations, and their own discriminating taste in being present, rather than what is actually being offered to their ears.

Of course no one is completely objective, and opinion is by definition subjective. All of us have artists whose work we enjoy; all of us have encountered performers who fail to leave us begging for more. But every listener has to be open to surprise. Even great artists have off days; a performer you don't usually admire may astonish you by finding the groove.

I have certainly found myself applauding performers whose work I don't invariably enjoy. No sooner did I decide that Emanuel Ax was an artist without humor than he showed up to play Richard Strauss's "Burlesque" with more panache and riper wit than anyone else I have heard. Andre Watts's performances of standard big bow-wow piano concertos in huge outdoor venues like Tanglewood seldom excite me. But when he played a benefit recital for the Lydian Quartet in the tiny Slosberg Hall at Brandeis University, offering works he loves but probably doesn't get to perform as often as he plays the Tchaikovsky Concerto, he was poetic, intimate, and enthralling.

Certain artists, like former Boston Symphony Orchestra music director Seiji Ozawa, become whipping boys, victimized by people's unwillingness to change their minds, or even listen. That is, in the '70s and into the 1980s, people said dismissive things about Ozawa's limitations that were probably true at that time -- I wrote many of them myself. But some people went on saying them, without variation, well into the 1990s when they were no longer true, at least as sweeping generalizations.

Now, of course, Ozawa is the darling of Vienna, in a sense following the course of his mentor, Leonard Bernstein, whose labors at the New York Philharmonic seldom earned a kind word from the New York press until he was lionized in Austria. He came back an icon and a demigod.

And who knows, the next time I hear Helene Grimaud, she may play Brahams and make me her slave. It's part of my job to hope so.