2013 – the year of the repeat...repeat...repeat...repeat...
In 2012 classical music dutifully celebrated John Cage’s centenary but resolutely ignored his creative credo of ‘I can’t understand why people are frightened of new ideas. I’m frightened of the old ones’. Which means that in 2013 there will be at least twenty-three different Ring cycles around the world and twenty-four productions of Aida , while a search of the Britten anniversary performance database returns no less than one hundred and twenty results for ‘ Peter Grimes ’. Predictably, BBC Radio 3 has been leading the charge by drip-feeding the Ring at the rate of one act a day over Christmas - a piecemeal approach adopted presumably because the station's fickle audience will decamp wholesale back to Classic FM if confronted with a complete Wagner opera – while Munich also jumped the gun with a Verdi gala on December 26th . With social media functioning as a massive echo chamber , mediated repetition has become the new black at the expense of the vitally importan