Last week, Anne Midgette wrote an interesting piece about the latest revenue-enhancing craze in the orchestral world: concerts devoted to video-game music. As Anne says, the notion that this kind of event will recruit new subscribers is questionable, but I suppose you never know what will get people interested. If the video above — a trailer for a PBS special — successfully captures the video-game-concert experience, I would pay good money not to have to see it. By the way, foreign readers may not be familiar with PBS, our Public Broadcasting Service. In theory, it is a publicly funded television channel devoted to programming that the commercial networks avoid. When I was a kid, classical music appeared fairly often on PBS stations: I remember being transfixed (and also bewildered) by a showing of the complete Patrice Chéreau Ring from Bayreuth. These days, you're more likely to get hit with André Rieu or Andrea Bocelli. Then again, when I was a kid, I couldn't go on the Internet and watch Salome on a Franco-German channel.
