This past Friday, a most unusual event occurred. The Yale Philharmonia, Camerata and Glee Club came together to give a performance of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony that filled Woolsey Hall, to the point that a fire marshal literally had to come and shoo out people standing in the wings. I have never seen Woolsey Hall so filled, not even at the mass assemblies held there during Convocation. The performance that followed was, for the most part, magnificent, and I looked forward to reading coverage of it in Monday’s edition of the News. Surely the fact that people were being turned away from a concert of classical music would at least merit a blurb in the Cross Campus column.
Evidently not. For whatever reason, there was not a single word of coverage of this grand event in Monday’s paper.
I understand that the News cannot review every single musical event that occurs on Yale’s campus, but surely a concert of this magnitude deserves at least a token flicker of attention. To ignore it in the way that this paper has sends the message that what these people are doing isn’t valuable; it tacitly implies that all the work that went into producing this event was ultimately worthless. I expect better from the News, and think that the performers at this event — and future events like it — deserve better, too.
Nick Baskin
Sept. 27
The writer is a sophomore in Ezra Stiles College.