FT.com / Arts / Music - Is classical music trying to be fashionable?

FT.com / Arts / Music - Is classical music trying to be fashionable?
“We’ve been slow to recognise what a radical departure this is,” says Sir Nicholas Kenyon, managing director of London’s Barbican Centre. “What people are choosing from is far more random and wide-ranging than in the past. The sheer availability of it all makes people insecure because they no longer turn to a single source to dictate their taste.” One positive result of this trend is that music with no connection to the long-familiar classical tradition can enjoy a new success, as the 12th-century composer Hildegard of Bingen has done. But there’s also a flash-in-the-pan effect, through the internet and television, that can turn any kind of music into a sudden hit. It has included an amateur opera singer winning the first Britain’s Got Talent competition, a blind soprano securing a recording contract on the back of her success in Operatunity and a comedian conducting a professional orchestra at the Proms, as Sue Perkins did last year after winning Maestro, another television talent contest.