Music Chat: Have Today's Artists Lost Faith in the Classics?
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 25 ต.ค. 2022
- The symptoms are everywhere: artists who micro-manage every note, the quest for every more esoteric examples of "authenticity," the overpowering need to "do something" different--is it just insecurity, or have today's artists lost faith in the music itself?
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I've been arguing with some people lately who complain that circumstance is denying X musician any livelihood from their profession. As you have said here and in other videos, we're in an age of over-abundance of creative output and ever more competition for our attention. Musicians have to compete with streaming TV, computer games, 24/7 news and social media, and a century-long recording back-catalog of recorded music and film from every corner of the globe. Plus we have more musicians than ever (because the means of production have been democratized) fighting for ever thinner slices of our attention pie.
For the performer there is the anxiety of being heard and "worthwhile", for audiences there is FOMO on the next big thing. Together they are worked upon by an industry designed to squeeze every dime from that relationship. This extends far beyond the music industry to all realms of marketing and customer engagement, and the "keep building new stuff" culture of the tech world, rather than nurturing stable relationships.
Exactly. Very well put!
I remember this problem in prehistoric days of my listening as record sleeves emblazoning BLOGGS conducts sibelius. Even in my then immaturity, I wondered why the performing of the music was more monumental than the composing of it.
"A cult of the obvious" is a powerful conclusion as are many of the points you made on this topic. "Tinkering" and "making it your own" are especially rampant (and not only in classical music). An aspect to this and the tendency to retitle everything might be the inclination to 'find a new [younger] audience'. Will younger people take a chance on an album with "Schumann: Studies (6) in Canonic Form, Op. 56 " in the title? Isn't "From Afar" easier to understand and remember? This is obviously driven by the labels, in their desperation to keep selling units. You're right: there is just so much music out there, sifting through the noise to find performances that are satisfying or edifying is hard. On top of that, artists like Olafsson need to compete with all that's come before. (It gets even more complicated for established artists: Hilary Hahn is also competing with her extensive back catalogue!)
This is why informed critics and reviewers are key today. So, keep on listening (and reviewing), Dave. Many of us depend on you!
Always enjoyable hearing you expound on music. Always Educational, and as a bonus ALWAYS ENTERTAINING -
It feels good to hear this video full of good sense : when we make comments about Yuja Wang playing romantic composers, especially Chopin, with a completely out of style excessive rubato every 3 bars which makes us lose the line, the structure and the unity of the piece, most people don't understand how it is possible to write a musical critics about this beautiful pianist. This makes me sad beacuse it shows that a big part of the audience has no musical education. Most of them just go to see the sexy woman but have no interest in what she plays or how she plays it. As you say the composer is not the most important artist anymore, his music serves the ego of the player who only thinks of making money. (Although I'm not sure she makes on purpose to do these excessive rubato... 🤔?) As a musical critics said in "The Guardian" (UK 2022) : "Wang's flamboyance and virtuosity doesn't always convey a real sense of what music is about, but in works such as Ligeti's Études she is irrésistible". I agree with that statement : in modern and contemporary music she is great while not many pianists have the courage or the ability to play these very difficult pieces.
On the positive side, we still have some young musicians who are marvelous artists and still respect the composers' styles : Nobuyuki Tsujii! This blind pianist is an angel sent from God... (What do you think?)
It's the fashion of the day. It will change again. Nevertheless, lots of great music still about. And back in the day there was lots of bad music as well. But we've forgotten it probably (as we should). Time will tell what endures.
VO is one of DG's "stars" and focusing the marketing and record on the performer rather than the composer is how popular music, rather than classical music is marketed. Hence the modern focus on tbe "concept album" where a pianist might decide to do a themed set of works from all different time periods focused on a specific emotion or subject. ECM does this a lot, and ECM are not exactly a mainstream label.
This can work well sometimes in the same way that creative museum curation can be a creative act in itself, and it can be a good way to showcase works by more obscure composers, but frequently the concept overrides the music and causes interpretive issues.
As a sign of the times, Gramophone now has a "concept album of the year" award.
I completely agree. Very well argued.
Hype has been on the scene since that tailor sold the king new non-existent clothes - but it's become totally overwhelming of late. I think the key is to stay open-minded and keep giving new recordings the benefit of the doubt before calling out the BS - which you DO, thank you very much!
Excellent analysis as always.
