Down in the publishing vaults of Schotts, beside the River Main, they have been rummaging through Beethoven’s nail clippings and sundry other relics to see if anything got left out of their most performed works of the 21st century.

Sure enough – why didn’t anyone spot the omission? – top of the pops for Schotts is the compelling British composer Gavin Bryars, whose Tchaikovsky-based Amjad for string quartet has had its socks danced off by sundry companies in Edouard Locke’s exciting choreography. Amjad scored 115 performances since its Ottawa premiere in April 2007.

Three works by Penderecki have also done pretty well, as has one by Steve Martland.

Computing them into the rankings, here is the updated Top Twenty:

20 John Adams: The Dharma at Big Sur (2003) for electric violin and orchestra, 72.

19 Steve Martland, Tiger Dancing (2005), 73

18 Jörg Widmann, Hunt Quartet (2003), 74

17 Kryzstof Penderecki, Ciaccona (2005), 76

15= Penderecki sextet (2001), 79

15 Oliver Knussen violin concerto (2002) 79.

14 Detlev Glanert’s opera, The Three Riddles (2003) 80

13 George Benjamin Dance Figures for Orchestra (2004), 82 

12 Detlev Glanert opera Jest, Satire, Irony and Deeper Meaning (2000) 83

11 Philip Glass, Concerto Fantasy, 87

 

Top Ten

10 Colin Matthews Pluto (2000), 87

9 Krzystof Penderecki  Concerto Grosso (2001) 89

8 Christopher Rouse Rapture (2000) 97

7 Howard Goodall’s Requiem (2008) 102.

6 Nathaniel Stookey, The Composer is Dead (2006), 104

5 Joby Talbot Entity (2008), 110

4 Gavin Bryars, Amjad (2007)

3 Tan Dun, Crouching Tiger concerto (2000) 139

2 Joan Tower, Made in America (2008), 145

1 Karl Jenkins Requiem (2004) 311

 

 

These new entries do not materially change the conclusions of the previous chart and report. Dance remains the most vigorous driver of contemporary music performance – considerably more so, to general astonishment, than movie scores.

By some intuitive affinity or massive failure of imagination, both Gramophone and BBC Music magazine asked ’10 leading Mahler conductors’ to explain in their current issues what his symphonies mean to them.

Three maestros – Zinman, Jansons, Tilson Thomas – took part in both features. The rest included most of the usual Mahler suspects with the exceptions of Abbado, Boulez and Barenboim, who must have had better things to do with their down time.

The banality of what these conductors write, or recite into a reporter’s machine, is mind-boggling: ‘The final movement (of the Fifth) is colossal,’ declares one interpreter. ‘Mahler finds a way of making a very basic idea appear in many new guises, so we get a constant spiral of uplifting energy until a glorious climax.’ So tell us something we didn’t already know.

The pull quotes are even worse. ‘Mahler said that when he composed a piece he always needed more and more time,’ reveals the BBC magazine. ‘His music takes us through aspects of the lifetime of a man, or mankind,’ blares Gramophone’s exclusive. And for this they get called Maestro? 

Conducting is not, on the whole, a verbal gift. The ones who talk most in rehearsal achieve least. Few conductors articulate with any intellectual clarity, and the few who do (like Boulez) exploit their articulacy to subject the music to an idiosyncratic ideology.

You have only to listen to Wilhelm Furtwängler’s archived radio attempts to explain Beethoven to realise that interpretation was something he performed without words. It may have been necessary for the music industry to invent the conductor as hero in order to satisfy public cravings for celebrity leaders. But when the publicity machine attempts to make an Aristotle out of an Achilles heel the results are about as edifying as asking Tiger Woods to explain the geometrics of his downswing.

The first shock on seeing the list of most performed new music of the 21st century is the absence of contemporary superstars. No work of John Adams appears in the top ten and only one in the top 20. Adams has the biggest public profile and publishing contract of any living composer, but his new work is clearly not being performed as much as we thought. Now why is that?

