Please God Not a Quirky Preamble

So I read the article. You can't judge an article in the New York Times by the cloying rhetorical question in its headline! And the concert under review sounded really good, so I was ashamed. But then I reached the last two paragraphs, the first of which contained this sentence: "With his customary menagerie of plush toys at hand, he paced the room, singing softly while rubbing a pealing tone on the rim of his cognac goblet." Say it ain't so! And in the next paragraph the guy performs "a quirky preamble." Much of the good will built up during the early part of the article was thus sorely taxed.