Most Orchestra's are boring egotists and basically over paid Government Welfare receiptents who believe they should be adored and admired just for being them..They are not common people as in friendly; darling how drab to see those commoners in the last row.

(First violin, Netherlands symphony Orchestra, Orkest van het Oosten). I absolutely agree with everything John Borstlap has to say, particularly the last paragraph.

Kato. You must be joking. The bill that's coming due is most recently 8 years of theft camouflaged by 8 years of frivolous war. On another note: What makes you think orchestra members work 20 hours? Are you kidding? Do you even have a clue what goes into that work and how many real hours are involved in a concert season?

`The (many) reasons given for Lebrecht's "irreversible conclusion that the symphony orchestra will always survive..." remind me of the reasons why one can say churches will always survive. Some may survive. Most won't--is my "irreversible" conclusion.

So private citizen Sarah Palin "recently" cut off arts funding, huh? And precisely which orchestras were affected? Frankly, I have never heard anything about them, although I am familiar with several of the Dutch radio orchestras. My point is that it is specious to compare Anchorage and Juneau with New York and Philadelphia. The bill for fifty years of big-government liberalism, with its chronic overspending and gross misallocation of resources is finally coming due, and the arts are only one aspect of society that is going to feel the consequences. There are dire times ahead, moreso in Europe than in the U.S. In cities like Detroit, Cleveland, and Philadelphia, the majority of the younger generations is uneducated or miseducated, and is completely unfamiliar with every single name in this article. For every one of them who may someday become a benefactor of an orchestra there are 100 who have become acclimated to receiving handouts. Talk about orchestra members making $100K for 20 hours work, the stagehands in places like New York make double and triple that amount, and their union bosses may make up to $500K per year. Is the taxpayer supposed to blindly continue to pay for this union theft in the face of multibillion-dollar deficits?

ORCHESTRAS ARE IN THE FRONT LINE In a society which gradually looses its understanding of its own high culture, finding justifications for the existence of orchestras through 'community work' and the like, will only contribute to the erosion of music life: reducing an orchestra to a community tool will lead to less and less understanding of what an orchestra is. Making music has many different forms, and orchestras are at the top of the art form and should be left to their own job which is in itself already time- and energy-consuming enough. The community outreach programmes should be the job of other musicians - pop, cross-over, world music and the like - NOT classical music orchestras. It is crazy to ask from orchestras like the Berlin Phil to try to help solve integration problems in immigrant quarters. It is only a sign of erosion, not a possible way into the future of orchestral practice. It seems to be more practical to solve the problems of 'the orchestra in the XXIst century' through 2 ways of reducing its museum culture: 1) education, by making music education a must on every level of the educational system; 2) new composition related to the fundaments of orchestral practice, i.e. new music rooted in tradition, which will inject new life into the repertoire. Classical music for the orchestra is complex but often sensational. It has a stimulating influence upon brain development (as proven by neuroscience), so it is an excellent tool for educational purposes. It orders emotional experience and has an identity-strengthening effect upon the psyche. It reinforces the universalism of the best of civilization. It is a spiritual product at the end of thousands of years of human evolution, embodying civilizational values. Recordings are always just a substitute of the real thing: live performances. Live performances by orchestras should thus be accessible to everyone, and thus it should be normal that the state (the tax payer, who also pays for roads, bridges, health insurance etc.) support orchestras, as a counterbalance to the eroding influences of modern life and the media culture, which threaten to create a new type of human being: glued to the material exterior of things and incapable of thinking, feeling, judging, acting. It is in the state's interest that its citizens develop as much as possible to independent, civilized beings capable of mature conduct: high art, in which classical music and its orchestras occupy a central place, should be central to the state's concern, as it should be to the educational system. To see orchestras as marginal to society, is a signal of a much broader war on civilization: it begins with dissolving orchestras but it ends with barbarism. Look what is happening now in the Netherlands: a rightwing populism government wants to reduce the country's art institutions to insignificant, marginal private entertainment for a rich elite. A wave of hostility by the uneducated masses towards all art, old and new, is now getting power and will soon turn Holland into a cultural waste land.

martyspence: I find your comment totally incoherent. I suspect, however, that you're a jazz or rock fan with no understanding of the orchestral genre who believes that orchestral musicians can create a performance by mechanically reproducing the instructions in the score which can be interpreted like computer code. Heard it before - not even close. To equate orchestral musicians with people who paint by numbers is just plain silly.

To sit in a music hall and listen to your favorite symphony live, real time, among other listeners who expect you to listen in silence or leave (no pausing the cd or drifting out of the room to the fridge while the music plays), to Hear the phrases and movements with Dimension and Luscious Timbre is an experience one cannot have from the couch and it is for this that we are happy to buy a ticket. There is no doubt, though, that the repertoire has become stale. Who Really enJOYS Schoenberg and Shostakovitch? It seems to me, though, young musicians are finding ways to make the classical music training more Relevant: a young woman on youtube who plays Poker Face in the style of a Beethoven Sonata, a violinist who plays the Super Mario theme on his fiddle - something will come of this experimentation. Musicians grounded in composition who take this path are the future. The composers music was of their time - Bach rewrote the instrumentation of some of Vivaldi's Concertos for his own purposes, Beethoven and Brahms included folk songs as themes in their works - why shouldn't this generation include Lady Gaga's tunes? Perhaps only a few orchestras will survive in their current form and size and in only the biggest or wealthiest of cities. But it's not difficult to imagine an exciting collaboration between young composers and out-of-work classical musicians, a collaboration which could be the genesis for the future Canon.

If Bach were there to hear it, it might not have been okay for him. I would worry.

I am unable to agree that orchestras ~must~ be funded, for the same reason I wouldn't advocate my city's funding of a tea-ceremony troupe, no matter how refined or excellent. The trick is how to attract and retain public attendance: I wonder what success stories exist out there? Here in my city (Hobart) we have an excellent and refined orchestra which it is my joy to attend and thus my responsibility to support.