Also missing are such big beasts as Steve Reich, Michael Nyman, Krzystof Penderecki,  Peter Sculthorpe, Henri Dutilleux, Wolfgang Rihm, Beat Furrer and Olga Neuwirth. Could it be that their media presence is greater than their audience penetration?

The list is subject to a number of potential distortions. It excludes performances for which no fees are paid to publishers and composers and it is heavily weighted towards works that are toured by orchestras and, particularly, by dance companies – which accounts for Joby Talbot’s extraordinarily high ranking. New works by Gavin Bryars and Julian Anderson are going to receive similar exposure. One conclusion that emerges from this process is that modern dance may be having a greater impact on modern music than at any time since Diaghilev. Discuss, at your leisure.

The early results suggested a predominance of Classic-FM-style works – relax, relax and forget that it’s music you’re listening to – especially works with a synthetic spiritual dimension, hence the prevalence of requiems. But the list as a whole does not bear out this tendency. Nor does it suggest that minimalist repetition has much longer to run.

There is a surge of real invention to be found in many of the top performers, along with a return to the most productive of musical dialogues, between single instrument and full orchestra. The concerto is bouncing back.

 

With reports in from all the major publishers, here, in descending order, is a list of the most performed new music of the 21st century. I shall offer some analysis in a further post, but the list – as you can see – contains several surprises and it will reorder our priorities as to which composer is making the most waves in the present epoch.

Here is the second tranch of the top twenty:

20 Philip Glass, In the Penal Colony (2000) – 65 performances

19 Kaija Saariaho’s 2000 opera L’Amour de loin – 66

18 Magnus Lindberg Gran Duo (2000) for woodwind and brass, 67.

17 Elliott Carter: Dialogues (2003) for piano and large ensemble, 70.

16 John Corigliano, Red Violin concerto (2003), 71

15 John Adams: The Dharma at Big Sur (2003) for electric violin and orchestra, 72.

14 Jörg Widmann, Hunt Quartet (2003), 74

13 Oliver Knussen violin concerto (2002) 79.

12 Detlev Glanert’s opera, The Three Riddles (2003) 80

11 George Benjamin Dance Figures for Orchestra (2004), 82

 

Ready now? Here comes the top ten.

 

10 Detlev Glanert opera Jest, Satire, Irony and Deeper Meaning (2000) 83

9 Philip Glass, Concerto Fantasy (87)

8 Colin Matthews Pluto (2000), 87

7 Christopher Rouse Rapture (2000) 97

6 Howard Goodall’s Requiem (2008) 102.

5 Nathaniel Stookey, The Composer is Dead (2006), 104

4 Joby Talbot Entity (2008), 110

3 Tan Dun, Crouching Tiger concerto (2000) 139

2 Joan Tower, Made in America (2008), 145

1 Karl Jenkins Requiem (2004) 311

 

On national grounds alone the results are astonishing. The top ten contains five US citizens (one Chinese born), four British composers and one German. What does that say about the people who are commissioning new music?

The second eleven adds two Finns and a German to the mix, but without changing the general pattern. Italy and France, two of the great sources off western music, are absent. Russia, once the great white hope, is muted.

 

It may be that composers in those countries are not being properly promoted – and the numbers here are only from the major commercial publishers – and it could bee that some of them are being performed and not properly reported. If that is the case, I will be glad to hear of any discrepancies. However, it does not change the general picture that the mainstream of contemporary music is now dominated by American and British composers – and not necessarily the obvious ones. But of that, more in the next post. 

 

The esteemed firm of Schott (Mainz and London) has submitted its most performed works of the past ten years. Well, not quite the last ten years since anything that happened before the computer was installed in 2004 is distinctly sketchy. Probably kept in a drawer as scaprs of paper with a lock of Beethoven’s hair.

Still, the returns demand serious attention because every single work on the list is strictly highbrow – no concession here to Classic FM style.