Isn’t one way to put a brake on this tendency is for artists to perform and record lesser known works? They might feel less of an incentive to fiddle with works that are not viewed as overplayed.
I recently watched a video of "unknown works by famous composers," put out by some popular TH-camrs who market toward young people. It was a revelation, in a good way. One piece was so appealing (Sibelius - six humoresques for violin and orchestra Op 87 & 89) that I tracked down a recording - "Nordic Violin Favorites" on Naxos - surely an obscure recording that did not make the best seller lists, only to find even more beautiful pieces on an album that has become a favorite. There are plenty of unknown and lesser known works out there, some unknown because they should be, but some gems that should be mined for the enjoyment of all, if the performers could only convince the recording companies.
Yes, for example, the pianist Eliane Reyes has recorded a Tansman CD as a World premiere.
It may be that these artists do not trust the classical works presented in a traditional way, that these works somehow lack relevance for people today. Perhaps pop culture and commercial considerations also come into play here.
This might be one of the most penetrating talks so far. Straight from the heart, insightful, clear. It could have been straight from mine (only then not insightful and muddled).
It is, of course, we-the-public who can put a stop to this by NOT buying any of the obvious, marketing-induced crap. Collectively, we have that power. Bundling that power, however, is no easy task. There would be a part to play for critics, but good criticism is very hard to come by (I gave up on Gramophone decades ago), and the internet is awash with nincompoop "influencers" posing as critics who either do not have a clue, or are interested only in the lucrative garden path to try and lead us up. Is it possible to call them out and stop their baseless or bought "opinions" from being a factor? I fear not.
The other partial escape from this mess is an escape into the less-than-lofty category (mentioned in the talk, I was happy to hear). Those works beyond the canon, which do not really get any play from the egomaniacs, but do (at least on record) by the passionate, real musicians that we'd be much better off listening to instead. They congregate on the smaller labels like CPO, Ondine, Praga, Toccata (etc., etc.), and even BIS and Naxos. I can hardly remember the last time a new recording by one of the big players (Decca, Warner, DG) made me want to go and spend.
If we fall into the trap of finding WHO plays of more interest than WHAT is played (and even more: HOW it is played), then we let the superficial egos win. We do not have to!
The bad news: we are completely marginal for the big bucks record industry. Classical music as a whole is that, and the serious listener to be found on this site even more so - being a niche within a niche. Long live the small label.
Wouter
I could not agree more and I also agree, strongly, with your perspective on many of these recent recordings/performances. But I think classical music is like everything else, in other words, it’s a business and the business of classical music needs to confront the very serious problem of a repertory that is mostly established. Modern music has a very difficult time finding a viable audience. So these amazing performers face the canumdrum of re-recording works that have already been recorded innumerable times and still keep it interesting.
Excellent essay
Really interesting talk. From the title I thought it might be more to do with repertoire rather than performers, egos, interpretation. This was absolutely spot on though. So much out there now just to be different. I would love to be a conductor for a day and play Tchai6 with a top orchestra, only making minor interventions to phrasing, etc. As you say, it would be seen as boring by the masses despite being closer to what is written than any new recording by Currentzis and co.
Back to my earlier point, I think you could do a talk dedicated to repertoire, you often mention the lack of Tchaikovsky and others, in favour of Bruckner, Bruckner and more Bruckner 🙄
I feel that most of the new crop of 'classical' performers simply have little innate connection to the music and its cultural roots. They may like it or even love it and possess the technical skills required to perform it, but most of this music was written long before they were born and was created in a time and place that's impossible for them to enter. This is especially true of young musical virtuosos, who have little personal past to remember, much less any academic knowledge of anything that came before them. I also suspect that many of them have little knowledge of or interest in performing tradition and regard it as not applicable to them. The past is always a foreign country that is closed to the present, and only the very greatest historians (or performing musicians) can go there. The desire to be 'creative' also contributes to some of the musical distortions you describe. I think this has its roots in the educational industrial complex, which has been singing the tune that everyone has creative potential for a long time now. I suppose it's true at some level, but discriminating consumers get a vote in how worthwhile this 'creativity' imposed on the music is when listening to recorded performances. I recently heard a recording of Schubert's wonderful A Major Sonata, D.959 that was so full of micro-managed tempo fluctuations, exquisitely graded dynamics, finicky articulation and impossibly slow tempos that the piece simply fell apart. The pianism, however, was marvelous. I won't name names, but I'll bet you know who it was.
