“The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, But in ourselves,” said Julius Caesar in Shakespeare’s play. Caesar may well have been referring to the head-scratching dilemma encountered by the hapless reviewer when assigning a star rating to a review, aware of its weight and implications. Do stars truly reflect quality or do they gloss over faults in the interests of positivity and a quick media grab?
Despite their ubiquity in appraising anything from appliances to books, there is little standardisation in how stars are awarded and interpreted. Now, it threatens to render the entire system meaningless as we avoid in-depth analysis and reduce the many aspects of a performance to a handful of pointy icons. It makes us rather lazy consumers if we judge a production from its star rating without venturing into the substance of a review.
Though performers look to high rankings for marketing material and funding applications, this is not the primary aim of the system. Somewhere along the way, the purpose of the star rating has been hijacked. In a feature I wrote for Limelight about reviewing, Matthew Westwood, Arts Correspondent at The...
I hate having to give star ratings to opera reviews on the excellent international Bachtrack website even though there are rigorous standards applied. Half stars are forbidden, which makes it even worse.
For a great singer, designer or even director can be damned with faint praise when one of the other essential elements in an opera – eg the logic of the libretto – fails to appeal.