Which unsungs are on their way to becoming 'sung' - and vice versa?

[musiclover]

I suppose, thanks to Dutton, Richard Arnell is less un-sung (can one say that?) anyway, he is certainly more sung than he was. All on recording of course, still hardly any performances. Why don't the Proms schedule the amazing third symphony or even the potentially very poplular Piano Concerto?

[Alan Howe]

You may have a point about Arnell; however, please do read our revised remit...
http://www.unsungcomposers.com/forum/index.php/topic,3681.0.html

[ronanm]

I have noticed two opposing trends: in the concert hall, the audience for classical music has aged and become more and more middlebrow. Looking back recently over the concertos that Helene Grimaud has performed, you realise that concert promoters have to fill halls with middlebrow listeners who are not prepared to listen to anything they haven't heard before. So there is a shrinking repertoire in public performance.
But there is a great expansion of recordings of repertoire that you are remotely unlikely to hear in concert ever. The only performance of a Stanford symphony I can recall in the last decade in Dublin - his birthplace, for goodness' sake! - was by a good amateur orchestra. But we now have two excellent recordings of the complete symphonies. And although beyond the horizon of this group, the same can be said for renaissance music: concert performances are rarer, but the standard and coverage in recordings is remarkable.
So possibly the question needs to be modified. In the concert hall, more and more composers and repertoire are being relegated to the sidelines as the relentless pressure to sell tickets pushes promoters towards the classical 'pops'. However, the independent recording industry has realised that an audience of a thousand people need not be in one place at one time. They just need to be found – and that's where the internet comes in.

[semloh]

Yes, I think you are right, except that perhaps the concert hall remains the forum for premieres -  especially of new works - sandwiched between the 'pops' to help audiences digest them!

That said, I don't believe that concerts play much of a role in shaping musical tastes, though I have no clear idea as to what does - and even less of an idea as to how composers become sung/unsung! 

[chill319]

... I believe we have to look longer term say over a period of ten years

I quite agree, Giles. However, I hope we can consider unsung composers on more than one temporal scale of fame and influence. One wonderful thing about modern media is the way it encourages people like ourselves to connect, transcending distance, and to share our enthusiams, which are no less universal in spirit for being ineluctably personal. I also quite agree, Giles, that Rattle, say, is unlikely to take up Bax the way Haitink took up VW.  On the other hand, the pianist Michael Endres and the cellist Johannes Moser have advanced Bax's cause in the years since Handley's spirited cycle. So perhaps a more rounded version of the composer will prevail, thanks in part to the Continent. And meanwhile, after several decades I myself have not tired of Bax -- or Nielsen -- and am content to see a remarkable number of his works (not to mention Cyril Scott's) available for enthusiasts like myself.

In the world of literature, the Canon seems more elastic, more accommodating of strata, of writers with specialized audiences. Wilkie Collins, for example. Or Philip Larkin. Or my father's favorite, George Meredith. I hope this is the direction in which art music reception is going, too.

[giles.enders]

A prime example of a relatively unsung  composer getting enormous amounts of publicity which other composers can only dream of and his work played over and over again is Gorecki with his  Symphony of Sorrowful Songs.  Now one never hears it.  Could he be described as a 'one work wonder'?  He is almost forgotten except among the cognoscenti

[Alan Howe]

Actually, a number of his other pieces (e.g. Totus Tuus) get airtime on ClassicFM, so he's not totally forgotten.

[semloh]

He's certainly a one-hit-wonder here in Aus. - and decidedly not a romantic!