Love your videos, Dave. Keep on recording them! On the topic of useless liner notes written by the PR/Marketing Departments, I thought you'd appreciate the following nonsense from Pentatone's line of remastered recordings from other labels: "Just as the birds intensify and refine the beauty of nature with their song--at times soothing, at others forceful, or amusing, yet on the whole extremely attractive--the perfect mixture of classical works and the superior quality of the REMASTERED CLASSICS series, based on the original Philips Classics' recordings, is sure to intensify and refine your own musical journey."
Oy!
Sheesh! Gag me with a spoon.
It's a very interesting point, I think the reason why there's a preference to record the most popular classical repertoire is that it sells better and more people listen to it. So there's definitely an artistic interest in lesser known works, but the outreach for them is ultimately smaller. There's artistry and there's salesmanship, I think they're at odds in the classical music industry. And with those weird disc titles, it shows that they're going for any marketing tricks just to boost sales a little. It doesn't work necessarily, but people who come up with those ideas think so.
According to the 2022 article "On the Record":
- ...Singers today have many fewer opportunities to record than their predecessors did...The recording industry is transformed. Who will pay for an album of, say, Schubert songs?
Two points: Honneck is an interesting case in this because his recordings are overwhelmingly “about the music” but the program notes are veering into the cult of personality.
2nd: in regards to the VO recording discussed, it’s interesting to juxtapose that with the lambert orkis recording of the appassionata on the two different historical pianos because that had an actual purpose behind it, and the third performance on a modern piano reveals the confidence behind his playing and his faith in the piece and in Beethoven.
An interesting discussion
Everything you're saying could be applied to many opera directors.
Great video. I find this very interesting, and as someone who personally finds the whole “period instrument” movement in particular quite disgusting, frankly, I welcome your intelligent and thoughtful words. Here is my question. What do you think of some particular modern recordings that I, personally, do think are excellent and worth listening to - in particular, the Charles Ives’ symphonies as recorded by Gustavo Dudamel and the Semyon Bychkov recordings of Tchaikovsky’s symphonies? Obviously the Charles Ives is naturally more radical due to the music itself. But I think both recordings are great. I don’t know if those even count as examples of anything like this, but they were recorded very recently. It’d be good also to hear some recommendations for other good modern recordings. Many thanks.
You can read my reviews om classicstoday.com, and check out some videos too.
I would dig up some scholarly stuff from some old archive on the Tchaikovsky 5th, slap that on my interpretation and my career would be made.
I think Walter Legge was micro-managing Schwarzkopf`s performances on EMI big time!"Her Master`s Voice" it was referred to.
I´m looking forward to hear Hurwitz´ Beau Rivage Tchaikovsky, maybe coupled with something by Gerard Hoffnung or P.D.Q. Bach😁.
More seriously, it is really a sad issue you are discussing. That enjoying music, that for many of us is a deeply meaningful and sometimes life-changing experience is perverted into personality cult. Actually you see the same trend everywhere. E.g. who is nowadays interested in what politicians actually want to achieve? No, no, it´s more interesting what they like for breakfast or what mistakes they have done in their youth. No wonder the same thing goes for the classical music "industry".
A (probably futile) dream for the future: What if all very talented musicians would do "their thing" by promoting different less frequently performed composers, instead of giving us still another "unique" version of something that everybody plays! How much joy of discovering unexpected treasure wouldn´t we all get, both artists and listeners!
