Among the many memorial notices for Andrew Porter, who died last week, the one by the New Yorker's Alex Ross stands out with its justified, unstinting praise:
"Porter was the most formidable classical-music critic of the late twentieth century, and, pace George Bernard Shaw and Virgil Thomson, may have been the finest practitioner of this unsystematic art in the history of the English language.
Colleagues in both England and America regarded him with awe: he heard everything, remembered all, brought to bear profound cultural knowledge, and cast his immense learning in an elegant, fluid style. I would guess that no critic in the magazine’s history — not Edmund Wilson, not Lewis Mumford, not Pauline Kael — possessed greater authority in his or her field ….
Porter’s New Yorker columns [1972-1992] were a mesmerizing fusion of criticism, scholarship, and cultural commentary. He would give the literary background of an opera libretto, delve into multiple editions of the score, and recount its performance history before proceeding to the rendition at hand ….