Patrik Enander asks:

>I don't know if we have any listers from LA?

Yo!

>In "Dagens nyheter" the biggest Swedish daily newspaper, there was an
>article about a heated debate in LA Times about Salonen.  Son people seem
>to really enjoy the way he has expanded the repertoire, but others say
>that he is just rushing through the classics to play "horrible"new music.
>I can't give you any more details since I thrown the article.  Perhaps
>some one in LA can enlighten us.

There's no argument that Salonen has introduced a great deal of 20th
century to the LA audience.  Where the disagreements come in is whether
he has alienated the regular subscription audience by his slighting of the
"standard" repertoire.  This is the heart of the resignation/firing of the
recently departed Willem Wijnbergen.  Attendance has been slipping steadily
through the Salonen years and Wijnbergen, to prove a point, stopped the
practice of papering the house so it would appear as though there was a
full house.  There wasn't one concert this year that I attended where the
house was more than 3/4 full and many where the house was only half filled.
While Salonen does program "standard" repertoire, and he does prepare it
well, there's nothing special that he does with it.

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