That new Vikingur Olafsson recording really has you dumbfounded. Here's my take, which has two parts: 1) It's total ear candy; and 2) It's a practical way to showcase the Kurtág compositions. Ear candy: this recording is perfect after a hard week of work, sitting down with a glass of wine, your cats huddled next to you, and just letting the notes pour over you. None of the material on this album is very challenging, and the playing is rather spare, even glacial. I find it just beautiful to listen to, something like listening to a Brian Eno ambient album. In general, I think the intent of this recording is to be beautiful to the ear and nothing more. It's ear candy. Kurtag: Having never heard Kurtag before, I was interested after listening to your review of this album. My explanation for Kurtag on this album is that the Kurtag tracks act as "palette cleansers" between the tracks by major composers. Without the Kurtag tracks, this album would be kinda sugary. Ear Candy albums have a tendency to be sweet. But the Kurtag pieces are so quinky and quirky, they really make the experience of listening to the album from beginning to end much more interesting. And after listening to the whole thing [grand piano version], it makes me wonder how else you could present the Kurtag compositions. Just a plain disc of Kurtag material would be a little strange and possibly, numbing. I like what Olafsson has done for the Kurtag compositions. They're really fun in this format/"program". This album may not be a "thinker" album, but it sure is a lot of fun and it's soooooo relaxing. Just my thoughts. Love your videos! 🙂 {As for the second disc, the [upright piano] version: We live in the Age of Content. If the company can market a second version that provides a little different listening experience, then they'll do it. The [upright piano] version does have a different sound to it, and that would make sense within the "ear candy" aspect of the album. But that's my guess.}
My cat prefers Mozart Piano Concertos, and wouldn't be caught dead with Kurtag playing.
I try (and try)....But -
Anything that requires that kind of an explanation isn't worth the time!
This kind of music, like the music of the fraudulent Brian Eno, is what I would call music for office workers (don't take offence: I used to work in an office) who like music as long as it knows its little place, doesn't get in the way of making a buck and doesn't disturb the emotions.
Speaking of cat chow, which you mention, how are things on the Pipo replacement front? Will another blessed puss appear in Pipo's place? We need to know, Sire!
At some point. I'm in the process of moving to a new house, so when that's settled we can address the pet issue.
I think that today's artists have no Idea what music is . outside of classical music , it's narcasism all over the world .
"...a narcissistic hog wallow"; David, may I quote you ( I think I alrady have, on occasion! :--))?
Sure!
Stimulating talk! Beecham was taken to task for his exceptionally slow recorded tempo in the last mvt of Eine Kleine Nachtmusik. He said he did it that way because it was different and nobody else had done it. I don't think any critics, even jaded ones, said it was a revelation, nor did his record company but there it was in all its singularity. But he didn't make a fetish of finding a different angle to a piece of music or a new perverse style of playing. Nor did RCA call the latest recording of a Tchaikovsky symphony "Songe passionnel" or some such.
Maybe we could argue that with at least 65 years of excellent recording (roughly 1955 on with the advent of stereo) behind us of superlative performances that there's no need to or desirability in recording the standard rep by anybody from here on out? (As opposed to performing them locally live in concert.) There's lots of music out there 1600 on that's worth hearing and underrecorded or unrecorded. Since sales of new recordings of even a Beethoven 5th must be nugatory, why not concentrate on those more obscure works? I'd bet not even 50% of surviving Telemann, to pick a name at random, has been recorded.
There is also the burden of 38 years of recordings on compact disc, of which there thousands of titles and millions of identical copies sloshing around. The CD doesn’t wear out (usually) the way vinyl did, and worn out end-of-life represses, plus Angel Records in general.
So we have these boxes of Toscanini, Stokowski, Walter, Böhm, Bernstein, Munch, Monteux, Reiner, Szell, Solti, Böhm, Fricsay, Markevitch, Karajan, Jochum, Klemperer, Barbirolli, Cluytens, Boulez, Martinon, Colin Davis, Kubelík, Previn, Mehta, Haitink, Masur, Maazel, Marriner, Abbado, Ozawa, Rattle (I missed a few, including the sixth Hungarian, Antal Dorati, and Christoph von Dohnyani (the son of a Hungarian), Tilson Thomas, Blomstedt, and Barenboim, who have few, if any, really big boxes,and leave out Karl Richter, Leonhardt, Harnoncourt, Gardiner, Hogwood, Pinnock, and Goebel as limited in scope)
Reference recordings older than current performers’ grandparents? I imagine it is quite intimidating.
My response to Dave's video was along your lines. Great recordings now last forever and are ubiquitous. I've no need for a new Beethoven symphony, concerto, quartet, trio, piano or violin sonata cycle.
But I still want to hear live performances of these and new pieces, which dead artists cannot provide. So I need to support current performers, and they cannot live on concert revenues alone. Also, I won't know who to go see if they don't release recordings.
Honeck would be a case in point. I believe that he is passionate and confident in interpreting the standard central European repertoire in the tradition of his native Vienna. Most of his live performances I've heard were exhilarating. Some of the recordings capture this and are worthwhile; but I don't really need them. I can assure you, however, that the Pittsburgh Symphony needs the exposure provided by the recordings.
