Word: beethovens
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...like some musical Rip Van Winkle, a 19th century man awoke today in a concert hall or an opera house after decades of slumber, he would find that things had hardly changed. Stirring to life in his seat, he would pick up the comforting strains of a Beethoven symphony. Blinking his eyes in the theater's darkness, he would notice the familiar sets of a Verdi opera. Only after he stumbled to his feet at the end of the program and sought out his horse and carriage would he learn that, for the rest of the world, time had indeed...
...hoariest cliches justifying timorous programming is that there is always someone in the audience who has never heard Beethoven's Fifth. "For the first-time viewer, you've got to have Bohemes and Toscas and Carmens," says Ardis Krainik, general manager of the Lyric Opera of Chicago, whose company this season had an unexpected hit with Glass's Satyagraha. "Those are the things they need to bring them back again." But is sheer repetition of a handful of staples the way to cultivate new audiences...
...music is not the only road to innovative programming. There are scores of neglected works by masters great and small that deserve dusting off. Instead of Dvorak's "New World" Symphony, for example, why not the equally seductive but infrequently heard tone poem, The Wood Dove? Instead of Beethoven's pawky Second Piano Concerto or the overplayed Violin Concerto of Mendelssohn, why not Rimsky-Korsakov's dashing Piano Concerto or Carl Nielsen's melancholic Violin Concerto? Instead of another Brahms' First Symphony, how about Joachim Raff's spooky "Lenore" Symphony, once greatly admired in the 19th century, or Austrian Composer...
...BEETHOVEN: SYMPHONY NO. 9 (EMI). Lean and mean on original instruments, the mighty Ninth, brilliantly conducted by Roger Norrington...
...IMMORTAL FRITZ KREISLER (RCA). The fabled Viennese-born violinist in showpieces, bonbons and a quicksilver Beethoven sonata...