Picking Nits

Martin Bernheimer’s review of the recent American Youth Symphony fund-raising concert at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion entitles your hip-critical music maven to the Pulitzer for Nit-Picking (“Mehli Mehta & Friends Offer Benefit Gala,” Feb. 16).

The purist of the Philharmania, with his fine-tuned ear for sour notes, reported of this nonprofit fundraiser that “the ad program was fat and amateurish.” It if were thinner, with less paid ads, would he have contributed the difference in receipts, so that Mehli Mehta’s deserving young musicians can continue their free training? (More than 40 AYS graduates now are pros, in great symphony orchestras, nationwide.)

Further, this Critic of Oratory wrote, “The welcoming speech was vapid.” Tell him William Jennings Bryan was unavailable. But in a lapse into fairness, Bernheimer said of the concert, “It was fun.”

It was. He isn’t.

IRVING BRECHER

Los Angeles