This leads to the paradox underlying Dave's complaints. Current recording artists need to attract an audience. If they release recordings only of recent compositions, they won't reach a large audience. (If you're not a music critic, are you going to spend precious time listening to a piece you've never heard before by a group you've never heard of?) If they perform standard repertoire, they know they're not adding anything worthwhile to the catalogue. Their outré interpretations are acts of desperation. I sympathize, because I don't see a solution to this paradox, but Dave's right, being different for its own sake isn't the answer.
They's better live on concert revenue alone--there's no money at all in recordings. Wherever did you get that bizarre notion?
I confess that I like some performances that fall into the category of this video. Does that mean I like things that suck and just need to admit it?
Of course.
David, I think you hit on it: "marketing." I don't want to simplify it too much, but I do think all this is the natural evolution of capitalism, and more specifically, trickle down, where all the wealth slowly migrates from the bottom to the top. It's the same reason why film is now judged by how much it makes in its opening day weekend.
But, without being different, there is no reason to listen to them. They should do whatever the hell they want, and we should listen to whatever the hell we like. It will all work out. Of course, the critic must listen to it all, so he has a special issue with it.
Do you think this is also a by-product of the over-availability of recordings of the standard repertoire by the great performers. Here on TH-cam you can hear any one of twenty great performances of the Bruckner 8, let alone the Beethoven Ninth. There is a TH-camr currently suggesting that Yuncham Lim's Rach 3 might be the greatest ever! Really? I think Glenn Gould was the first to suggest if there are twenty recordings of, say, the Brahms 1st Piano Concerto, then the performer was duty bound to do something different. And, of course, splicing and retakes allow one to create a performance that one cannot deliver in the concert hall. When we were young, I thought Abbado had to be better than Bohm or Jochum because he was younger and cooler. The same is true for the younger generation, Kopatchinska plays a great Stravinsky concerto, but her Beethoven is unbearable. Having sat through Pollini in all the late Beethoven Sonatas in the late 1970s, totally unmoved, there is nothing new in all this. The marketing is cruder, ghastly, embarrassing, tasteless, but still, the Volodoses and Ranas still emerge to confound our worst predictions of the death of the great tradition. Conductors? I am still looking.
I think this kind of thing makes more sense with soloists because there always was a cult of solo performers. You could get into arguments about Richter vs Serkin vs Schnabel, and those always were more passionate than arguments about orchestras and conductors. Conductors may be famous but only a select few like Furtwangler or Bernstein could inspire the adoration and argumentation that a star soloist could.
@@samuelheddle You may well be right. I went to hear Haitink, Previn, Abbado, Tennstedt, Davis (both of them), Masur, Maazel, Rattle, Weller and number of so-say luminous others during my concert going years in the 1970 and 80s. The most outstanding orchestral performance I heard was by a then unknown conductor called Gunther Herbig of the Brahms 1. So even then, the hype machine was working so that truly great conductors went unnoticed. Fruhbeck de Burgos and Skrowaczewski and Matacic were all three great musicians whose appearances with top rank orchestras dwindled, though their recognition in Japan might have told us were were missing something. Even Carlos Kleiber made ridiculously few recordings because he refused to play the game, and appear everywhere all the time, with the inevitable cost that dictates to performance standards. Recently, I heard some nice conducting of the Marseille Orchestra, the artist responsible, Lawrence Foster, a man whose discography, to the best of my knowledge, is a few appearances on Decca back in the 1970s accompanying Kyung Wha-Chung. Twas ever thus. I think Barbirolli was a far greater conductor than Beecham., on the basis of recordings I have heard, but he is nowhere near as famous or universally highly-regarded.
That’s entertainment.
Sometimes, as Dave the yellow moon eclipses the large flat instrument behind himself, I sense a crisis of terminology.
Faith = religion/humanism/baxian/norringtonism.
Interest = score/talent/liner notes/title.
Compositional music = intent / rules/ innovation/boredom.
Time= yesterday/ now/research/musician skill/tempo
Sacre blurred,
My comments = 😢
What is particularly prevalent in the Netherlands is that classical musicians and orchestras are afraid of being dismissed as elitist. Being elitist is the biggest curse in cultural Netherlands. So all kinds of methods are found to sell the music differently and 'with a new message'. The soloists and orchestra's take you on their journey. That sort of nonsense. But we're stuck with it because it's the standard nowadays. Especially in the Netherlands where the state determines which orchestra's get money. And the state demands that nonsense. It is an outgrowth of the woke sentiments.
