Constantine Samartzis
Critic & editor, The High Arts Review
I write about recordings, films and books the old-fashioned way: slowly, closely, and with an actual opinion at the end.
Hello, and welcome. I’m Constantine, the person behind The High Arts Review. Some of you knew me as “Konsgaard”, the pen name I hid behind for years. I eventually decided that if I’m going to tell a conductor his scherzo dragged, the least I can do is sign it.
Why “the high arts”?
I know, the name raises an eyebrow. It isn’t a velvet rope. It describes the work I care about most: music, cinema and literature that ask for your full attention and repay it many times over. I’m not interested in ranking art from a balcony. I’m interested in taking it seriously, which is a different thing altogether, and in writing about it so that anyone curious can follow along.
How it started
Like most critics, I began as an unpaid one. As a teenager I filled notebooks with verdicts on films, records and novels that nobody had asked for. Gramophone, Sight and Sound and Cahiers du Cinéma were my real textbooks, and the Penguin Guide to Recorded Classical Music lived, I’m not ashamed to say, in the bathroom.
In time my reviews found readers in newspapers, magazines and online. I kept a separate blog for each art form until I noticed they kept talking to one another, so I gave them a single home. Within a year of starting this one, record labels were sending me recordings ahead of release, which I took as a sign that someone, somewhere, was reading.
The rest of my life
My formal education took the scenic route: degrees in European Studies and European Policy Studies, then a PhD in Education Policy. These days I teach and coach from my home on Rhodes, and I spend a suspicious amount of time in the gym. The ancient Greeks had a phrase for the harmony of a sound body and a cultivated mind, kalos kagathos, and I’ve never found a better ambition. Bruckner, I can report, is excellent for deadlifts.
How I review
Rigorously, and without sugar. I want to explain why a performance works or doesn’t, not merely announce that it does. That means listening more than once, setting a recording against the ones that came before it, and noticing things most people would rather I didn’t: a cough in a pianissimo, a tempo that sags, a beautifully designed opening credit.
Every review ends with a verdict and a rating out of five. Five stars mean I’d defend it at any dinner table. Two mean I’d rather change the subject.
Allegiances
Symphonists
Beethoven, Bruckner and Allan Pettersson. If you haven’t met Pettersson yet, you’re in for a revelation. Bach, of course, stands above the argument.
Cinema
Tarkovsky, Bergman and Antonioni, in precisely that order.
Literature
Tolstoy, Thomas Mann, Henry James and Proust, my four touchstones.
A column
The Echo After Silence
Not everything fits inside a review. The Echo After Silence is my more personal column: essays on the works that stayed with me long after the last note, and why they did.
If you’re a reader, welcome. Stay as long as you like. If you’re a label, a festival or a publisher with something worth hearing, I’d love to know about it.
— Constantine