Christopher Smith wrote:
There is in the U.S. a dogmatic divide between "contemporary" and
"classical" music that just does not exist in Europe.
I reiterate (for the third time now in this thread, so far w.o
rejoinder) that this is no longer the case in Philadelphia.
Is it not the case that San Francisco and LA also have orchestras
with conductors who quite frequently program recent music?
And Montreal, Winnipeg, Ottawa, and now Vancouver, who has inherited the
utterly fantastic Bramwell Tovey as conductor.
Plus here in Montreal we have La NEM (Nouvel Ensemble Moderne) and La
Société de Musique Contemporaine du Québec, who specialise in new music
and several excellent chamber groups that program modern works to great
acclaim (if you discount the local English language critic who dismisses
anything written before about 1920 as garbage.)
I have no certain knowledge of other Canadian orchestras (other than the
five-concert-per-year Sherbrooke Symphony that I play with, which does
OK for a small orchestra, too) but it wouldn't surprise me to discover
that they, too, have a living composer mandate.
Being a working musician, I rarely have a chance to hear any of the
local orchestras, but I've played Gershwin, Janacek, Mahler, Wagner, and
modern (contemporary) works with at least 2 of the symphonies here in
San Diego.
To me, the price of tickets, plus the perception of snootiness are at
least as much what keep the audiences away as anything else.
cd
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