I’ll present the Schott list verbatim and submit the final analysis tomorrow. Here goes:

1  Jörg Widmann Hunt Quartett (No.2) (2003) – 74 performances
2 Henri Dutilleux Correspondances (soprano and orchestra)  (2004) x 56
3 Peter Eötvös Zeropoints (orchestra) (2000)  x 55
4 György Ligeti Sippal, Dobbal (mezzo and 4 percussion) (2000)  x 44
5 Jörg Widmann Choralquartett (No.2) (2003)  x 34
6 Peteris Vasks 2nd Symphony (2000) x 32
7 Jörg Widmann Versuch uber die Fuge (SQ No.5) (2005)  x 30
8 Jörg Widmann String Quartet No. 4 (2003)  x 29
9 Mark-Anthony Turnage Scorched (for jazz soloists and orchestra) (2001)  x 27
10 Peter Eötvös Snatches of a Conversation (trumpet and ensemble) 2001  x 26

This is a terrific result for Widmann, 36, a Munich-born clarinettist who has become a favourite of the Lincoln Center Chamber Music Society. With four out of Schott’s top ten he leapfrogs his teacher Wolfgang Rihm as Germany’s most sought-after composer of the decade.

 

This is also a good result for the rising Hungarian, Eotvos. I am, though, perplexed at Mark Turnage’s relatively poor showing. He’s one of the few composers around with a sound all his own and a reach beyond the staid concert audience.

Just when you thought the most performed works of 2000-2010 were soft-focus sad songs, new results just in from the Music Sales Group in London and New York overturn the tables. 

First from the London office of Chester, Novello, Dungaven and St Rose. At joint number 10, it’s Judith Weir’s piano quartet and Ludovico Einaudi’s Devenire with 35 performances each.

Above them, Philip Glass with The Sound of a Voice (39), Rachel Portman, The Little Prince (43), Kaija Saariaho Orion (45) and Hans Werner Henze L’upupa (46).

Into the top five goes Sir Maxwell Davies with The Kestrel Road (2003) –  54 performances.

At 4, it’s Philip Glass, In the Penal Colony (2000) – 65.

At 3, the soaring Finn Kaija Saariaho with her 2000 opera L’Amour de loin – 66.

The runner-up is Glass, again, with 87 plays of Concerto Fantasy for two timpanists.

But the translatlantic winner, and  by a nautical mile, is Joby Talbot’s Entity (2008) with no fewer than 110 performances. Entity is an hour-long dance piece for Wayne Macgregor’s company, advised by six cognitive scientists who observe the brain/body relationship. In that respect, at least, it qualifies as a very 21st century piece. Talbot, 38, got an early boost as resident easy-listening composer at Classic FM. He has since become more complex.

Now don’t go away. Here come the US top ten from Schirmer.

At 10, it’s Avner Dorfman with Spices, Perfumes, Toxins (2006) – 33 performances.

At 9, Peter Lieberson’s gorgeous Neruda Songs (2005) – 34

At 8, Robert Xavier Rodriguez’s 2005 opera La Curandera – 37.

At 7, Gabriela Lena Frank’s Three Latinamerican Dances (2003) – 38

At 6 John Harbison, Concerto for Bass Viol and Orchestra (2006) – 45.

 

And now it starts to get interesting. In fifth place is Richard Danielpour’s opera Margaret Garner with 64 showings. At 4, it’s John Corigliano The Red Violin Concerto (2003) with 71 concerts. Number 3 is Nathaniel Stookey, The Composer is Dead for narrator and orchestra (2006) with no fewer than 104 performances.

In the runner-up position is Tan Dun with Crouching Tiger concerto for erhu and orchestra from a hit film – 139 performances.

But the winner – and who would have guessed? – is Joan Tower. Her 2008 piece Made in America, recorded in Nashville under Leonard Slatkin, won three Grammy awards and has been doing good box-office ever since.

