Re: The Death of Classical Music (da capo, con brio)
On Apr 3, 2007, at 2:05 PM, joanna wrote:
Doug Henwood wrote:
>
More than partly. By the mid-1960s, recording technology had gotten very good, and things from the 1950s weren’t so bad either. So we’ve got 40 or 50 years of very high quality performances of what is a large but nonetheless limited canon. Do we really need contemporary re-interpretations of the minor works of Telemann?
Well, the short answer is yes. Every generation interprets classical music differently, hears different things in it, rediscovers it in a different way.
For sure, but when it comes to the economics of classical music
recording, the marginal value of a new recording of a double viola
concerto by Telemann just doesn’t justify the marginal cost. The
audience just isn’t there for that sort of thing. It’s true even of
truly great stuff - how many versions of the complete Beethoven
string quartets can the market bear? And I don’t think it’s merely a
question of the stinking capitalists.
Doug