dutiful journalism

The publicity people for the Peninsula Symphony wanted an article for the Daily Journal celebrating their conductor's thirty years with the orchestra. So I wrote one.

They provided me with a short memoir he'd written, and all the quotes from him come from that. I mixed that up with a good helping of my personal knowledge and experience of the group.

I felt it would be negligent not to have mentioned the recent scandal involving the disappearance of the orchestra's funds, though I tried to give it a positive spin. As I'm not trained as a journalist, I was uncertain about the vocabulary permissible to use regarding a criminal case, but my editor assured me that, since there's been a court conviction, my choice of the words "unscrupulous" and "culprit" were justified.

They're getting this in lieu of, and not in addition to, a review of this weekend's concert. What if I didn't like it? Mind, I'm not lying: the orchestra really can be pretty good, and it certainly is a vast improvement on its predecessors of forty years back, but I've never really given them a rating, more usually a . That would ill-suit such celebratory puffery as this.

But I'll probably go to the concert anyway; the concept is just that appealing.