20
Moving on
A hundred years is a long time. No one can now remember when it was thought normal for concert programmes to consist largely of contemporary compositions, as a matter of course. Unlike a hundred years ago, concert audiences now live almost exclusively in the past which, put like that, doesn’t seem entirely healthy. What’s the matter with now? Certainly music can induce a retreat into oneself and one’s thoughts, but does this require a temporal distance as well?
There is some light at the end of this astonishingly long tunnel. Those who say Twelve-note was a disaster are now heard everywhere. The Danish composer Bo Holten, whose opera The Visit of the Royal Physican recently played across ten performances at the Royal Opera House in Copenhagen to audiences of 94 per cent capacity, is one of them. His alternative music must have something, since the risks inherent in staging modern operas are notorious. High time to move on.
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