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The Hill
5 days ago
- General
- The Hill
Northwestern study reveals a culture abandoning NPR
In Fall 2024, a media engagement study at Northwestern University revealed a stunning generational break: Only 2 percent of students reported listening to NPR at all, and of those, just 17 percent listened regularly. That's right: Fewer than one-half of one percent of students at one of America's most intellectually engaged universities still consider NPR a relevant part of their cultural experience. You might surmise that college students just don't go in for this sort of thing, but you would be wrong. In the 1990s and early 2000s, more than 40 percent of college students reported tuning in to NPR during a given semester, with nearly half of those listening regularly. The collapse in engagement is not the product of shifting dashboard technology or the rise of podcasts. NPR's decline, particularly in classical music programming, reflects something deeper: the breakdown of aesthetic trust in institutions that have exchanged excellence for ideology. For decades, NPR served as a gateway to the Western classical canon. It offered emotionally rich, intellectually accessible programming that invited listeners into music that transcended cultural boundaries. A Mahler symphony or a Debussy prelude didn't require a conservatory background — only the desire to feel something profound. What distinguished NPR wasn't just the music it played, but the curatorial intelligence behind it. That intelligence has since been compromised. Over the last decade, NPR's classical segments have become laboratories for performative inclusion, where programming is governed not by aesthetic judgment but by demographic optics. DEI ideology now functions as a selection criterion. Composers are elevated for what they represent — not for what they compose. The result is music introduced not through its structure, innovation, or affective power, but through the race, gender, or social positioning of its creators. This is not progress. It is reduction. No serious critic argues against expanding the canon. Marginalized composers have produced masterworks that deserve broader recognition. But NPR's current posture doesn't correct history — it merely flattens it. By featuring underrepresented composers primarily to satisfy institutional symbolism, it strips the music of its autonomy. The pieces become vehicles for moral instruction, not aesthetic encounter. And the listener — sensing the shift from invitation to indoctrination — quietly steps away. The Northwestern study makes this clear. Today's students, raised amid saturation-level virtue signaling, are no longer persuaded by it. They do not protest NPR — they simply ignore its existence. This is the most potent form of cultural judgment: not outrage, but indifference. Indeed, NPR's own data mirrors the trend. In 2023, the network reported a $30 million budget shortfall and laid off 10 percent of its staff. Digital music engagement is in steady decline, even as classical music consumption increases among young listeners on commercial platforms. The genre is thriving — it's just not thriving on NPR. Why? Because people don't turn to classical music for affirmation. They turn to it for transcendence. The canon was not constructed through quotas. It emerged across centuries through refinement, repetition, and resonance. Works by Bach, Brahms, and Tchaikovsky endure not because of who the composers were, but because their music continues to arrest the human spirit. The suggestion — increasingly implied by NPR — that love of the canon is itself suspicious, or in need of correction, is not only historically illiterate, but aesthetically toxic. And yet this is now the ambient message embedded in much of NPR's music programming: that to prefer Brahms over an obscure activist-composer from a recent MFA program may reflect some quiet prejudice. This is the logical endpoint of identity-first curation: the collapse of musical trust between broadcaster and audience. Listeners can feel this. They don't complain, they just tune out. That is the quiet tragedy of NPR's collapse — not scandal, but entropy. Not rebellion, but silence. To recover, NPR must recognize that artistic legitimacy cannot be conferred through ideology. It must be earned through beauty, complexity, and affective depth — qualities that exist independently of identity. Diversity matters. But without excellence, it becomes mere optics. And listeners know the difference. NPR is not the first institution to discover that DEI cannot sustain cultural relevance. It is merely the latest. And like many, it remains unwilling to admit what the evidence makes undeniable: the public is not rejecting inclusion. It is rejecting the substitution of ideology for merit. The Fall 2024 Northwestern study was not just a dataset. It was a verdict. A generation raised on curated empathy, language policing, and moral performance has turned away — not because they are closed-minded, but because they recognize when an institution has stopped respecting their intelligence. And the current silence — empirical, generational, and final — is not the result of reactionary resistance. Northwestern is not a reactionary place. Rather, it is the sound of trust lost, music misused, and a cultural authority that now exists largely in name. If NPR hopes to survive, it must return to what made it great: the unyielding belief that excellence, not messaging, is the highest form of inclusion. Until then, it will remain a case study in how great institutions disappear — not with the bang of a scandal, but with the whimper of disillusionment.
