UK's love-affair with choral music
15 January 2013
Most performed in 2011-12: Handel's Messiah
Choral works and choral composers have once again performed
strongly in annual statistics for the UK published by classical concert finder
Bachtrack.com.
Handel's Messiah came top of the list of ten most-performed
concert works in 2011-12; his Zadok the Priest came in at No.5, Parry's I was
glad at 7, Brahms's A German Requiem at 8 and Mozart's Requiem at 10.
Overall, Beethoven was once again the most widely performed
composer, with Mozart in second place, followed by Bach and then Brahms;
Debussy rose to 9th in his 150th anniversary year, an increase of almost 50%
from 2011.
The list is dominated not only by male composers, but by
dead ones: among the living, the highest-placed were the Estonian composer Arvo
Pärt (54), followed by Eric Whitacre (78) and John Adams (89); there were no
female composers in the top 100.
Bachtrack.com, launched in December 2007 by Alison and David
Karlin, is the largest classical concert finder online and listed a total of
17,048 concert and opera events for 2012. Bachtrack told C&O: 'The usual
caveats for statisticians apply: clearly, our database only includes a
proportion of the concerts performed across the globe. It’s a large sample,
although not a random one - it’s skewed towards the events put on by the
largest organisations and those who have chosen, for whatever the reason, to
work with us. It’s hard to say how those biases might play out: they make these
stats fairly useless for serious research, but they don’t stop them being fun
to read (we think).'
Graeme Kay
