Tim Arnold:

>What do you consider the big events to be? I've thought of the New York
>Metropolitan opera house; the Saltzburg festival, and some events here
>in the UK (eg the Proms) ...  but what would you lot call the Top 50 big
>events every year in classical music?

The Metropolitan opera is, I suppose, a big deal in terms of name
recognition, but can anyone tell me of a groundbreaking production of
anything in that house in the past 10 years? Most of its great successes
seem to have been imported from elsewhere.

I'm not aware of any event - other than Glyndebourne, Salzburg, Santa Fe
chamber, Aspen, Oregon, and (as Mimi points out) the Toronto chamber music
festivals - worthy of annual coverage, worthy in the sense that you're
actually covering something interesting.

>What would you say the big trends are in classical music?

The very large trends are a decline in amateur music-making, the rise
of a consumer-oriented, passive listenership dependent on recorded music,
an increasing irrelevance of classical music in general to the culture at
large, and ancillary to some of this, the weakening (perhaps to oblivion)
of major recording labels, who no longer seem to know exactly what their
business is or who their audience is.

>Here in the UK, classical music has been a big winner in radio airplay
>and CD sales - possibly in the same way that country music has in the US.

Lucky you.  Wish we could say the same in the US.

Steve Schwartz