No further comment at this pojnt. I’m still awaiting figures from Schott and one or two more. But I expect tomorrow to give the complete chart of 21st century classical best-sellers. And as you can see, it ain’t what you thought.  

 

 

Two more publishers, Faber Music and Universal Edition, have just submitted their most performed works of the century’s first decade, and you won’t believe what they are.

UE, the benchmark label of modernism, has lost many of its big names – Boulez, Berio, Birtwistle, Stockhausen – to silence, mortality or other labels. The company is, as they say, under reconstruction. Only four names appear in its top ten below.

Its biggest performer over the decade was Arvo Pärt’s Lamentate (2002), a homage for piano and orchestra to Anish Kapoor and his sculpture ‘Marsyas’. The work has achieved 44 performances, which is highly respectable but would not get it into the top ten of other major publishers. UE needs to find some big-hitters.

Here’s the list from Vienna:

1. Pärt, Arvo (*1935): Lamentate (2002) – 44 performances

 

2. Haas, Georg Friedrich (*1953): tria ex uno (2001) – 40 performances

for flute, clarinet, percussion, piano, violin and violoncello

 

3. Pärt, Arvo (*1935): Which Was the Son of … (2000) – 32 performances

for mixed choir a cappella

 

4. Pärt, Arvo (*1935): Cecilia, vergine romana (2000) – 30 performances

for mixed choir and orchestra

 

5. Haas, Georg Friedrich (*1953): in vain (2000) – 29 performances

for 24 instruments

 

6. Pärt, Arvo (*1935): Symphony No. 4 ‘Los Angeles’ (2008) – 28 performances

for string orchestra, harp, timpani and percussion

 

7. Rihm, Wolfgang (*1952): Das Lesen der Schrift (2001) – 28 performances

for orchestra

 

8. Rihm, Wolfgang (*1952): Das Gehege (2004) – 28 performances

for soprano and orchestra

 

9. Rihm, Wolfgang (*1952): Grave (2005) – 27 performances

in memoriam Thomas Kakuska for string quartet

 

10. Staud, Johannes Maria (*1974): Configurations/Reflet (2002) – 27 performances

for 8 instrumentalists

Now for Faber Music, based in London, the brainchild of Benjamin Britten when he walked out on Boosey & Hawkes (take that, Boosey! – and biff to you, Hawkes!) Faber have waxed healthy on late Britten, The Snowman by Howard Blake, various audacious Young Brits and the odd Aussie for good measure. Here’s what’s cooking at Faber:
 
At number 10, The Adventurer by Carl Davis (2000) – 46 performances of an orchestral score for a silent Chaplin film.
 
At 9 Julian Anderson’s ballet, The Comedy of Change. Premiered only six months ago by a 12-player ensemble, it has been danced 48 times – rising to 81 by May this year. 
 
In at number eight is Thomas Adès with a piano quintet (2000) – 49 performances.
 
It’s Adès again at 7 with Court Studies (2005) for clarinet, violin, cello and piano – 51 plays.
 
At 6 it’s Australian Carl Vine with Smith’s Alchemy for string orchestra – 53 hearings.
 
Into the top half of the draw with George Benjamin Three Miniatures for solo violin (2001) – 60.
 
At number 4, Oliver Knussen’s violin concerto (2002) – 79.
 
George Benjamin leapfrogs Ollie at 3 with Dance Figures for Orchestra (2004) – 82.
 
The runner-up at Faber is the vastly accomplished Colin Matthews who, in the year 2000, added a Pluto movement to Gustav Holst’s eternal Planets. It has been played 87 times and came out on record.
 
But the winner, the number one performer at Faber, is a composer one would not have linked to the Britten tradition. He’s a television performer, a populist, a resident at Classic FM – the most played Faber score is Howard Goodall’s Requiem (2008), with 102 performances.
 
