Ah, critics… where would be be without them? I don’t even bother reading reviews much anymore - they’re generally very depressing and most likely at odds with my own impressions. But whatever…

Negative reviews are reasonably common to my music. Visit the link below and you’ll see what I mean. However occasionally you’ll get one critic who will go in with all guns blazing. Everyone likes to look at a car smash, and so here’s a short selection of some of those worst super-negative reviews. Note that the bold emphasis in each review is mine.

For a more complete listing of reviews, visit http://www.hindson.com.au/reviews.html

In Memoriam: Concerto for Amplified Cello and Orchestra
    The world premiere of Matthew Hindson’s Concerto For Amplified Cello And Orchestra, subtitled In Memoriam, was a prime instance of how an enfant terrible (born 1968) can turn music into sensationalism by inventing or inciting effects, from quasi-hysterical to vapid, demanding attention for a deliberate shocker lasting 34 unrelenting minutes. - Fred Blanks, The North Shore Times, 18 April 2001.

Moments of Plastic Jubilation / Plastic Jubilation

    The premiere of Matthew Hindson’s Moments of Plastic Jubilation, scored for an electronic piano and CD playback, was disappointing. It is a vapid appropriation of techno-jazz without the sophistication of this genre. The work begins in pseudo-ambient mode and proceeds to stab at Philip Glass, techno-pop and piano-bar. It is indulgent twaddle and [the performer]’s role is akin to a club DJ. - Xenia Hanusiak, Herald-Sun, 28 November 2000.
    My next musical outing an up-to-the-minute recital by Michael Kieran Harvey and Bernadette Harvey-Balkus at the Opera House Studio showed how much Australia has changed … the techno-junk of Matthew Hindson’s solo, Moments Of Plastic Jubilation (all plastic, little jubilation), added nothing to its composer’s reputation … We have to hear this stuff to be reminded of what substantial and significant piano repertoire really is…” - John Carmody, Sun-Herald - Metro, 8 April 2001.

The Rage Within
    …By contrast, Matthew Hindson’s task in The Rage Within was to create the poetry, or at least some form of aesthetic web, in an apparently inauspicious site for the purpose, the mind of a serial killer. I sometimes think that Hindson’s originality as a composer lies in his penchant to delve, in his polite girls’ private school manner, into psychological areas that were not quite what his parents had in mind when shelling out for all those music lessons. Each piece seems to capture the quietly suppressed alarm in the exclamation, ‘Really? A serial killer! Well, that’s lovely, dear.‘

    Needless to say, the piece didn’t achieve [a] positive view of homo sapiens. Nor was it the cry of an angry young man trying to shake us from a state of denial. What it did achieve was cold, unsettling, unpleasant, and there. - Peter McCallum, The Sydney Morning Herald, 9 March 1999.

Speed
    More musical drivel from Matthew Hindson… how does that seem as a way of leading into a word or two on his orchestral piece, Speed? A bit sweeping and dismissive perhaps? Yes, but it is one of the legitimate reactions to Speed, which self-confessedly takes its musical cue from one of the lesser genres of our time. Techno music, nominated by Hindson as his stylistic starting point, is the sort of music you make when you want to grind your heel - ever so nonchalantly - on the old idea of music as a nobly expressive, humane activity.

    Its mechanical repetitiveness of figuration and beat is a finger sign to musical as tradition - and, in case you feel like raising a red flag in sympathy, it means the same for the idea of music as revolution. This is music which goes with the spurious sense of immunity a hoon might feel while revving-up a wreck on the way to a fast-food joint; its moments of plastic jubilation, faithfully echoed by Hindson, at best fit the closing shots of the latest action picture schlock.
    Of course, there is nothing of the hoon about Hindson. He seems a pleasant young man, undoubtedly talented, who is working at the moment as the Sydney Symphony Orchestra’s resident (or, as they say, attached) composer. They wouldn’t let a hoon in there, would they?
    In fact, Speed is the soft of pseudo-pop score very much in favour with the musical establishment at the moment. Conductors like a shortish piece which gets under the guard of younger listeners - a majority, as it happens, at this 6.30 PM concert - and makes a lot of people feel they are up with the times without letting its stainless steel finish impinge seriously on their attention. You can jig with the beat - the SSO’s guest conductor, Muhai Tang, shook out a few rumba swivels as he left us in no doubt that he was attuned to the mood of the moment - and there are no indignant exits by members of the audience. If that was new music, that wasn’t so bad, was it? You could be high safely on this Speed.” - Roger Covell, The Sydney Morning Herald, 27 August 1999.