What if, to pander to shrivelled modern attention spans, the Canberra Symphony Orchestra led by effervescent chief conductor Nicholas Milton presented bonsaied, elfin, much-shortened versions of great works? The fabulously popular Andre Rieu is doing this (in performance and on record) to great middle-class commercial acclaim. What if, for example, the CSO's forthcoming performance of George Gershwin's An American in Paris (performed with, as well as an orthodox array of instruments, a taxi horn, tom-toms, three different sorts of saxophones and a xylophone) lasted for an undemanding three minutes instead of Gershwin's relatively demanding 20?
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Not that those of you counting the sleeps till the CSO's July 7 Night With Gershwin (and this column isn't out to sell tickets, since such is the allure of Milton and the CSO that the cavernous Llewellyn Hall is sold out anyway save for one or two seats up in the attic) have this nightmare. In my recent conversation with Milton about these sorts of things he was politely scathing about this trend, and worried by it too.
''Increasingly people want the Andre Rieu versions of say [Ravel's] Bolero, or of the Blue Danube Waltz. But the Andre Rieu version of the Blue Danube Waltz takes only three minutes while Strauss's version [Johann Strauss wrote the Blue Danube Waltz] takes about 91/2 minutes. The Bolero, which Andre does in about six minutes [and Milton fancies there's even a three-minute Rieu version of it] takes about 10 minutes in Ravel's version.''
Milton, who like his counterparts everywhere would love to have more young people at symphony concerts (I put it to him that when I go to symphony concerts almost everyone there looked distressingly like olde me, for just as there are Grey Nomads there are Grey Mozartians) thinks this a grim trend.
The young, who are already under great cultural pressure to only pay attention to anything for nanoseconds, may be in for a disappointment when they find that symphonic music makes demands on them.
''Classical music takes more effort. You can't possibly experience a Mahler symphony in three minutes.''
Not that ours was a gloomy interview. Milton, 44ish, is enjoying a sparkling career (he zooms off to Europe many times a year) and CSO, though bizarrely undersubsidised, is thrillingly good these days and is regularly putting bums on almost all the Llewellyn Hall's seats.
When overseas Milton is conducting more and more opera. ''I'm loving it,'' he laughs, ''because as an opera conductor you really feel that you're doing everything. For opera you really need a conductor. But sometimes with a Beethoven symphony, in rehearsal I might start the orchestra off and then leave the stage to go and stand in the hall to check sound levels and the orchestra will sound quite OK without me!''