Now, I’m going off to digest these figures with a sandwich before collating them with the ones already received. A trend is starting to emerge and the order of precedence in contemporary music is not what we’d imagined it to be. 
 

A friend who is writing a play about a parent who resents his child’s musical talent wonders if there is any known instance of an adult actually destroying an instrument because he or she cannot bear the child moving in an uncontrollable direction.

I’ve racked my brain and can’t think of one. There are instances of self-harm among musicians who feel technically inadequate – Schumann, the most famous – but can anyone call to mind an enraged parent smashing a violin against a wall, or taking a sledgehammer to the piano?

I got pretty close to the edge when one of my daughters transcribed her repertory and played it on the penny-whistle, but both she and the instrument survive in good nick and I am quietly coaching her two year-old tot to exact an appropriate revenge. All in good time…

Can anyone come up with a personal or historical incicent of an older person – doesn’t have to be a parent, could be teacher or priest – who took out their frustration on the object that emitted the music? All contributions gratefully received. There’s plenty of space below.

It’s George Washington in reverse: kiddie, I cannot tell a lie. It was me who snapped your oboe in half and stamped the trumpet into a doormat.

Three publishers in London and New York are working day and night to supply me with audited figures of their most performed 21st century works in response to yesterday’s post. Or so they swear. I will pass the information on as soon as it hits my mailbox.

Meanwhile, I see that Brett Dean’s opera of Peter Carey’s novel Bliss is going to hit the boards next month in Sydney and Melbourne, and in Hamburg at the end of September.

Bliss the novel is an ad-man’s view of the afterlife, glimpsed during a near-fatal heart attack. How this makes an opera for the big stage is a challenge for librettist Amanda Holden and I am more than a little curious to see the results.

Brett, former viola player in the Berlin Philharmonic and an all-round good guy, is a composer of considerable subtelty. He complains that he’s already had to downscale the orchestration for the broom-cupboard pit of the Australian Opera. Will they never repair that wretched space?

The Sydney premiere will be conducted by Elgar Howarth, deputising for the late Richard Hickox who was hugely enthusiastic about the opera. The Hamburg show will be conducted by Simone Young, Hickox’s predecessor as music director in Sydney. One way and another, this could be the great all-Australian opera.

 

In the final act of his London Beethoven-Schoenberg cycle, Daniel Barenboim took applause on stage with the orchestra for his Strauss polka encore and then bounded downstairs to the Clore Ballroom where hundreds of people had watched the concert free on a large screen.

After four nights of intensive music making to a sell-out crowd, Barenboim could not wait apparently to get to the invisible audience, the non-payers, the future potential.

Not many conductors can be bothered to do more than conduct. Barenboim, in his late 60s, has realised that a concert no longer has to be self-limiting. It can be an active engagement with those who attend, and those who don’t.

Other maestros, take  note.

When I breakfasted on the South Bank this morning, the whole circumference was still buzzing with the energy of this compact concert series.

Three months ago I kicked off a public conversation here as to which living composers are most likely to last the test of time. You can read the results here.

The discussion, which spread into several languages, prompted soul searching and stock-taking at music publishers. One of the leaders, Boosey & Hawkes, has just sent me a list of works of the past decade that achieved the greatest number of performances.

The top ten are not what I expected. To avoid giving you a quick fix, I’ll start from the foot up.

At number 10 is Karl Jenkins’ Stabat Mater with 57 performances. I once described Jenkins as ‘a newspaper composer’ in the sense that his music is ephemeral, hot today, late tomorrow. It looks like he’s proving me wrong.

At 9, with 59 performances is James MacMillan with O Bone Jesu (2002) for chorus.

At 8, the countdown quickening on 62 performances, it’s Michael Daugherty: Raise the Roof (2003) for timpani and symphonic band (or orchestra).

At 7, Magnus Lindberg has been doing well at the Los Angeles and New York philharmonic orchestras with 67 hearings of Gran Duo (2000) for woodwind and brass.

