Denis Fodor writes: > As for Beethoven's Second, a large-house audience I think would be >pleased to hear it. Tastes do, repeat do, change...over the span of >200 years. Tastes don't take 200 years to change, if mine are anything to go by. And I guess there are very few people whose musical cravings, if you like, don't develop as they go along. As a matter of fact, here in London the concerts doing best (or rather, least badly) tend to be either (a) the glamorous orchestra/conductor combinations (generally doing Mahler yet again); or (b) 20th century "classic"-based concerts, featuring Bartok, Vaughan Williams, Barber, Sibelius et. al. These, not Beethoven 2nd, would be the modern large-house fillers over here. And you'd have to programme the 9th to get into the "Rite of Spring" league. For myself, I kind of feel that I've "done" Beethoven's 2nd, though doubtless I could still be bowled over by it if it caught me unawares. There are plenty of people who are still quarrying it, and always will, because it is a cogent, beautiful and stimulating piece- though not endlessly so. But there are lots of people, too, who won't get off their scented couches unless there is something more in it for them than a penny-in-the-slot programme of 19th century Warhorses can promise. The real problem is that most orchestral managements and boards are (a) conservative in their personal tastes, (b) apt to pander to the natural disinclination of rank-and-file orchestral players to stray too far from familiar territory, and (c) bizarrely blind to what a *potentially larger* audience actually might wants to hear. It's well known, for example, that Naxos's Bax Symphony series under David Lloyd Jones is a top best seller for them, on both sides of the Atlantic (and it does pretty well in Germany too.) Yet there is a "received wisdom" - completely unsupported by any evidence base or research as far as I've been able to discover - that live Bax is box office death. Nicholas Kenyon, for example, resolutely refused to programme one single Bax symphony during his tenure of the Proms, on precisely that prejudiced ground. Evidence he had none. Anecdotally, at Vernon Handley's recording sessions for his complete set, the woodwind and brass players were in love with it (as were the leader and the 1st cello), but the rank-and-file string players would on the whole rather have been doing Beethoven. Yet unless the orchestral managements programme Bax's 2nd instead of Beethoven's 2nd, I for one am not going to pay to enter. And - completely anecdotally again - most of my friends are of the same cast of mind. If the managements persist in placing their penny in the predictable slot, I will instead sit at home, smiling at my wonderful new Chandos CD of Bax Tone Poems (Handley, Volume 2!) Christopher Webber, Blackheath, London, UK http://www.zarzuela.net "ZARZUELA!" The Spanish Music Site *********************************************** 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