Been reading Who Killed Classical Music?: Maestros, Managers, and Corporate Politics, Norman Lebrecht, great fun in a bitter sort of way, takes the high toned air out of the classical music biz and puts the biz back in, corporate powerr plays, sleaze, greedy agents, predatory and arrogant managers, record execs who car only about money, an ugly star system, favoritism, lazy conductors and an engine designed to take all the fun out of classical music. About what you'd expect, but with the details.
One thing I gor out of this book is I'm going to purge all my Karajan recordings, it's not bad enough that he was an unregenerate Nazi (which I sort of knew), but the influence he exercised on music subsequently was basically wholly malign. Some of his interpretations are brilliant, but there's nothing that you can't find that is just as good in another way by someone who was not totally reprehensible in almost every way -- Beethoven by Toscanini (a genuine antifascist if a snob) is not a whit worse.
Lebrecht is sort of a classical companion to Hit Men : Power Brokers and Fast Money Inside the Music Business, Fredric Dannen, which does a similar job on popular music.
One might say it exposes the underside of popular music if popular music were not prtetty much all underside.
--- joanna <123hop at comcast.net> wrote:
>
>
> Doug Henwood wrote:
>
> >> Yeah, it's one step removed from Mantovani.
> Perfect for lending a
> >> high-toned atmosphere to a boutique or an organic
> bakery.
> >
> Perhaps this is because Mozart's favorite place to
> compose was coffee
> shops and pool halls.
>
> Joanna
>
> >>
>
>
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