Jon Johanning wrote:

>Long ago, when it was difficult enough to travel from one valley to the
>next ...  it was easy for dialects to be preserved. Now, with all of the
>world-circling media available, whole languages, much less dialects, are
>dying out... Could it be that the musical specialties Denis refers to are
>equally threatened? After all, a very good musician (and all of these
>orchestras, by definition, are staffed with the best) with complete command
>of her/his instrument can pretty well play any style she/he hears, so what
>keeps an orchestra in location X from doing an almost perfect replica of
>the style of location Y?

Funny thing, but in the very places I singled out as wellsprings of the
classical music tradition--Vienna, Berlin, Milan, Paris, St.
Petersburg--dialects remain pronounced (and in all of the countries
corresponding to the cities named, there will be people living in the one
part who will not be able to understand their own language as spoken in
another part).  But even granting that things are tending to globalize and
homogenize, and that thereby languages are losing their dialectical
inflections, it still remains very,very hard--a most seldom thing--for
someone reared to maturity in one language to then learn to speak another
tongue entirely without an accent.  It's a subtle thing, I agree, and an
even more subtle thing in music.  But, to me at least, it's _there_.  When
you heard Boskowsky conduct the the VPO in the New Year's concerts, THAT
was Johann Strauss; or Furtwaengler playing Beethoven; or Fricsay, Bartok;
or Martinon Debussy; or Serafin Verdi.  And the exceptions merely prove the
rule: Celibidache became perfect in the German canon because he learned
and mostly played his music here.  By contrast,the jet-set club of top
conductors, as far as I'm concerned, excel at something that's different,
though also exceedingly tough to master, namely musical Esperanto.

Denis Fodor                     Internet:[log in to unmask]