Olivier Solanet's transcendent experience with a live musical performance was good to read about. Isn't this what music is finally all about? To cite Frank Zappa: "Without music to decorate it, time is just a bunch of boring production deadlines or dates by which bills must be paid." ...or so it would seem as one emerges from attending a thrilling musical ride. In any case, on the other side of the ledger, much as I don't doubt the excitement of that evening, I'm not sure that the Russians have any patent on musical thrills. Artists with such abilities lurk almost everywhere, I daresay. Latvian-Canadian Arthur Ozolins, for one, recently wowed me musically with a delightfully angry version of Ravel's La Valse, a sublime Sonatine, and the night's piece de resistance: an astonishing suite for piano by Talivadis Kenins that I hadn't previously heard. And the Orion String Quartet did much the same with all six of Bartok's quartets, to the utter delight of a small but grateful Ottawa audience: they're New York-based US players, but in this music simply second to none. All to say that my experience is that many artists from various backgrounds are doing a fine job of engaging people with this high art (and perhaps also to add, banking on their obscurity, that far too few get the accolades they deserve). It can alarm, I agree, to notice that most attendees are retired folks, and that those of us who aren't quite at that age may be a last generation of any size who hunger for this kind of fare. What often comes to my mind is: record these events! It's cheap enough, and will at least provide an archive of the music to behold down the road. Many other, even better ideas also arise as solutions; musical bodies should be looking to one another for those that succeed. Plenty of notions to educate youths about this art are coming from Venezuela and Latvia, and more modest but as worthy initiatives of all kinds are turning up elsewhere. None of these ideas, to my knowledge, turns on the age of the artists playing the music, as I think was suggested. Certainly expressing artistic dislikes would seem anathema to any efforts at audience-building. Personally, I like Hilary Hahn, for her Bach and Stravinsky and Meyer. But surely that's another discussion, and should be kept separate. Except for one thing: she's at least playing concertos by Stravinsky, Meyer and other recent composers, and persuasively -- unlike so many other artists, 'stars' who stick to the old warhorses, take few chances, tailor an image, collect their money and go home ...maybe to come out and tour that tried-and-true material every so often. Some, of course, dabble in profitable cross-over -- as if that performed any service to the life of their art. These often seem to be the biggest 'names,' and I see them, and the system to which they belong, as in large part responsible for the lack of a renewed audience. But, to stick to the affirmative, Hahn at least figures on the list of artists doing something to generate new audiences: simply by not regarding classical as the art merely of dead composers. Bert Bailey *********************************************** The CLASSICAL mailing list is powered by L-Soft's renowned LISTSERV(R) list management software together with L-Soft's HDMail High Deliverability Mailer for reliable, lightning fast mail delivery. For more information, go to: http://www.lsoft.com/LISTSERV-powered.html