Alex Ross: evaluation

Transcript context

…You can choose two places. Yeah. Just in terms of being whisper-quiet and concentrating at every moment — it’s a cliché, it’s a stereotype, but in the German-speaking world — that’s where you find this kind of audience, where it just seems as though everyone is concentrating, especially if you go to a chamber music concert in Germany or Austria. This music is just so steeped in the countries’ traditions, and so many people of different social classes and backgrounds have grown up with it, and it just feels so natural to them. So you get that appreciation. Now, in terms of adventurousness — that’s a slightly different thing. Those same Austrian and German audiences may be quite resistant to 20th-century music and contemporary music because they love and know Brahms so well. That doesn’t prepare them so well for something different and new. One of the most adventurous audiences I’ve ever encountered is at the Ojai Festival in Southern California, northwest of Los Angeles. That’s a festival that goes back decades in terms of its commitment to new music — quite adventurous, often avant-garde music. Stravinsky was there. Boulez went many times. So the attitude there is almost the complete opposite of what you normally encounter with a classical-music audience, where the more complex and the more difficult it is, the more excited people seem to get. I had this wonderful experience of sitting in the audience once a few years ago at Ojai. There was a piece. It was quite tonal and repetitive and minimalist, and I think an average audience would have found it quite pleasant to listen to. It was in no way dissonant or modernistic. And afterward, the older couple sitting next to me said, “Oh, that was…” And then there was a piece by Pierre Boulez right after that, and what that older couple said was, “Ah, finally some real music.” They didn’t like the tonal, easy music; they were waiting for the Boulez. So it varies very much from place to place, and the stereotype of the classical audience is that they’re not going to be adventurous. They always want the tried and true. But over time, I think, when an institution, a festival really shows commitment to this repertoire, they can change the audience’s mind. And that’s also what happened with the Los Angeles Philharmonic under Esa-Pekka Salonen. It happened to some extent in Berlin with Simon Rattle and various other places. And so, it’s not a lost cause in terms of converting audiences to the new and different. If you go to a second-tier American city — say, Washington, DC, which is by no means uneducated — and you go to the opera, what percentage of the crowd there is actually enjoying it in the sense that they are wishing it would last longer than it will?…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.