Spectator
02-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Spectator
Brave and beautiful: Longborough's Pelléas et Mélisande reviewed
King Arkel, in Debussy's Pelléas et Mélisande, is almost blind, and he rules over a kingdom of darkness. Debussy's score is so luminous that it's easy to forget just how dark it supposedly is, this mythical realm of Allemonde – even despite the libretto's references to gloomy caves, shadowy castles and forests that block out the sunlight. Many productions take their visual cues from the music rather than the words, providing endless opportunity for shimmering effects and the subtle play of light and shade. Jenny Ogilvie's staging for Longborough Festival Opera doesn't just embrace the darkness; it goes all in. Shadows texture the huge, brutalist wall of Arkel's castle and occasionally – briefly – it's pierced by shafts of sunlight. But the visual default here is inky blackness, in which occasional points of light are almost characters in their own right. A single lightbulb darts about like a moth; a fluorescent bar makes a foil sheet glitter like water. Occasional low washes catch faces in profile and turn the scene icy-blue, or flood it with soft gold as the two lovers accept their destiny. It's a hugely impressive achievement; one of a growing list of recent opera productions in which the lighting designer (here, Peter Small) makes the running. Still, gloom has its drawbacks. I was sitting five rows back from the orchestra, and even there the mystery sometimes felt a little too profound. How it came across to visually impaired audience members, I wouldn't like to guess. On the other hand, the Longborough auditorium is so compact that no one is very far from the performers, and there are huge benefits in staging a lush, late-romantic opera in a venue where both orchestra and cast can whisper or roar without inhibition. As Pelléas, Karim Sulayman was practically conversational, in a role usually sung by a rather heavier voice. He barely needed to project at all – the embodiment of openness against Brett Polegato's tormented, slow-burn Golaud. As a lover, Sulayman made a desperately naive counterpart to Kateryna Kasper, a Mélisande who gave nothing away. And I mean nothing. Dressed like some Singer Sargent heiress, with a face that flickered between radiance and china-doll blankness, Kasper was as enigmatic (and as compelling) as Debussy and Maeterlinck surely intended. Bell-like and bright at volume, she placed her quieter phrases gently into the silence – a sonic equivalent of those solitary light sources, throwing the surrounding performances into powerful relief. She was especially potent alongside Julian Close's Arkel, a role that feels even more tragic when the old King is as compassionate, and as majestically sung, as he was here The conductor was LFO's Wagnerian-in-chief Anthony Negus, a master of intimacy coupled to long-range command. In this venue you can really feel the grain of the orchestra, and Negus stretched velvet expanses of shadowy sound between sudden, flashing glimpses of ecstasy – moments when the orchestra was as agile (and as soft) on its feet as a cat. True, not everything in Ogilvie's production worked, and in the last scene – with the dying Mélisande encased in a Damien Hirst fishtank – you could practically hear the collective 'eh?' from the audience. But by then, a spell had been cast. There's an authority and assurance about this Pelléas that feels like a company stepping up to the next artistic level. It was brave, and – at its best – very beautiful indeed. Grange Park Opera also deserves points for courage; its new production of Tchaikovsky's Mazeppa delivers a brutal torture scene immediately before the picnic break. Big respect, too, for the way that GPO has given director David Pountney a platform for his ongoing love affair with the Slavic operas that no one else will touch. Mazeppa was a Ukrainian Cossack leader who rebelled against Peter the Great, but Pountney avoids overt point-making, which is probably wise. A couple of years back an opera at Grange Park featured a simulated storming of the theatre by Vladimir Putin's Spetsnatz. Impressive, but giving your audience heart attacks is not a sustainable business model. Anyway, the setting – a generic modern war zone – is vividly realised; the singing sounds admirably Eastern Bloc and Pountney does his best to energise the story, presenting Mazeppa (David Stout) as a hairy biker and his child bride Mariya (Rachel Nicholls, who can do melancholy as well as cold steel) as a sort of groupie. The main problem is Tchaikovsky, who can't decide whether Mazeppa is hero or monster, and never quite gets a grip on his material. A string of extended lyrical soliloquies and duets works a treat when you're adapting Eugene Onegin, but it's less effective when your story climaxes with the Battle of Poltava. Still Mazeppa is a bucket-list opera for Slavophiles, and for the foreseeable future we're unlikely to see it done better. Or, to be honest, at all.
