Alex Ross: evaluation

Transcript context

…The classical music world — what will be the long-term effects of lockdown and having had a pandemic? Assume there’s a vaccine. We’ve recovered. Older people are still scared. Five to seven years from now, what will the concert world look like in New York City? I don’t know. On certain days, I feel as though the classical world may not recover or go back to anything like what it was before because the damage has been very severe. And once people get out of the habit of going to concerts, it can be very difficult to persuade them to come back. This is what happened to the Metropolitan Opera after 9/11. For a little while, people were just very reluctant to come into the city, and some of them just never came back. They just developed new cultural habits. So some days, I’m very worried. Other days, I feel it could be more or less total recovery, and perhaps five to seven years from now, it will just be this strange nightmare that we all went through before going back to normal. But classical music — it’s going to be the very last to come back, along with, really, the other performing arts forms. It’s an art form that subsists on crowding people into an indoor space and then having to crowd people onstage for a certain period of time. Even if the medical question is resolved, even if there is a vaccine, there’ll still be a psychological block against people coming back. There’ll be a fear of crowding into spaces. So I am fearful of what’s going to happen, especially to the bigger institutions. I think the smaller ones can be more resourceful and more spontaneous in terms of how they react, and so they might recover more quickly in terms of chamber music and solo recitalists. That end of the business should be okay. But it’s also the artists. There’s thousands of artists who aren’t being paid, and some of them are just going to give up and get other jobs, even extremely talented ones, and that also may be a tragedy. And when you look at the difference of the situation in Europe, where artists who are out of work have nothing to worry about. They’re being taken care of financially. They have health plans they can afford. They’re able to wait it out. Here, people aren’t going to be able to wait it out, and they’re just going to give up and do something different. So it’ll be a dark period. I just don’t know exactly what form it’ll take, but things will be very different. There could be ways in which there will be a healthy effect in the end if classical music becomes more local in focus. For decades, we’ve had this culture of constant jet-setting, conductors zipping around from continent to continent, singers zipping around, orchestras touring, probably unnecessarily. Just because of the fear of travel at this moment and other questions about the wastefulness of this kind of travel, that may be cut back. And I think that could be a very healthy thing if conductors just spent more of their time with their orchestra that they are the music director of instead of feeling the need to guest conduct in 10 other places during a given season because they’re being paid usually pretty hefty sums of money, $800,000 or a million dollars or more. director of instead of feeling the need to guest conduct in 10 other places during a given season because they’re being paid usually pretty hefty sums of money, $800,000 or a million dollars or more. Why not really concentrate your career in one place, work on building ties to the community immediately around you, and forget about this global marketplace? That end of the business will be much more difficult to negotiate.…

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