Da música clássica contemporânea... (II)

Em contra-ataque à opinião de Joe Queenan, a respeito da música clássica contemporânea, eis a resposta ferverosa de John Berry, director artístico da English National Opera:

«(...) Reaching out to wider audiences requires an innovative approach: it means pricing an event appropriately, and occasionally engaging artists from the multidisciplinary arts in order to create a "must-see" event. The recent ENO/Young Vic season was radical in its choice of material, including Olga Neuwirth's Lost Highway, and it sold out to a mainly new, young, enthusiastic audience. ENO's collaboration with Philip Glass and the Improbable theatre group on Satyagraha, at the Coliseum last year, attracted more than 21,000 people, including 78% first-time visitors. It recently finished a sell-out run at the Metropolitan Opera in New York.

Luckily, there are organisations in the UK that are prepared to take risks, confident that an audience exists with an appetite for something new. Artangel's Stifter's Dinge, an inspired work by Heiner Goebbels that featured five grand pianos gliding over a lagoon, was a hot ticket earlier this year. Meanwhile, Glyndebourne's new opera, Love and Other Demons, by the Hungarian composer Peter Eötvös, receives its world premiere this summer.

I believe the contemporary music audience is far bigger than the popular perception of it. These audiences are more intelligent than writers like Queenan would have us believe, and they insist on expressing themselves through blogs and other means on the internet (...)


I don't believe people go to hear contemporary work because they feel under some kind of intellectual pressure to do so, and I don't accept that a single bad experience alienates them for ever. Sadly for Joe Queenan, he appears to have missed out on some of the big - and hugely popular - contemporary music events in London in recent years. John Adams' Nixon in China at ENO attracted a very large audience, both at its London premiere and in a subsequent revival. The UK premiere of John Adams' Doctor Atomic, directed by the award-winning film director Penny Woolcock, will be staged by ENO in February 2009, and I am confident the Nixon audience will come back for more.

A great director and designer working in tandem with a composer, and a libretto that connects with today's audience, can result in something thrilling. There are many composers now emerging from a multimedia-savvy generation who are crossing genres and bringing together new languages of composition. We need to give these artists space to create new work, and find ways to fund and develop new compositions. Most importantly, we need to have faith in our audience, and give contemporary music a chance.»