Marcin Dylla is one of the finest of the current generation of classical guitarists being both a strong technician and a fine musician. Lately he has joined with the Kupinski Guitar Duo to record some concerto performances. A while ago they released the Villa-Lobos Concerto and yesterday they released the Rodrigo Concierto de Aranjuez. While this is certainly well-played, it is not as successful as the Villa-Lobos because of the strong instrumental colors in the orchestra that are simply missing.
Recently Ana Vidovic released her version which consisted simply of playing the guitar solo part with no orchestral backing. The tragedy here is that fine artists like Dylla and Vidovic should be playing this concerto--and a bunch of other guitar concertos--with orchestras all over the place instead of being forced into these inadequate solutions. The Concierto de Aranjuez is a great piece, one of the finest 20th century concertos. When I was a solo concert artist I had a number of opportunities to play it with different orchestras and even got a chance to do the Villa-Lobos. But times have changed and it seems that guitarists are no longer sought after. The classical world has narrowed its horizons and there are vanishing few concerto performances that are not by piano, violin or cello. That's it.
Please correct me if I am wrong, but this performance of John Williams with the Berlin Philharmonic is the kind of concert that is probably gone forever-
6 comments:
I made the same point that the concert hall concerto now is for piano and violin with the occasional cello, certainly in the Americas. But even there only a handful of the usual suspects are played for those instruments. I think the problem is that there is a low motivation to go to the concert hall now with streaming access to most anything and an old repertoire that everyone has heard. Legacy acts work in the pop arena because the starting point is so much bigger. Losing 75% of your audience still leaves you with enough fans to earn a good living.
Season subscriptions are way down even at the biggest venues. While overall attendance at these top venues is about the same this means either there are more sporadics at the concerts these days or perhaps they are inflating attendance via free tickets to favored groups. Either way this forces the venues to go with the tine tested draws for fear no one would show up otherwise. Without some exciting new repertoire the downward spiral continues. I just see very little passion among classical composers these days to expand the audience.
I was just focussed on the opportunities for guitar, but your wider point is likely also true.
Just one quibble: the task of a composer is not actually to expand the audience--at least not a serious composer. It never has been. That is one thing that entertainers do. I think that what we have seen developing, first slowly and then quickly, is the taking over of the aesthetic realm of the arts by two differing forces: politics and capitalism. Of course there are lots of historical examples of the former: the French Revolution did a good job of reshaping the arts to serve its needs and, in a far more rigid way, so did the Russian Revolution. But the invasion of the artistic realm by market economics is quite recent. Up until very recently it would have been strongly resisted by every working artist. But the glitter of fame and fortune first seeped into the visual arts and now we expect to find it even in classical music, dance and theater.
I should have connected the two thoughts of exciting new repertoire and expanding the audience which is what I meant, not of LCD pandering. Attending smaller sized chamber music concerts here that occasionally offer works by current composers I find many of the new works well done and often interesting but of restricted scope, not likely to move the needle. The older repertoire projects better, flows better and seems more robust, and not just due to familiarity.
As for "market forces" in music today, I think it is more along the lines of oligarchy/monopoly. There are only 3 brontosaurus labels that matter: Sony Warner and Universal. Market forces were more in evidence in pop music from the 50s to 90s. And about the political aspect, the arts were typically directed towards the ruling elite prior to the Jacobins. However the seamless overlap of the aristocrats with the social and religious culture obscures that to a large extent as well as their political diffusion. The French/Soviet Revolutions had the effect of making the artistic direction for a different (bureaucratic) elite more obvious rather than inaugurating it.
In another context, Samuel Andreyev made the point that these things move in cycles and while we may have some good composers right now, there don't seem to be any superstar composers. I think that in general the incessant demands for more sales/streaming does absolutely nothing for real creativity and encourages a great deal of mediocre imitation of the last successful song.
I agree with you and the point about decreasing developmental patience has been discussed on music forums. By developmental patience is meant giving talented songwriters a few years to hone their style and quality of works before giving up on them. So there is a fairly wide understanding of the changes that have occurred over the past 30 years are artistically detrimental. But music listeners are pretty helpless to change this unless they collectively stop listening to streaming sites. Seems impossible.
Generalizing: I tend to divide things into two broad categories: things I can do something about and things I can't do anything about. This would fall into the latter category! What I can do is talk about genuine aesthetic values and post musical examples that might embody them. Which is also quite a fun and rewarding activity!
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