To the editors:
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Mr. Molinaro, music teachers do not create audiences. If anything, they “create” musicians. You create audiences. Instead of lamenting the museumlike state of classical music, why don’t you get out there and play something that others are not playing? Your Bennett-Gordon Hall program is obviously very challenging, and it is important to keep playing Bach, Prokofiev, and Rachmaninoff. However, that program sure seems out of character in an article that laments classical music is in trouble because “everybody’s playing the same things.”
“It is music of primal passion and orgiastic madness. This is music to accompany The Bacchae of Euripides. It is music that is built upon such long lines of tension and with such grandness of vitality that the listener is overwhelmed, overawed, and transcended,” wrote Gordon Rumson, a pianist-composer, about Flynn’s work. It is not just a listening public whose will to discover can be squelched by misinformation. Musicians succumb also to this bane of sincere artists everywhere. It is not an easy task to maintain one’s repertoire to concert-performance standards, but I suggest that it is only the performing musicians who can right the wrongs. Only interpreters with passion can bring audiences to the new, and they must take the time to do it.
