I think that the younger folks find contemporary music less daunting than that archetypal 55-year-old concert-goer does! Contemporary music has changed and includes a thick strand of music influenced by or driven by the power of pop music from the Sixties on, written by a whole generation of composers who grew up listening to that music as well. So if you’re going to talk about the John Adams generation, you’re going to talk about music that has those influences in it, so you can connect with twenty- to fortysomethings. And I think classical music has gone through a pretty dramatic period of new music losing an audience and new music finding a new audience. We’ve come out a lot healthier

I’m learning the Schoenberg Violin Concerto for performances coming up, and I think to myself, my God, this is actually beautiful, but it’s at the outer fringes of the language. If you don’t know the language, it really is hard. If you do know the language it’s very traditional in a lot of ways, with variations on phrases strung together the way Brahms would have strung them together. Yet one can see why it doesn’t get played that often, and why it did lose an audience – and yet one can feel nothing but admiration for the gift of composer as well. It’s quite a task to reconnect the music with a young audience, but I’m hopeful that it will work.