At 6, it’s Elliott Carter: Dialogues (2003) for piano and large ensemble, played 70 times.

Into the top five now with John Adams: The Dharma at Big Sur (2003) for electric violin and orchestra, 72 concerts.

At 4, a big surprise, 80 performances of Detlev Glanert’s opera, The Three Riddles (2003).

Number 3, an even bigger shock, Glanert’s comic opera Jest, Satire, Irony and Deeper Meaning (2000), seen 83 times. Who would have included Henze’s star pupil as a contender?

At 2, it’s Christopher Rouse, American hero, with Rapture for orchestra (2000), 97 plays.

And the winner is, you’d never have guessed, in the red corner, the Welsh dragon Karl Jenkins with a breath-taking 311 performances of his 2004 Requiem. I owe Mr Jenkins a retraction: his music may still be played when the last newspaper has bitten the dust.

Let’s digest those stats. John Adams, who is Boosey’s top earner, is getting many more performances of earlier and more trenchant works than the slippery Dharma. But where in the list, I wonder, are the prolific Peter Maxwell Davies and the ever-interesting Harrison Birtwistle, both stars of the Boosey stable? Where, above all, is Steve Reich?

It appears from that Reich’s Cello Counterpoint almost made the cut, as did two further works of Adams, On the Transmigration of Souls and the opera Doctor Atomic, along with two concertos by Lindberg and a collection by my Melbourne cobber, Brett Dean.

These are, of course, the results of just one big publisher. Nevertheless, they are indicative of a trend towards the simplistic satisfactions offered by the former ad-man Jenkins, as distinct from the more serious contemplations of post-modern genre leaders.

If other publishers care to send their results to norman@normanlebrecht.com, I will attempt to compile a list of all-time hits of the Noughties. Chester, Universal, Faber, Peters – it’s time to come clean – you’ve got til the weekend. Ades, Glass and Rihm musy be in the running.

Anyone else you think needs to stand up and be counted?

This just in from Eric Dingman, president of EMI Classics:

 

I’d like to add some points for the discussion…

 

Perhaps useful to remember that the % swings dramatically in years when major Classic releases happen because of the relative small size of classics %-wise in USA.   This indicates that there can be broader interest than the prevailing 2 – 2.5%  

 

South Korea’s reputed 18% classics share of sales relates to the physical product sales which in SK are now only 50% of total music sales; within digital sales classics in SK is almost 0% – at total effective market share for Classics of 9% so opportunity to get ‘digital’!

 

The retail challenge for Classics (like that for Jazz) is that with a larger number of titles each selling smaller quantities versus same for Pop, Classics either needs a higher price to generate similar return per square metre of retail shelf space or it looses its shelf space first in favour of titles that turn faster & generate more revenue for the retailer (Pop, Films, Games). 

 

Over the past 10 years as Classics prices reduced to drive sales (campaigning, introduction of more budget series), the margins the genre offers retailers has progressively declined and thus accelerated this negative trend.  Good news is that there has been strong steady growth of digital and home delivery (physical) for Classics in most major markets; Amazon is now world’s largest buyer of Classical music, followed by iTunes.

 

Also on the positive side – and based on the belief that there is no shortage of great classical talent, and that music lovers can still be ‘won over’ to classics, I see the opportunity as:

 

a) labels, & venues making better, more effective connections to classical music lovers (eg which channels, marketing works best in these changing circumstances); and

 

b) creative, relevant and eye catching ways to introduce ‘true’ classical artists and repertoire to new audiences (versus assuming they will only respond to ‘cross-over) or thinking these new fans will simply walk into the opera house on their own. 

 

To me the 10,000 people in Trafalgar Square last July for ROH’s La traviata on the BP Big Screen is great example of both ! 

 

Eric

 

 

 

NL adds: It’s late at night so I won’t append a commentary, but Eric has added a good measure of clarity to the debate and I’ll be happy to return to it as comments continue to come in.