Just what you've always wanted...

[Ilja]

Would it go too far to consider Keith Jarrett as a sort-of Clayderman for the intellectual poseur (with glasses to match)? Or is that a can of worms that needs to remain firmly closed?

BTW, allow me to offer my apologies for my countryman André Rieu; wherever on the globe I venture, the man seems to haunt me.

[Peter1953]

BTW, allow me to offer my apologies for my countryman André Rieu

... who introduces popular classical music to thousands of people all over the world in his own enthusiastic way...
And we, forum members, obviously turn up our noses at his disgusting shows. We want classical music to be and stay something for the elite, don't we?

[petershott@btinternet.com]

I see it, Peter, as an issue not between the 'elite' and the 'common folk'. I have the very greatest admiration for those with the very rare gift of 'opening up', and making accessible to all who care to listen, the music that you and I love. But I heartily dislike those - and I think the names mentioned in the thread are examples - who trivialise, water down, dumb down great music, and make it appeal solely to the senses unaccompanied by any kind of mental effort. In the long term they are robbing the ordinary person of the opportunity to find music truly rewarding.

[Peter1953]

Peter, I believe that classical music, especially serious classical music, will always be something for only a few (or happy few), a very minor part of the music loving people. Therefore I welcome efforts, how commercially these all are, by folks like Rieu to make many people get to know at least some classical music, even when it's performed in a popular way. If you have ever seen a performance by Rieu (I have watched it on TV), look at the enthusiastic audience. They love it. His classical music makes people happy.
I suppose this also counts for Clayderman, Bocelli, and so on.

[semloh]

I can't resist joining in - even though I've tried! 

Unfortunately, I have to admit that the charisma of Rieu sparks interest in classical music among vast numbers of people who would not otherwise listen to it, so I'd give him three cheers - albeit muted because I don't like his smalmy, self-satisfied persona.

I believe that the love of classical music begins with simple visceral enjoyment - which is what Rieu's repertoire is mostly about - and that the more demanding intellectual element comes later. Strauss waltzes and polkas aren't meant to plumb the depths. So, I find the barely restrained ecstasy that attends his concerts rather inspiring, and a source of optimism for the future of classical music. [It certainly does more for classical music than the Last Night of the Proms - which I find utterly awful.  ]

However, I don't believe there can be any excuse for Clayderman, Jarrett, Liberace, Bocelli or a host of others. Oh dear, did you use up all that anti-emetic 'mbhaub'? 

[jerfilm]

Having just attended last evening a Palm Springs Friends of Philharmonic concert with the BBC Concert Orchestra and noting that the audience is predominantlly ancient as I am, and then seeing a quite different audience show up for a Jeffrey Siegel Keyboard Conversation, I say go for it.

I suspect that there are a couple of generations now of folks in their 40s and 50s and such that are tired of being pummeled with 500 db of noise from distorted guitars and monster drum sets (and losing their sense of hearing in the processl) who are delighted to discover that "real music" does indeed exist.  But folks need exposure and whatever it takes........

Jerry

[kolaboy]

This only serves to remind me that our statewide PBS channel will hold its bi-monthly fund-raiser soon. Coffee table classics, Three Tenors, Celtic Gals, and a load of... uh, "self help" seminars.
Huzzah.

[Mark Thomas]

I think that it's worth reminding ourselves, as several of the posts here have hinted, that the Claydermans, Rieus and Bocellis of this world do provide an "easy access" route for some people to the more rarefied, and no doubt initially forbidding, sphere of "Classical" music. If I think back to my introduction to art music it was at 19, through hearing the music played over the opening and closing titles of a Sunday afternoon TV serialisation of Sir Walter Scott's Ivanhoe. I loved the music, but had no idea what it was, and so I asked a friend who played in a youth orchestra. It turned out to be the finale of Tchaikovsky's Fourth Symphony. I bought an LP of it (Barenboim and the NY Phil on CBS - it came with a  free pocket score!) and settled down for a few months to a musical diet consisting mostly of "Famous Overture" LPs, plus the odd symphony, before widening my listening repertoire. I'm not equating Tchaikovsky's Fourth with Clayderman et al, but my point is that he is only slightly further back down the slope than a classical pop being used as backing music for TV credits. My guess is that many of us will have a similar story and, although I have been as guilty as anyone else of looking down my nose at them, these artists do more good to art music than they do harm and may, on occasion, provide an entry point which will eventually lead someone to our own noble sphere of appreciation.

[Alan Howe]

...trouble is, after all these years, I still rather like Andrea Bocelli!

[eschiss1]

I'm glad no one yet had gone out of their way to include Wright & Forrest in their list or I'd start taking this personally (and with good reason I suppose )

[petershott@btinternet.com]

I reckon I'm a real walking innocent. Who on earth are Wright and Forrest?

No, on second thoughts, please DO NOT answer that question! I fear being told something I really do not want to know.

[jerfilm]

They do go TOO far when the finale of Beethoven 9 is used in a TV trailer for one of the more recent violent movies........poor Ludwig cannot possibly be resting well......

Jerry

[JimL]

Wonder what he would have thought of A Clockwork Orange?  Poor Ludwig van...the prudish whoremonger! 

[eschiss1]

The use of the finale of Beethoven 9 with its Schiller-setting, as movie music to a shootfest currently in previews in the United States, ... does not please me at all. (There's often a thread at the back of my mind, of unsung music that would work so much better than either the new but poor music, or the sung, very good, but inappropriate to the given scenes, music that was actually used for the film. Oliver Stone's idea of using Barber's Adagio- not totally obscure at the time, but better known still after he used it in Platoon - comes to mind. Would it work for much less-known music of a certain "filmic" quality- maybe the concluding funeral march of Myaskovsky's 3rd symphony... - in an appropriately minatory, gloomy, sequence? Don't know. Apologies for tangent... I'd create a new thread instead but there's no future in the subject, I guess.)

jerfilm- ah yes, you noticed too.

Petershott- Erm... ok. May I answer anyway? Wright & Forrest. Kismet / Borodin. Song of Norway / Grieg. Broadway shows after music by Romantic- (or in Rachmaninoff's case, 20th-century Romantic) composers. This popularized their music- when I heard Borodin's 2nd quartet on the radio for (probably) the first time I admit my reaction was, as with many other people (a member of the Borodin Quartet in an interview mentioned/complained that American audiences would always ask for "And this is my beloved", which they knew from the 1953 musical Kismet to new (well, any, but specific) words from the Notturno slow movement of the Borodin quartet... (the 2nd theme of the sonata "scherzo" became "Baubles, Bangles, and Beads". So when I first heard the quartet, my ears were grabbed (from recognition) as they usually weren't when I dropped in on classical radio in those days (1986?) and I asked my father for a recording of the quartet, and I was hooked more and more on classical music.)

[jerfilm]

"Take my hand, I'm a stranger in paradise......."