Classical music plays the generation game


My link from today's An American in Berlin article points to a February 2007 article about the media ballyhoo over English National Opera partnering with Sony to install PlayStation 3 consoles into the ENO foyer. Can someone tell me what happened to this much-trumpeted initiative because a Google search can't - I can find no follow-up articles at all. But then I guess we've moved on to and Doctor Who Proms and newspaper reader offers.

Header image shows how classical music should play the generation game.
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Garth Trinkl said…
Pliable, thanks to you, I just now read Helen Pidd's article about the Royal Opera House's opening night Fall 2008 publicity stunt in which the 2,200 seats to Don Giovanni will be distributed by lottery at subsidized prices to those who swiftly fill out a Sun newspaper reader offer. (I also enjoyed the separate link to the Sun offer earlier this year in which something like 4 million readers responded to the offer of two free "green" light-bulbs.)

I may have mentioned this before, but I fondly recall the more thoughtful "newspaper reader offer" made by a Sunday London newspaper (The Guardian?) back in the May of 1986 when the English National Opera was premiering Birtwistle's "The Mask of Orpheus" at the Colesium. The offer coupon plus 5 pounds got the reader one of the remaining seats to the run (including, I recall, the orchestra level seats that I had splurged for in advance).

I gave the coupon to two newly married friends originally from Berkeley and Hawaii who were then living in London and doing graduate work in, respectively, African rural development and computer science at the School of Oriental and African Studies, and LSE.

Just last year, in Berkeley, one of the pair reminded me that their attendance, in their early twenties, at "The Mask of Orpheus" that spring twenty years earlier had been one of the highlights of their few years in London.

*

[PS. Congratulations too on your citation in the Royal Academy of Music 2009 Prospectus.]
3:59 pm
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