On Apr 3, 2007, at 5:52 AM, Colin Brace quoted:
> http://music.guardian.co.uk/classical/story/0,,2048916,00.html
>
> Vanishing acts
> Martin Kettle
>
> What went wrong was partly the glut: with 435 versions available, who
> needs number 436?
More than partly. By the mid-1960s, recording technology had gotten very good, and things from the 1950s weren't so bad either. So we've got 40 or 50 years of very high quality performances of what is a large but nonetheless limited canon. Do we really need contemporary re-interpretations of the minor works of Telemann?
The bigger problem might be that younger people are not taking up classical music, and even boomers rarely listen to it except as upscale mood music. That's sad, but aside from blasting out some old- fartism, I don't know what to say about that.
> As Lebrecht
> points out, the quality both of performance and audio on the internet
> is still generally inferior. The iTunes bit rate is less than one
> tenth that of a classical CD, while even hi-tech downloads are below
> CD standard.
Most people could hardly tell the difference between the iTunes version and an AIFF file, especially with modest equipment.
Doug