The Guardian
02-07-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Pelléas et Mélisande review – Longborough's staging is accomplished and atmospheric
Anthony Negus's conducting of Wagner has long been the chief musical glory of the Longborough festival. Now he has turned his attention to Debussy's Pelléas et Mélisande, an opera on which he assisted Pierre Boulez at the Welsh National Opera more than 30 years ago. The results are no less unmissable and authoritative as his Wagner. From the dark chords of the opening bars, Negus conjures a fluently idiomatic reading of the translucent score. The pacing is beautifully controlled and Negus is always attentive to Debussy's many tone colour changes and subtle dynamic contrasts. He draws some ravishing woodwind playing from the Longborough orchestra. The opening of Jenny Ogilvie's production is instantly gripping too, as the barely discernible figures of the lost Prince Golaud and the mysterious Mélisande encounter one another in the tenebrous depths of a murky wood. It sets the bar high for a darkly mysterious staging of an enigmatic work, in which Max Johns's cubist suggestions of a castle supply a menacing background to the opera's elusive events. The stage is often almost bare, with the characters facing outwards without direct interaction. Amid such discipline, Mélisande's scene at the tower window, imaginatively translated on to a giant garden swing, has all the more impact for its impulsive movement. Peter Small's lighting plays a crucial stage role, occasionally bright and trained, blindingly so at the death of Pelléas, but more often suggestive and fleeting amid the weight of the shadows. A tiny, bright bulb flickers like a will-o'-the wisp, deepening the darkness behind. When the dark occasionally lifts, and Debussy's orchestration opens radiantly with it, the illumination of the stage is like a breath of fresh air, but it is only momentary. It all adds up to one of the most accomplished, atmospheric and well-integrated Pelléas productions in years, and possibly the most completely successful show Longborough has mounted. There are reservations, however. Three silent servants, whose entrance in the final scene is indeed signalled in the text, are given more extended roles as extras and scene shifters, including a memorably posed moment as the sleeping beggars in a cave. Though they never speak, surtitles twice give them inner thoughts, elevating them into an unspeaking chorus. This feels an otiose moment in a production where music, staging, lights and performances otherwise all support one another so sympathetically. Among a strongly cast group of principals, Kateryna Kasper brings an ideal combination of soprano richness and soubrette brightness to Mélisande. Karim Sulayman's light-voiced Pelléas sounds almost improvised in its conversational fluency, but his tenor flowers in moments of passion. Brett Polegato is an intense and intelligent Golaud. Julian Close brings sombre authority to King Arkel, Catherine Carby is a richly projected Geneviève and Nia Coleman, on stage almost throughout, is a brightly convincing Yniold. Until 10 July. Our reviewer attended the second performance.
