Gasping Audience?

Regarding Mark Swed’s review of Gloria Cheng’s performance of Esa-Pekka Salonen’s “Dichotomie” (“In a California State of Mind,” Dec. 6):

Somehow Swed was able to divine that “passages of flamboyant glissandi [were] so thrilling that they practically generated gasps from the audience.” If the audience in fact did not gasp, I am bewildered that Swed was able to conclude that they practically gasped.

Did he see audience members open their mouths, only to censor themselves just as they were about to audibly inhale? If so, I’m amazed that he was able to detect the difference between a stifled gasp and a stifled yawn.

It seems more likely that Swed is projecting his response to the performance on to the audience. In so doing, he ascribes his enthusiasm for the new music he so religiously advocates onto the greatest audience base possible, in a perhaps unconscious effort to distort its very viability.

CAROL WEISSBERG

Chatsworth