Then what should artist do nowadays when they want to record AGAIN Beethoven Symphonies (we have trillions of them!))? Not recording them?
Yep. Give them a rest.
what your opinion about glenn gould.....? the cult of the personnality....? i remember one critic in the past about the recording of the reesued of the well tempered clavier by bach from a french critict,marcel marnat in the harmonie magazine.....he said about this recording.....'' this is not a bach music...this is a glenn gould music''......
I think some of his recordings are great and some are horrible. He definitely has a cult of personality around him. I don't get it.
Gould was no romantic - any music after the Baroque period was a closed book for him. His Mozart and Beethoven was tone deaf.
As I already commented on this channel about some atrocious performance or other, too many performers (mostly conductors, but not only) want to "mark" their interpretations to personalize them - sort of like a dog peeing on a tree to mark its territory.
There is certainly nothing wrong in principle with being informed and wanting to grow as a musician - reading good scholarship about music, thinking deeply about what you like and dislike, and about whether you might be missing out on something good. But at some point that has to give way to making music, which cannot be reduced to formulas.
The timpani player Saul Goodman played in the New York Philharmonic for about 50 years, and he said that Toscanini once took him aside and told him: "You are very clever. But being clever is not enough!" I think I know what he was trying to say. When I go to a concert, I am not at the least interested, for that 2 hours or so anyway, in how erudite the performers are. I want to hear a performance that is convincing on its own terms. A performance where the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. That is the acid test. All the whys and wherefores go out the window.
Classics has expiration date probably. :)
It just sounds like Dave is describing performers who do not have compositional talent to create unique works for themselves yet strive for uniqueness by altering others' compositions. The end result is superficial market differentiation and making a 'flash in the pan' name for yourself.
Some sing Moravian duets in nice way like a folky tune, in a natural way and some lady on youtube was singing it like an Opera.
I like more the original tune.
I'm a visual artist, and I don't understand any of this. It seems to me that these performers you criticized are trying to steal glory from the composer. When I was young, we judged performances based on the amount of passion a performer put into the music. Von Karajan was as passionate like my mother's hairdresser. He was neither Szell, nor Toscanini, God bless their souls, but he thought he was. Roger Norrington conducts Berlioz with white gloves under the Oscar Wilde principle. Every time I hear him conduct I think of the spinal taps I had. On the other hand, I have never heard a recording or seen a video of Leonard Bernstein when he wasn't completely involved in the music. But maybe that was because his ego wasn't wrapped around his conducting, or his conducting alone. I just listened to his violin concerto and thought that maybe someone should do a set of all of his music. I'm sorry for rambling.
On the contrary, I think they don’t go far enough to make the music relevant for the kids of today. Add a drum machine with a steady beat, replace the strings with a synth and the horns with an electric guitar. Attach a video game to the music, and we are in business.
Let's not leave public expectation out of this equation. The public crave novelty, and having heard a piece for the umpteenth million times, they want to hear something different. Thus, artists may feel compelled to stretch the credibility of a performance to satisfy this demand. Now we arrive at a situation where one feeds off the other and extreme performances are the result. There can be little doubt that marketing is partially responsible for this phenomenon. The sub-text may be for example: " Tchaikovsky as you've never heard it before" - that's got to be a good thing, right? To which we might reply, well, no actually. However, there is another aspect to all of this in that although many classical composers wrote for posterity, some of then would perhaps be delighted that they are still listened to and remembered centuries later in whatever guise.
Don't extremes start to appear as norms begin to disappear?
Why is it that modern day composers concentrate on A Tonal music and never compose music that actually has a nice melody? It drives me crazy!
There's plenty of non-atonal composers around, but they are less likely to work in standard classical forms. They write for film or computer games or just post stuff for free on the web.
There is plenty of contemporary, tonal music that employs tradition melody. You just haven't heard it.
I find the current crop of classical singers to be awfully bland with some few exceptions. I recently purchased an album of an American tenor who is touted as the latest 'Caruso' and god it left me saying 'meh'!!
Its like when 'scholars' read into the literary classics and come up with new absurd theses concerning sexuality and this and that... lol
I blame Glenn Gould and his cult.