Danes cancel concerts for lack of cash
OrchestrasThe Athelas Sinfonietta Copenhagen has cancelled concerts for the rest of 2024 in ‘a final attempt to secure the ensemble’s survival’.
Founded in 1990, Athelas has been a beacon of contemporary music, Danish and international.
The Danish government has reduced 2024-27 arts budgets and the ensemble has been refused a special grant to see it through.
Has ACE Dementia Syndrome crossed the North Sea?
Nothing to do with the Arts Council of England, although I suspect you are trying to be funny! But it is the result of no significant music in schools all over Europe, not just in England. Germany will be the next to get hit with all their opera houses. The younger generation have different ideas about what they attend, and classical music is beneath football, even over there. The present generation of concert goers who help the funding will soon not be there. It was heart-warming to go to ten very different and diverse proms in London this year, and see the diversity of the audience over 5,000 or so in both age and ethnicity. Long may it last.
The Danish with their calvinist world view have never accepted the fact that arts and culture form an integral part of society.
So, even when the DK taxman is hauling in mega-bucks with the success of Ozempic, and they have more money available than ever before, they still pretend they have no money for the arts.
Typical small minded calvinst approach where anything pleasurable is seen as the devil’s work…
The majority of religious Danes are Lutheran, which sees a more benign God than the sterner Calvinism.
The Danes also set a lot of store by “hygge,” which would seem to contradict your final assertion.
Arts funding in Denmark is quite generous but they, like most countries in recent years, have had to tighten their belts. The Athelas Sinfonietta would appear to be one of the victims. But I do not detect a malign hostility to the arts in the problems of this group.
I’m not danach but.. really everyone knows – Denmark is not a poor country and additionally even homebase of Novo Nordisk! Really shameful
Nothing to do about being a poor country or not. It’s about audience attendance as well, and if you don’t have an audience, funders will say it’s not viable. And audience attendance is all about choice these days of how you spend your free time in life. It’s not shameful but it is very sad that that’s the way classical music is going ever since the pandemic, and people now changed their habits, and have different ways of listening to and watching anything to do with classical music – if they actually do.