More On Putting Young Butts In Concert Hall Seats

Last Thursday (4 March) The (London) Times ran a column titled, "How To Sell Classical Music To The Masses", wherein "the cream of British talent suggest how they would transform the traditional concert for a new audience." The Times solicited suggestions from a dozen of "Britain’s classical taste-makers," and what we found interesting (as well as encouraging and gratifying) is that not a single one of those British "classical taste-makers" even so much as hinted that the proper way to accomplish the goal intended was to adopt the absurd, even perverse, solution promoted by some well-intentioned but perversely wrongheaded souls in the States who advocate pairing rock bands (so-called "alt-classical" bands) with symphony orchestras or chamber groups on the same concert stage in order to draw a younger crowd and put younger butts in concert hall seats. (Just for the record, we're perfectly OK with suggestions that classical music concerts be given in venues less formal than the traditional concert hall as long as audiences are well-behaved and the acoustics aren't truly sucky.)

The column was by way of prelude to the annual Royal Philharmonic Society lecture to be delivered at Wigmore Hall in London this evening titled, "Inventing and Reinventing the Classical Concert", by none other than The New Yorker's own Alex Ross ("the world’s most influential classical music critic," as The Times put it), the full text of which lecture will be available online tomorrow at URL http://www.royalphilharmonicsociety.org.uk/?page=index.html&id=109.

We look forward with more than a modicum of interest to reading what Mr. Ross had to say on the subject.