In Sunday’s (8/22) Los Angeles Times, Kevin Berger writes about 28-year-old crossover musician David Garrett. “On his new album, ‘Rock Symphonies,’ accompanied by a new PBS concert film, Garrett and his Stradivarius hot-wire Beethoven’s Fifth and Vivaldi’s ‘Four Seasons’ as well as Guns N’ Roses’ ‘November Rain’ and Nirvana’s ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit.’ … Crossover has long been ‘seen as the future of audience development for classical music,’ said Deborah Borda, president and CEO of the Los Angeles Philharmonic. ‘But you cannot remotely prove it in any quantitative or analytical way.’ … Jesse Rosen, president and CEO of the League of American Orchestras, an advocacy organization, agreed. ‘If you go back to the days of the Boston Pops, the pops audience was always completely different than the audience that came to the classical subscription series,’ he said. But today, Rosen explained, the division between pop and classical is vanishing, and classical music is experiencing a renaissance on its own. ‘We’re now seeing a new generation of composers who grew up in a vernacular world and are rejecting the academic straitjacket that plagued earlier generations of composers,’ Rosen said. ‘It’s wonderful that composers are writing in a way that takes in so much of the musical language that runs through American life today.’ ”
Posted August 23, 2010