Telegraph
30-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
Pelléas et Mélisande, Longborough Festival, review: Opera at its most intoxicating
In the wake of their recent small-scale stagings of Wagner's Ring cycle, under the outstanding musical direction of Wagner supremo Anthony Negus, it makes sense for him to tackle Debussy. After all, the French composer's 1902 operatic adaptation of Maurice Maeterlinck's play was profoundly influenced by his experience of Wagner's music-drama. Now, in doing so successfully, Longborough have demonstrated a way to move forward. Heavy with symbolism, the story of Debussy's intoxicating opera is essentially a simple love triangle in which the developing, overwhelming love of Pelléas and Mélisande threatens her enigmatic marriage to Pelléas's half-brother Golaud and leads, in the end, to the murder of Pelléas and the death of Mélisande. But around this swirls a host of allusive episodes linked by Debussy's unique through-composed score, a continuous narrative of suppressed passion and lurking danger with no conventional operatic arias or ensembles. Picking up on the frequent references in the text to light and dark, Jenny Ogilvie's staging (designer Max Johns, lighting Peter Small) is dominated by lights with an alarming life of their own: a moving neon strip for the pool by which Golaud and Mélisande first meet, swinging spotlights across the stage, dazzling crossbeams for moonlight, an illuminated swing on which Mélisande becomes entangled with Pelléas. However, this becomes overdone towards the end, as the equipment has to be dragged on and off stage by silent servants, while the concept of Mélisande's baby portrayed as a light should be rethought. But all this frames a perfectly intelligible telling of the story, against a threatening moving back wall of concealed steps and hiding places, where the young Yniold (the excellent Nia Coleman), Golaud's child by his first marriage, can constantly lurk unobserved, and then be used by his jealous father to spy on the lovers. As Golaud, lost at the beginning of the opera, despairing at the end, Brett Polegato captures perfectly the intensity of Debussy's writing but also its restraint. There is strong support from Julian Close's sonorous Arkel and Pauls Putnins's disturbing Doctor. The central couple are not perfectly matched: Karim Sulayman's Pelléas is well sculpted, the words crystal clear, but there is just not enough voice to sustain the role. But Ukrainian-German soprano Kateryna Kasper as Mélisande is an outstanding discovery here, with a voice fuller and richer than we may be used to in this role, but wonderfully rounded, full of anxiety, and heart-rending at her death, prostrate in a glass box (recalling the sleeping Tilda Swinton at the Serpentine all those years ago). Mélisande's hair is not long, there is no tall tower from which to drape it: our imaginations have to work overtime to conjure up these scenes, but Negus realises Debussy's storytelling precisely, especially in the vivid interludes. At first I feared he would be too overtly dramatic, and it is true that there is an element of translucence and stasis missing here. But the orchestral playing is very fine, and bodes well for Longborough's future expansion of the repertory.
The Guardian
19-06-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
La Mer: French Piano Trios album review – expansive, beguiling and unexpected
Three French works make a disparate but rounded programme on this release from the Neave Trio. Saint-Saëns took years to write his Trio No 2, and the result was a sprawling five-movement work that gets an appropriately wide-ranging and meaty performance here. The first movement roils and surges, the players catching both the push and pull of the restless theme and the brief passage of stillness later on. The slow third movement sings .with wistful nostalgia, and the fourth flows by in a waltz-like whirl pitched somewhere between Chopin and Dvořák. But the second movement, with its obsessively repeated rhythmic motif, perhaps needs a little more imagination to make it work. The two movements of Mel Bonis's Soir et Matin, written in 1907, are the opposite way round in atmosphere from how you might expect: Soir (Evening) is soulful, expansive and melodic; Matin (Morning) altogether more strange, impressionistic and beguiling. Finally, there's something unexpected on a chamber music recital: Debussy's painterly orchestral showpiece La Mer. Rendering the orchestra's highly textured writing for a chamber group is no easy task but this version, made by the composer Sally Beamish in 2013, is imaginative and beautifully judged, emerging more like a new work in its own right than a mere arrangement. This article includes content hosted on We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as the provider may be using cookies and other technologies. To view this content, click 'Allow and continue'. Listen on Apple Music (above) or Spotify
