Mozart VS Marilyn Manson

I went to the Louis Pasteur Canadian Foundation benefit at the invitation of Normand Lebeau from Mandrake, one of my clients. The event raised over $260k to help develop new vaccines and fund research. The event theme was homage to Mozart. Now, as you can tell by my previous posts, I'm not what you call a Classical music enthusiast, but I do enjoy it on occasion.

Yannnick Nézet-Séguin & Suzie Leblanc gave us a great sampling of some of the more obscure Mozart selections. What I enjoyed was a small explanation before each song of some of the lyrics, to help us understand the theme or style of the song. What a minute...lyrics...Mozart? Speaking to Harry Trihey sitting next to me, we both were surprised that Mozart even had lyrics. Now Harry is much more educated than me in this type of music, but nonetheless, we were even more surprised to learn that Mozart composed a few French songs, which were sang at the event.

Now here is the deal with Classical music, and remember that I am in no way an expert. In contemporary music, artists will often cover another's song. I thought of a good extreme example: Marilyn Manson covering Sweet Dreams from the Eurythmics. It is almost a new song it is so different. But when it comes to Classical music, I just don't see too much room for interpretation/improvisation. It seems that to be a great artist in Classical music, you must reproduce exactly the sounds of so long ago, getting every nuance, tone, pitch, and so forth. True it takes much pratice and discipline and those who do it, are remarkable. How many languages did Suzie have to learn before being able to sing all these songs? So with this line of thinking, all these Classical music bands are in reality cover bands.

Now let's see the Montreal Symphony Orchestra remake a Marilyn Manson song...that I would pay to see!